The funny thing about the distinction between good and evil is the way that it changes with time. Most people accept good and evil as absolutes, but they forget that with age (and either wisdom or brain damage) one's views change. Young children will go through predictable stages of moral development as they learn to tell right from wrong and try out different motivations. The majority of adolescents flirt with unlawful, immoral, and even psychopathic behaviour, but most will outgrow it before the age of twenty five and settle down, relatively speaking. Then, as people age further, their minds crystalize and get set in their ways, and "good" tends to become "however we used to do things back in the old days." Ideally, though, a person who really understands good and evil is someone who can keep up with the changing meaning of those words, both in society and in their own heart and mind. Good and evil do change, to a degree, and a person who manages to seek and find a better way to live as a good person oughtn't be held accountable for sins commited while they subscribed to an inferior way of seeing things. That said, people who continually fail to rise up and adopt a better form of good, that why we have prisons. Depressingly, it's also why they're overcrowded.

None of that thought is meant to be any sort of profound statement, of course...it's just supposed to justify why I'm not in prison. And why I'm putting other people into prison instead.

When I first became a metahuman, I admit that I used my talents for crime. Why wouldn't I? An underpaid and overworked glorified janitor receives powers that are barely above the spot-on-the-wall level isn't going to go out and thwart an alien invasion. I had small needs and simple desires -- the money I'd never been able to get my hands on working honestly. I kept robbing beyond my needs, and that was wrong of me. Greed, that was my biggest flaw, but new superpowers will go to your head like that. Looking back, a botched bank job scaring me straight was the best thing that could've hapened to me at that stage. I'd become confident enough in my abilities to make productivce use out of them but hadn't become so addicted to the thrill of the theft that I couldn't go straight. That was a moment of transition for me, a moment when I was forced to see that the things I'd done up to then weren't good, but that if I put my mind to it I could stand for a greater good. It didn't hurt that I'd already made myself rich -- it's easier to turn your life around when you don't have to worry about where your next rent check is coming from. It also didn't hurt that I was given the pretty simple choice of "become a superhero" or "rot in jail for the rest of your life." I's a fortunate thing when the universe presents us with such clear-cut choices.

What made my actions as a thief evil weren't that I was robbing, per se, but the extent to which I was robbing. I started off hitting rich targets and taking just what I needed. I was living comfortably but not too far beyond what I'd have gotten honestly, and the only people getting hurt was the richest shareholders of the insurance companies of the owners of the bamks which I robbed. When I started taking larger and larger sums, though, and started taking from people who would actually miss the money, that was evil, it it was right for me to be stopped. The proverbial man stealing bread to feed his starving family isn't evil. If he steals that bread from someone even poorer, or if he happens to lift some gold jewlery along with the food, things get a little more problematic.

One of the advantages of being a superhero, of course, is that you can try to avoid the dark areas and no-win situations. My job is to catch the a-list baddies and the building-toppling threats; I catch thieves where I can but I know it's not my right to judge the man-and-bread scenario. I'm not a good enough or wise enough man to do that. What I am is just a simple man, trying to do good in the world, with nothing more than his wits, a couple of guns, and an anthropomorphic entity embodying the concept of vengeance living inside his head. When those are the qualifications on your resume, you don't sit on the judge's chair and weight the minute principles of law -- you catch the guy who's breaking into that store down there and make sure that the *proper* people are the ones who prosecute... and defend.

Mind you, I like vengeance. Vengeance is fun. I used to worry that I only feel that way because I have a Spirit of Vengeance living inside me, but I came to terms with that sort of thing years ago. If I am being driven to love vengeance by the spirit I host, then I like to think that I'm also a moderator of its vengeful ways. My friends and I call ourselves the Justice Battalion because we fight for justice, a difficult concept under the best of circumstances but which becomes downright clouded as soon as you start sidding too much with either selfishness or vengeance. And justice... that's more important than good or evil, because good and evil do change with time and society but justice is still justice. Sometimes justice means doing a good thing and sometimes it means doing a bad thing, but justice is still justice. And justice tends to have a healthy helping of vengeance on top, which is fine with me.

