(Excerpt from the memoirs of Vlix Griebnacht, wandering historyman of the Vandergraaf Chapter, Syndika of the Fool, Porter Society, dated sometime around harvest 1925)
The Porter Society, while not an organization with central leadership or top-heavy dictator work, originally consisted of three distinct chapters across Midlandia. Each chapter was headed by a "chapter master", an elder member of the commune (by age or by experience) who took on common sense direction and the archiving of knowledge. We thought they'd be the brain to our eyes and ears, not any despot or warmonger levying their clout and office for their own fiendish conquest, their own gain. We were wrong.
No one is entirely sure what it was that defected the Mitchell Chapter. Suppose it was our own fault, trusting that the man from Pinkwater was reformed enough. Those days were naive, though--naive and desperate, with a shortage of men with commitment to the cause, and indeed we'd taken him as committed. Bastard was just in it for himself, though.
He was a skilled gunfighter, as anticipated from a man who tended the masts of Libertarian cattleships only to take a career pivot to one of the most blood-soaked special tactics terror squads ever known. Cut down hundreds of working men in the great manufacturing cities of Galeas. Rumor around the Estate was he had served in the Oil Rebellion, committed atrocities against the Many that would have made even the most racist Arthurian generals puke. And he'd laugh and give us a honeyed word or two and tell us not to worry, that it was all a wives' tale from the jealous and the imbeciles. All the while, though, he counted those notches in the pommel of his Bowie knife and schemed.
They'd heard the first scream from his study on a Woltansday morning a lot like today, the week winding down and everyone feeling some quiet spark of relief. The entire strut had to be cleared, the funk of Rot was so great. Fungi and loam and pus. Yet when chapter master Hanrik Mitchell returned from his study for the daily coffee service, his Crows found him largely unchanged. Unchanged, except for some stubborn refusal to remove his mirrored glasses.
In the days that followed, the feats Mitchell performed amazed even his fellow Porters. They began to inquire on his process and how they might aspire to such a powerful mastery of the boons he received from the unknowable ones. His methods became more collateral and unpredictable as the chapter questioned why the Society still settled for small--yet mighty--acts of rebellion when it could topple empires, no matter the cost. Mitchell did not just want to live in harmony with the cosmos; he demanded mastery of it. And so it was that the Society could tolerate him and his ilk no longer.
The reprisals were swift. Their ranks were depleted, with catastrophic losses among our own ranks. They had imbued themselves with powers beyond the human mind--how could we not get slaughtered? So the chaptermasters counted the dead, faced with no choice to be like the generals we turned our backs on. In the end we stood battered but never broken. The Vigil was secured, and the warmongers we call now the Twisted Porters were sent out into the dying world they'd chosen over ours.
Mitchell's body, however, never appeared among the dead...