Chapter 304: Chapter 288 – The Value of Life

“All too many philosophers love to claim that the value of every life is equal to each other. I thought the same way once when I was younger and naive, before the vicissitudes of life made me realize just how much of those words were little more than horse shit in practice.

 

Most everyone would consider the lives of those they care for more valuable compared to strangers, much less compared to people they actively dislike. I would love to see whether those who spew such words could still act the same way when the lives of their own loved ones hung in the balance.

 

Most ditched the showboating and showed their hypocrisy on the spot, from my experience.” - Aideen deVreys, the Silver Maiden, circa 519 VA.

“Feeling better now?” asked Aideen as she rubbed the younger woman’s back gently with her hand. Celia’s reaction to realizing that she had just killed someone was not something she was unfamiliar with. Many younger soldiers reacted the same way after their first kills, some even in worse and more dramatic ways. She knew that the best thing to offer them by then would be a slow acceptance and gentle reassurance, and took her time with it. “I’m all ears if you want to speak about it.”

 

“I killed a man…” said Celia as if she could not believe what she had done. The younger woman stared at her hands, the left one still coated with dried blood from when she had stabbed the man repeatedly in his side. She recalled the way his eyes looked as the light left them once again and shuddered as she hugged herself. “Took his life with my hands…”

 

“For what it’s worth, he wanted to give you a fate that I’m sure many women here thought might be worse than death,” said Aideen in consolation as she collected the younger woman into a warm embrace and hugged her closely. “Considering the company he kept, it wouldn't surprise me if he was one of those that your friend was passed around to before she took her own life, so you likely just reduced the number of scumbags in the world when you did that.”

 

“How do you get over it?” asked Celia all of a sudden. Probably the utterly nonchalant way Aideen spoke made her wonder, since while Celia had killed one of the men that accosted them, Aideen had killed the other six and looked as if she was merely slaughtering chickens instead of humans. “Does it not bother you? To kill? To take a life just like… that?”

 

“I guess upbringing mattered in things like these. I was not raised in a peaceful place like you,” said Aideen when she heard Celia’s question as she patted the younger woman’s head and ruffled her dark hair a bit in a bid to make her feel more comfortable. “Where I was born and raised, we were under constant threat from our neighbors, and most everyone had to fight and help defend our lands.”

 

“Our hostile neighbors were nations ruled by necromancers, so just about everyone where I’m from met with death face to face from a young age. We were all too familiar with it,” Aideen continued. “I guess when you’ve been fighting against dead people and the occasional necromancer from a young age, killing sort of lost its weight.”

 

“Does it ever… get easier?” asked Celia with some trepidation at the image Aideen’s explanation formed in her mind.

 

“Not really, but you do get used to it after a while. Those who couldn’t get used to it tend to not survive,” replied Aideen honestly. “If anything, I’d say you need some mental help if you feel killing gets easier. That way lies a path of carnage, as you’d rarely value life for much anymore. I was close to falling down that path myself in the past.”

 

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“Really?” asked Celia with hopeful eyes, and not a little relief that even someone like Aideen had experiences that were similar to hers. “What made you realize and stop yourself from treading further down that path?”

 

“I killed an innocent girl by mistake,” admitted Aideen bluntly. The incident where she had killed the young girl over a century ago still haunted her dreams at times, but she had learned to live with it, and accept that her guilt would remain with her, likely all her life. “It was during an important infiltration, and considering the aftermath of that mission, the girl would have almost certainly died anyway shortly after, but it still haunts my dreams from time to time.”

 

“And yet you killed all those… people back there…” argued Celia with some confusion. “As if you didn’t put them in your eyes at all…”

 

“One thing I learned early, and I would advise you as well, is not to think of scum like them as humans. Just think of it as cleaning up trash instead, because that’s what you’re doing anyway,” said Aideen with a blunt tone. “The world would be a better place without them, and had you left them around, think of all the people who would suffer under their hands instead.”

 

“I know all those moral teachings and the likes like to harp on how all lives are equal and whatnot, but the truth of the matter is, they never are equal. It’s entirely your call to decide for yourselves which lives you would value more, and which you wouldn’t,” continued Aideen as she looked Celia in the eye. “Don’t worry too much about that, though. You’ll have plenty of time to think about it. After all, we do have all the time in the world now.”

 

“That sounded like… a rather dangerous way to think,” argued Celia with some nervousness.

 

“Some might feel that way about it,” admitted Aideen nonchalantly. “Let me put it in a different way though. Imagine if back when the bandit had accosted you and your grandfather, you had the means to fight back against them. Would you have killed them then to save the life of your grandfather?”

 

“... I would,” said Celia after only a moment of thought.

 

“There you go. In your eyes, your grandfather’s life was worth more than those bandits’ lives. That’s not a wrong view to take. Everyone would value those they care for more than strangers, much less strangers that were trying to murder them,” said Aideen with a smile. “All you have to do is just to accept it and be true to yourself.”

 

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