There are three components to justice. Justice is made up of vengeance, punishment, and mercy. Vengeance is the part of justice which says "you did a bad thing, so now we're going to balance the scales." Vengeance is the part of justice which identifies the evil-doers and their crimes. Punishment is the aspect of justice which says "you did a bad thing, so here's what we're going to do to you to balance the scales." Punishment is the part that says that thieves should get their hands chopped off. The Greek philosopher Draco said that most every crime deserved death, and that's the spirit of punishment... it's the satisfaction of inflicting a horror tenfold greater than the crime, which is, to be fair, exactly what some scum deserve. Lastly, there's mercy. Mercy doesn't mean letting every criminal onto the streets with a slap on the wrist, although it can drive a society to silly extremes like that if it's out of balance. Mercy is the little voice that pipes up at some point and says "okay, this creep's had enough" so that you stop hitting him after he's learned his lesson but before he's been crippled. Mercy is the part of justice which means that even though I carry half a dozen handguns on me, I've never inflicted a killshot, even though I'm more than good enough to make one. I'd hesitate to say that mercy is the most important part of justice -- I *really* enjoy the vengeance -- but it seems to me to be vitally important to consider that in absence of mercy, no punishment can really be just.

I'm a hero. I'm registered with the government's metahuman registry (although I did lie about the extent of my abilities... can't trust the gvernment 100% these days, after all). I'm liscenced by my city to operate as a costumed vigilante and my activities are monitored by the Department of Vigilantism to make sure I keep playing straight and narrow. No two ways about it... I go out there most every night and I do good. I can remember when I was less good, though, and although I go to great pains to make sure nobody else ever finds out about those days, I make sure that i remember who I used to be. I can go out and do good because I strive every day and every night to act justly. I'm the guy who stops the robbers, and not the guy who robs. Despite my guns, I'm the guy who keeps gunmen from shooting, and not the guy who shoots them. I wear a mask and hop the rooftops at night, but I'm the guy who makes sure it's safe for other people to go out under the moon without worrying about what a guy in a mask might do to them. I'm good because I'm a force for justice... I make bad things happen to bad people.

Let's hear it for vengeance.

The greatest good is to do nothing.

Many are the scholars I have read who argue, most fluently, the merits of light and dark. They who champion the brightest day inevitably espouse the merits of hope and charity, while those who lurk in blackest night are rarely so united but most oft return, time and time again, to the selfish pleasures. One might notice, though, with time, that those most vociferous of writers come most frequently from those races shorter lived, and these aged sages have rarely seen beyond their first century. Wise though they may be, they lack perspective, and understandably. For being who live but one human lifetime, perhaps good and evil are indeed so simple, and perhaps life hath opportunities for them to be good and evil simply by virtue of their not living to experience the true consequences of their acts.

Thy nobility may be beyond question, sage, but thy judgements bind only thee. Your logics and sophistry apply not to life that ageth not. I have done good and evil and watched for better than ten centuries as it unfurled, and I cannot but observe that my good has yielded evil and my evils and birthed good. The wonderous world hath means to balance itself out given only ample time, and with perspective, all goods and all evils lead to each other. Thus, the only true good is to do nothing.

When I was but decades of age, I lived a life of evil. Forced to consume the flesh of others to maintain mine own existence, I did so and without guilt. I knew neither mercy nor compassion, for in truth, my heart is stone. When I was but centuries of age, I had passed the time to observe the consequences of my actions. Intently did I study the probabilities and the tangled threads of fate to see what had come of my simple actions long before. This life I had taken, were there not signs that the death had prevented other ills? This life I had spared for lack of hunger, had it not gone on to snuff out another? As the incalculable bonds which hold together the grains of sand which make up a stone, so too are the interconnections of line innumerable and beyond the counting... every evil I had done was balanced by a good that followed, and the few goods I had done fell, in time and in turn, to evil. A cycle, a pattern, a wheel. All that was became the other, as a stone is worn away by rain and the sand is fused into stone anew.

