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being the best, winning, means you have a responsibility to those you have beaten. You must teach them to be better.
When you are in a leg-hold trap, reasoning with the steel does no good.”
one was always better off in the end when dealt with fairly, rather than by favor.
If war is brought to you, then it is incumbent upon you to show no mercy. Surely you will be shown none, and you will be a traitor to your people and as good as their enemy if you let any clemency slip its bounds, for your people will pay for your mistake with their lives.
The strength and beauty of the Midlands was in its diversity, even if some of that diversity was ugly. What was ugly to one was beautiful to another, and so it was that each land was to be left to rule itself, as long as it brought no force of arms on another. It was a tolerant suffering of things repugnant to allow things beautiful to blossom.
Yet when all lived under the same rule, every other form of existence was extinguished and none would ever have the chance to grow, though one of them might have been a superior way. The kind of single rule the Imperial Order represented was slavery.
There is no honor in killing, no matter the method. Dead is dead. Killing your enemy in war is done to protect the lives of those for whom you fight. Their lives are no better protected by killing your enemy sword to sword than by slaying him while he sleeps, but only put at risk by it.
Think of the solution, not the problem; that was what Zedd had taught him. He had been blinded to the future by the past.
“Wizard’s Second Rule: the greatest harm can result from the best intentions.
They accuse warriors of being bloodthirsty, when the warriors would have actually prevented bloodshed.”
