(I am just a player of the game, like the rest of you, but I have a gift for words, that while probably not on par with our author-in-residence, has usually been enough to encourage people when they need it most, so I turn to this gift now, and offer these words.)
We now enter into the darkest days of our shared reality. Though our lives will go on after this day, we all lose something valuable yet intangible. Could we honestly explain the impact that this game has had on our lives without remembering the struggle we have found ourselves fighting? There is no true enemy, no vile plot, no earth-shattering kaboom, (no matter how much we might want one...) there is just.... business. We find ourselves facing the extermination of our second home, a place where many of us feel safer than we do in our actual lives, and it certainly seems that we have no power to stop this from happening.
This is not true, my friends, because there is one power we all of us share. The power of a single voice CANNOT be underestimated. Where on our own we will falter and fail, speaking as one voice for the millions that have sprung from our imaginations, we WILL certainly be heard. Already we have seen the Leviathan that threatens us blink at the sound of our fury, and yet again, even in the hopelessness that looms before us, others yet hear the call. What we ask, seems impossible. The mountains in our way seem insurmountable. By all rights, we should be swept away by this rising tide. Yet we still stand here, together, staring back at the abyss that seems to grow ever wider.
What reason do we have to fight this? It is only a game, isn't it? It's not something of flesh and blood, it's not something of code and hardware. It is our imagination, our stories. I dare to suggest this: It is not for ourselves that we fight this destiny that appears set in stone, it is for a Dream Called Paragon.
Desiderantes Meliorem Mundi