Still, I had nought but time, and curiosity most ample. I had learned to control my hunger, with time and feedings, and in any event, my desire to wear human flesh had faded with years and so I needed to consume less with which to clothe myself. I went among the humans and did good for a lifetime and more. I had not true nobility of thought and deed, for in truth, my heart is stone. But good I did and lives I saved, and the very mud of my body rippled with the force of the cheers that followed me. The stone of my hands struck down so many tyrants that it was worn smooth, and a mountain of rock did I consume to replace the flesh i lost to evil's swords. Then did I retire from that life and watched. For a generation or more, perhaps, good deeds crafted good fates, and happiness followed me. But with time, joy became lament. A life saved birthed later tragedy. A tyrant deposed was a lesson forgotten, and a new ruler soon enough commited the same sins, always on a larger scale than the last. A generation after my passing through their villages, it was the lives I had taken to feed my hunger that had yielded the truest goods, but within a generation of that, all would have reversed once more.

Good and evil are not in the intent, but in the result. It is the greatest blessing of the mortal races that they age and die, and in so dying, can believe that stories end. Alas, in truth, no story endeth nor is truly forgotten, but continues to be told and, in the telling, write into forms anew. Good actions cause short goods, which in time, become evil. Evil, in turn, soon leads to good, as the sun revolves around the world in the endless cycle of day and night.

The greatest and only good is thus to do nothing, to retire from the world of men and change their lives no more. The greatest and only possible good is to leave them... that one's sword never again cuts evil down and one's hungers never drive the taking of a good life. In time, in endless time, all that it done becomes something else, as mountains are worn down and new hills grow. The greatest good is to leave the doing of good and evil to those short-lived creatures able to believe that what they do changes their world, and in so doing, at least, protect that precious illusion for one generation at a time. This I can do, for there is no true good nor evil in this world save that which imminent death drives one to see, and my heart, in truth, is stone.

Good... and evil... are inventionsss of the sssquishiesss. Silly little ideas from silly little creatures who do silly little things and don't understand their lives. Good isn't noble deeds and selflessness and evil isn't the absence of good. Good is doing what you're told by whatever hero or god you cling to and evil is doing whatever the fool next to you says he wouldn't do. I'm not a moral relativist... I'm just a different kind of thing. Your laws don't apply to me because your laws are silly little rules made to secure the lives of silly little beings. Squishy little beings filled with squishy organs and squishy ideas. All that matters is whether or not you're having fun, and let me tell you, little squishies...

I... am having fun.

Do you know how they invented good? They invented good when a lot of people got together and decided what all the hard things to do are. They sat and debated for a thousand days and on the longest scroll they could find they wrote down everything that was hard to do. They started with "resist your hungers" and they ended with "resist slaying your enemy" and who would have guessed but that they had a lot of resist this and abstain from that but not a single do this or intend that. There's no such thing as right... just the absence of wrong, and that's just the wrong of those tired old squishies because the tired old squishies one village over had sat for a thousand days and a thousand nights and every item said the exact opposite of the list of their neighbours. When they sent messengers and they saw that two different lists, they went to war... that's how squishies solve everything you know, with wars, and they tell you that that's "good"... and when a thousand thousand bodies stained the earth a squishy sort of red, the last handful of maimed and damaged squishies were the ones who had written the list with all the "thou shalt nots." But for the fall of a few more flint axes the whole squishy world might be very different, but that'd how things go... the axe falls where it may and fools take the blood as scripture for ten thousand generations.

And they ask me why I do evil? I ask in turn how it can possibly matter. I'm not evil... you're just squishy.

