I am not naive. I have spent forty years in academia and I understand how findings travel from their original context into the wider world, and how they are transformed in that travel. I know what will be done with what I have written here, and I know that no caveat I insert and no careful phrasing I employ will prevent it from being done. Nevertheless, I insert the caveat and employ the careful phrasing, because to do otherwise would be to participate in the misreading, and I will not do that.
This paper does not argue that the Vitae rift should be controlled, claimed, or restricted. It argues the opposite. What I have demonstrated is that the Vitae rift, placed at the origin point of the ley line network by whatever force of nature or divine intention set it there, is the foundation upon which the arcane practice of this continent rests. It is not a resource to be possessed. It is the source of a resource that belongs to everyone who draws from the ley lines — which is to say, it belongs to everyone whose world is shaped by arcane practice — which is to say, it belongs to everyone.
To claim the Vitae rift exclusively is not, as some will frame it, to gain an advantage. It is to damage the system from which the advantage is drawn. A practitioner who monopolizes the rift's access and allows it to benefit only her own side will be drawing from a network that has been degraded for everyone, including herself. The ley lines do not care about political borders. They run where they run, and what damages the network damages all who use it.
I submit these findings with full knowledge that they will be read by people who will ignore everything I have said in this section. I submit them anyway, because the findings are true and the truth belongs in the record regardless of what is done with it.
What is done with it is not in my hands. I have done what I can.
Whatever decisions are made about the rift's future should be made with full understanding of what would be lost if those decisions go wrong. I have spent fourteen years ensuring that the people making those decisions cannot claim they did not know. Whether they choose to act as though they know is a question I cannot answer for them.
I hope they choose well. Our world is too beautiful to spend carelessly.
