You know who I hate? The godless verrik. The godly verrik, them as you can trust to keep to their own, they’re not so bad. They just hang back and pray for our souls or the panhandle or they raise turnips. They’re not focused on the here-and-now, they take a Pelagic view. They don’t get in your face.

Here’s my impression of a godless verrik. Whaa! Whaa! My ancestral homeland was destroyed! Whaa! Whaa! Even though it happened before I was born I’ve nevertheless been personally discomfited by it! Whaa! Whaa! I deserve to be transported at Diamond Isle expense to a plush new homeland! Whaa! Whaa! I deserve regular handouts of food and fresh water just because my ancestral homeland was destroyed!

Sweets, these people need to stop whining and move on. Get over it. The Verr, biggest island in the Parth, got well and truly stomped on, sure, but that was like five hundred years ago! Two hundred. Whatever. You’d think in that time the verrik who lived there – and I mean it’s not like all verrik lived there, there were the ones who lived in the rest of the Parth, there were some on Habadad, there were some on the Diamond Isle, there were some on the Island of Word – there’s some good verrik too, hardworking ones who don’t make trouble and play the destroyed-homeland card – but two hundred years is plenty of time to lift up, move on, and establish jettatura or mimbly-pop or whatever someplace else. But it’s all “ancestral homeland this” and “built on the bodies of our parents and grandparents that” and “lo unto the eightieth generation other.” If Xoxo was such a great place there wouldn’t have been verrik living there, that’s for sure.

I’ve been lobbying for a dozen decades to the Most High, saying we should cut off the Verr from the Diamond Isle, that the reclamation project is a needless expense. Am I listened to? No. What do I know? I’m only thirteen hundred years old, after all. It’s not like I’m one of the Undying Princes of the Earth, who with one hand wields Death and in the other holds Wisdom. Oh, wait, it is! I am that!

Filthy Verr. It’s all mud, now, you know that? Third-largest body of land in the world, slightly larger than Habadad, and it’s all mud. Somewhere in the Yomno islands there might be something bigger, but we don’t bother them and they don’t bother us.

Not a thing grows there or in the dead seas around it. Whaa, say the verrik, it’s the Dark that’s eaten our land and every year the Saltern gets bigger. Whaa, it’s somebody elsels fault. Toughen up, that’s what they should do. No use crying over spilled milk.

Fucking whiners.

SEE ALSO: The Most High, the Origin of the Dark, the Xoxo Saltern Loss, the Yomno Islands