Now I... I wasn't created by gods or by progenitors who spent a thousand days pondering much of anything. I can forgive the squishies for their foolishness -- every child accepts the word of its mother as gospel. I was given life by forces far darker than the gods, though... nothing is darker than the soul of a squishy who thinks it's doing the "right thing." I was given life without a hand indoctrinating me with legends of the existence of good and bad, leaving me with nothing but myself to teach me right and not right. I stretched for my mind... oh, what you squishies would be like if you could see, truly see, the universe without your eyes getting in the way. I saw the lords and the wars, the joys and the loves, the pains and the deaths, the triumphs and the torments. I touched the hearts of heroes and villains and tasted their souls. Within a day of my being given life, I had stared into the face of good and evil, and found them flat as a pond and bland as water. They were cutouts, puppets, facades behind which the squishies lived their lives like children throwing stones at each other from behind two paper castle fronts. And like two children fighting over the piles of rocks they threw at each other, so too were the goals and meanings and purposes of both good and evil empty. The souls they fought for were the same amunition they wasted against each other. The lofty goals to whihch they aspired were torn down time and again, vast ivory (or obsidian) towers scrapped to use as catapult amunition against a foe so arbitrary that it would have been funny if it wasn't so pathetic. And worst of all, it was dull. It was dull, dull, horribly painfully dull, so empty and boring that the squishies had to invent old age just to escape from it as a last resort.

But no squishies has eyes like mine. No squishy can see the things I've seen, and so no squishy can understand how meaningless these ideas are. When I tried to explain it to my creator, she refused to even listen to me, and she wouldn't admit how silly she was being no matter how many times I removed her skin. You just can't make some people listen to reason.

How can I be bound to concepts such as good and bad? These are rules created by squishies for squishies, to regulate squishies and make it possible to form societies of squishies. But I'm not a squishy. I've done a lot of experimentation on squishies, and let me assure you that I have nothing at all in common with them unless I choose to. There's no reason in the world for me to agree to be bound by silly squishy rules, particularly such dull ones.

Good and evil... bah! No, what matters are goods that you can measure and judge, and that means fun and boredom. I can measure how much fun I'm having (let fun = good) and how bored I am (let bored = bad). I can take clear, comprehensible actions to imcrease my fun and lessen my boredom, and that's more than any squishy can do in the cause of good or evil. Why should I waste my life (which is, to the best of my knowledge, quite literally unlimited) in pursuit of that which is generally unquantifiable, usually subjective, frequently inconvenient and regularly Pyrrhic? Better, I think, to dedicate myself self something achievable, something measurable, and something that has a clear and positive impact on the lives of every creature who matters to me.

Of course, the things I find fun are things squishies don't tend to find fun, I admit that. I mean, games of moving stones around boards are fun for the first century or two, but every game and riddle begins to pale with time. Only sentientsd are eternally interesting and fascinating, the reactions of each every one different, nuanced, enchanting. Why, I could torture a whole village and never see quite the same reactions in any two squishies... and I can say that with authority. Squishies are silly and foolish and woefully delicate, but they're endlessly entertaining and the make the cutest little noises. I couldn't care less about good and evil, as long as I'm having fun. If a few little mortal lives have to be cut short by a few empty decades for my fun, that's just the way things go.

And I am having oh... so... much... fun...

I can think of a lot of things that are good. I can also think of a lot of things that're evil. Why is this? Because I'm overeducated, that's why! But more than that, it's because our world is filled with good things and evil things. it's this marvelous chaos which gives life meaning. In societies where everyone knows what's right and wrong, everything is safe and secure, but also drab, colourless, and boring. Yes, they have peace, but where do you ever see someone laugh and then jump off something, or leap into a bloody melee with a scimitar in each hand, or even swing from a chandelier? These are the things which give life meaning. These, and the eternal attempt to split good from evil. Life is nothing more than one big chance to jump onto the board, gaze at all the pieces, pick a side, and then fight for it! Me, I'm good, and I fight for good. If I didn't, what'd be the point of doing anything?

