What makes a person?
Today, I buried three members of the White Flame. They didn’t know with whom they were fucking; they could hardly put up a fight. I have a few minor wounds – desperate dagger slashes, too shallow to even require stitches. They all died quickly, killed with the surgical precision I suppose is my trademark. Yes, I imagine I’ve killed enough people by now to have a trademark.
I advocated for this, for simple and swift endings, for eschewing the appearance of due process lest we fail to respect excommunication sufficiently. But there is a part of me that sits uneasy, wondering… wondering, is humanity something so easily taken away? Is there such a thing as being utterly beyond salvation?
Of course, there is because the Order decrees it, but… is it so true that every single member of the Flame is lost? Might some of them be salvageable beneath the brainwashing of their leaders?
Then again, it was that sort of thinking that led me to persist with Casimir… persist again and again, well beyond the level of sanity or reason. I was still discussing giving him back nobility long after he’d proven he couldn’t be trusted with power or responsibility.
Perhaps… there reaches a point where the possibility that someone could be saved isn’t sufficient justification for the effort. Perhaps what excommunication is really telling us is that our kindness, our charity, and our time is better-spent on those who choose not to spit in our faces.
I could believe that. I do believe that, really. How could I not?
Have I ever seen anyone saved, except by the pyre, when they didn’t want to be?
