Even knowing of these horrors I cannot too greatly fault the brigands of the city. The horrors which we have seen, and the still greater horrors we shall presently see, are not signs that rebels, miscreants, and rogues are ever growing in population within the dream city, but rather that there is a constant increase in the number of obedient, docile people. I issue that statement and follow it with a warning: Do not make the same mistake our ancients did. What mistake is that, you ask? As I said, the noble families can be held in some contempt for allowing themselves to fall into apathy. The far greater crime of the ancients, though, is there tolerance and almost blind loyalty to those who were known as the Freespirits.

You see, in theory there was no fault to be found amongst the Freespirits. They were a silly lot who wanted to stand against the organization of the eight noble families by organizing themselves. Oh how humourous! To non-conform through conforming!

The real issues though did not occur until the apathy of the ancients and noble families had grown exponentially. You see, the Freespirits had at this point gone from a group happy with their weekly meetings to a group that held more power then the noble families combined. And that is no exaggeration. Amongst the noble families there were but a handful of citizens who held dynamic amounts of power. Very few of those number knew anything about actually using the power they possessed.

This was not the case with the Freespirits. Their power was broad and spread fairly evenly amongst all who carried their banner. Even though you would be hard pressed to find any amongst the Freespirits who held true to any semblance of belief or code, you would find that they were on better terms with the ancients then any one of the nobles. We also have to take into consideration the fact that the Freespirits had found their agitprop spread throughout the ranks of the noble families as well. Really, at this point you would have had to have been blind to not see what was coming.

Apparently, blindness was quite a popular ailment.

Now we have examined the nobles and the rabble alike. With that concluded I think now that we should examine how the foundations of power had become corrupted. For it was not by accident that people who were not worthy had grown corpulent with power.