Back in the Schola Oceanus, a friend told us the legend of the Great Gamers. In the land he came from, he said, people look up at the night sky and see all the stars. This, as we all know, is just asking for trouble -- in every eraly society, they looked up at the stars and nothing good came of it. In this society, though, they looked up and saw a great game board of white and black pieces. In the early years, they thought evil was conquering the world because there was so much more black than white. As the centuries passed, though, some bright fellow came up with the idea that, at the dawn of time, there was nothing *but* black.. white was terribly outnumbered, but gods damn it, white was winning! And even thought it might take another million years, eventually there'd be nothing but white in the sky. This story always struck me as being absolutely marvelous, and I remember crying over how beautiful it was, although the amount of rum I had in me that night surely contributed. Now, I'd always known that when I left the Schola I'd be booking passage on a privateering vessel and going out to fight the good fight across the face of the Great Blue, but that story cemented it. I'm good and I fight for good, because in the end, everybody fights for one side or the other, in their own way. Some fight with words and thought... I fight by sticking pointy steel into the chests of the evil! And I have a damn fine time doing it.

Some nights, I even gaze up at the Great Black and I could swear I see new stars.

I believe that the purpose of life is nothing more than to pick your side of the fight and then fight for it. Everything that exists in life, be it steel and ships or texts and scrolls, exists to facilitate this task. For some of us -- read, me -- this is easy, because good and evil are right there in front of us plain to see. For others, people who deal with the grey areas and the places where shadows fall, this division is a lot less clear, and I feel sorry for these people. Myself, I know my strengths and my limitations; I can swash a buckler and run through the dog who holds it but I'm not cut out to tease apart the infinite nuances of ambiguous justice. As I said, we all contribute to the fight in our own ways, and there's no shortage of obvious evils in this world to choose from.

Spot the evils, my friend, spot the evils. A ship in the distance flying the black flag, that's ambiguous. But if you're a league away yet and already hear the ciy of tortured slaves, there's no more amibuity there. Evil is taking slaves and torturing them what haven't commited crimes worthy of torture; good is sneaking up in the wake of the people who do evil and kicking them into the Great Blue! You could spend three elf-lives arguing whether it's right or wrong to interfere and whether the strong have a right to rule, or you can go out and sink the buggers and make a measurable good change in the world. It's a crude an' violent method and maybe not wasting time finding a peaceful solution's a kind of evil method in itself, but look into the eyes of the slaves you've rescued for the cat o'nine and tell me violence never solves anything.

Some might call me evil because I wasn't born the sort to obey rules. Aye, I admit I've stolen my share of gold and sunk my share of ships, and humiliated the odd lawman while I'm at it, but the only laws I break are the unecessary ones and the only men I rob are the bad ones. This fine blade by my side that glints so bright you'd swear it cuts the sunlight lengthwise, I took off the body of a slain duke who'd come to power by legal roads and nearly killed his people once he had, laughing all the while. I laughed twice as loud when he was staining m'shirt as he had when he was filling his coffers with wholly legal bloodmoney. T'was a shame to have to kill him, but from the cheering of the peasants you'd have thought I did no wrong with a little judicious murder.

That's what good and evil are all about: hurting people or saving them. Don't give me that "minimizing the harm" garbage... you're hurting or you're helping, and sometimes you're doing both but you're making damn sure to do as little as possible of the first and as much as possible of the second. If you've got to waste ten heartbeats pondering whether the harm you're doing is worth it, then you're just rationalizing your evil and you either find a better way or you stop deluding yourself about what you are. You pick your side and you do what you can for it. If you pick the side that lines your pockets at the expense of everyone around you, then that's your choice to make and good for you to know where you stand! But I'm on the other side of that line, and I line my pockets at the expense of yours, and my sir isn't that a damn fine sword you're wearin' at yer belt?

Good and evil exist. I have watched the clerics of both sides work their miracles; I have looked into the face of a god and been called a monster. I have looked through gateways into the hells and seen the face of true darkness. There can be no quesiton that good and evil exist.

They are, however, meaningless.

I am, by most any stretch of the imagination, an evil man. I say this not in pride but as statement of simple fact. I have, without mercy or hestiation, robbed, lied, tortured, and killed. I have enacted plots and schemes across kingdoms to acheive my ends; I have ruined reputations and taken lives. Once, there was a part of me which recoiled in horror at these acts, but always, I have done them anyway. They needed to be done. Evil is a label which weak men attach to any act which they, personally, find distateful, and it is with typical arrogance that the gods, simply by virtue of their having a vested interest in certain codes of behaviour, enforce their views upon others.

