[The thing is, this kind of ugliness and violence isn’t exactly anything new to her. It had been incidental in the clashing of the tribes growing up, but it was a much more open thing to witness in the warring throughout Sargon where she really cut her teeth on warfare. It was there in the wake of the petty ambitions of feuding Padishahs and Lords Ameer, it was in the devastated remnants of homeless Sarkaz, and the brutality afforded to those fighting for survival under the harsh gaze of Ursus. It just feeds on itself in an endless cycle.

People were always too quick to declare the competition for the oracles a war, but this is the first time it really feels like it’s living up to that label. It’s brutal, and it’s ugly, and it’s exactly the kind of thing she was happy to write off with the rest of Terra—the rest of every other world. They don’t need this.

So maybe that’s why she’s not as certain as he is that she has anything resembling the right answer here. She wants to leave this kind of behavior behind, not build everything on the foundation of it.]

It’d be a start. But words only mean so much without real gestures backing them up. I don’t… I don’t know how we make it up to them without completely negating everything we set out to do yesterday.

[You can’t kill their leader and kill their people and only apologize for one of them. When you make a big swing, you have to mean it.]

We can’t let it be for nothing. And we can’t let it happen again.