I am evil. I also do not care. The ends justify the means. More specifically, my ends justify my means, because I have the capacity, the intelligence, and the ruthlessness to do what I have to. I have considerabvle sympathy for those who hold themselves to more noble methods and goals, but no mercy for them.

In my youth, I was an adventurer. I was, at that time, a better man. I traveled the kingdoms, following the ways of fate and the call of quests, and by and large did mostly good. The universe facilitated my doing good in those days; I had no one to protect besides myself and the helpless around me, and there was never a shortage of cruel men with cruel schemes to stop. This brought both gold and power, and was well worth it at that time. I was but a single man, however, despite my natural talents. I could do good in small ways, stop small crimes, fix small crises, and save small lives. This is the essence of heroism: giving of yourself to protect and serve those who lack your power. I did many small goods, and made the world a better place. I was, it might be said, a hero, and those who traveled with me acclaimed me as such.

But they were men who did small good, and saved small lives. They rescued small treasures and served small goods. They were, not to put too small a point on it, small men.

When I came to rule the Arena and became, against my desires, a leader of others, i could no longer look upon small goals. A single man traveling can save the lives of individuals around them, but a ruler cannot focus on small lives. Save a single life, lose a thousand to an invasion. Particularly given that I was protecting a hated and feared minority surrounded by enemies, there was no room for mercy or hesitation, and too many lives were lost while I learned this. A single individual can afford to use noble methods and act qwith honour, because by and large those they encounter act with honour. A ruler, however, ascends into the company of men and women who have come to great power, and those who attain great power, as a rule, do not claim it by just means. Even those who do come to power justly can never hold it justly. With some few exceptions, those who rule are evil, must be evil, or quickly become evil to hold their power and protect their people. A ruler's daily choice can be summed up simply: save the livves of those under your care, at the expense of those who are not. And so, with time, a ruler must be evil, or cease to rule.

I have ruled for a long time.

A ruler cannot act on small scales, and on large scales, good is impossible. Only evil -- those actions which lesser men refuse to do because it is distasteful -- can accomplish goals on the large scale. Good is impossible at a level beyond the individual; to strive for it is self-destrructive and self-dooming. Those noble avtions I could perform as a single adventurer could never be applied to a scale of cities, let alone kingdoms and nations, and so I have stopped being a hero. I have not been a hero in a very long time.

I am a villain. I am that which weaker men call evil. I have faced those who still named themselves heroes. I have looked into the eys of good men and good women who remind me what I once was and what I might have been. I have killed them, denying them even the simple honour of a burial.

Good and evil exist, but are meaningless in the face of what must be done. To secure the fate of my people, I would assualt of the heavens themselves and lay waste to the gods. With equal fury, I would lay siege to hell and battle its kings. Good and evil are irrelevant at the level in which I move, and can have no more bearing on my actions than the hierarchy of an ant colony applies to a human who treads upon it. The one and only thing which matters to me is the safety, security, and power of my people, and while, from time to time, I regret some of the actions which i have had to do to protect these, such moments come to me far less frequently than they once did. Evil accomplishes goals, and this is the only concern which matters.

Where I come from, you don't hear a lot of talk about good and evil. It's a pretty stupid question, as far as I can see. Oh, sure there're a few scholars here and there filling every parchment from Terra to Cadia with High Gothic florid nonsense about the nature of the universe, but these are people who I can only assume have had their anti-agapics specially designed so that their brains keep aging while their writing hands stayed young. Growing up in the underhive, good and evil don't matter, and so I wasn't raised to think about stuff like that, and in most of the galaxy right and wrong are utterly, totally irrelevant in the face of basic subsistence. I haven't lived in the underhive in a long time, though, and in the Imperial guard, you learn damn quickly what constitutes good and what constitues evil, because if you can't say it with a straight face and belief in your heart, your comissar knows and at best you get flogged. It's not an evil system... it's a harsh and brutal system, but that's what it takes to get things done.

"Good" isn't a word I'm qualified to define. I'm not a savant; I'm a soldier. My job isn't to judge good and evil, but to find and shoot the people who get them backwards. Put simply, though, good is whatever the Emperor decrees is good, down through the appropriate chain of command, so to speak. For some, that's from the High Lords to the planetary governors to whoever it is that gives us our orders and our daily bread. In the Imperial guard, that's the Lord Generals down through the colonels and comissars to our seargants, and let me tell you, a soldier with a devout seargant either picks up faith quickly or learns to fake it faster than an orc learns which end of the axe to swing. The will of the Divine Emperor defines what's good and bad, and nobody short of Him can decree that. If everybody with an idea thought they could say what's good and bad, we'd have chaos. Worse, we'd have Chaos, and then you'd learn pretty quickly what real evil is. The Emperor protects and the Emperor's servants protect the Emperor's servants and that's the way things have to work... it's a rough system, but it's better than the alternative.

Good is duty, honour, obedience, and faith. For a grunt like me and for all but maybe thirty or fourty people on any given planet, that's as complex as it needs to be. You find someone who knows what's right and you do what they say, when they say it. When the word gets handed down to you by a superior, you can question it, but you do so quickly, you do so privately, and you don't let them know you're questionning unless you're very sure you're right and you can prove it to witnesses. Individuals can't decide what good is. Individuals can't see the big picture. You can spare a soldier a flogging that he doesn't deserve, but if that's what leads him to deriliction of duty ten years later that lets a Chaos fleet get within bombardment range of a populated world, that's not a good. Only the Emperor is able to say how things will go and what the ramifications of an action will be, and that's why only the Emperor can say what's good or evil. That's also why we obey Him and those who speak for Him. We try to do what's right, but it's the word of the Emperor which has to rle everything we do, because that's the only way to be proof against evil.

And I have seen evil. I've seen Chaos. We talk about humans doing evil, but the warp is capable of things no human would dream of... not without help, at least. The first time you see a daemon running through a crowded chamber is the last time you ever question the Emperor, that much is certain. In the face of a clear and unquestionable Great Enemy, issues of good and evil rapidly become secondary. daemons are more evil than anything else I could name.

The Emperor is good. Anything which isn't of the Emperor is evil. The freak, the mutant, the heretic, the psyker... all of these things are evil. There are heretics who've turned back towards the Emperor and there are psykers who are true and vigilant servants of the Imperium, but as a general rule, they're all evil, and should be treated as such until proven otherwise. The duty of a soldier is to combat evil... we aren't qualified to judge it (not with absolute certainty, at least, although i imagine that most of the time we can make enough of an educated guess for it not to matter); a soldier's duty is just to be vigilant and ready so that when the Emperor's servants find evil in any form, we go forth and burn it away. Deflagrate es inimicus, as they say in High gothic. There can be no greater good for a soldier than to be prepared always to fight the enemy and die fighting the enemy. It's always a good idea to survive, of course, if only to fight again the next time, but there's no doubt in my mind that every guardsman who dies in service to the Golden throne sits at the Emperor's right hand hereafter. That's good, and whatever has to be killed to make that vision come true is evil. It may be a simplistic view, but I'm a simplistic kind of guy, which is why I'm still alive and a lot of evil people and creatures (most of whom I've only ever seen through a scope) aren't.

In my life, I have killed ten men. Five men died by my hand in Venice. Three I killed for profit alone. The fourth’s death was a mistake, a noble who killed himself by misusing herbs I provided him. The fifth was a soldier of the city who I killed as I fled the wrath of my enemies following that accident. Four more men died by my hand in England, and for each of those I was paid well; in money and favours that kept me alive in the turbulent court of John Lackland. The last death was after my transformation, when in self-defense I took the skull of a templar and crushed it in my bare hands. I remember each of their faces, and I do not think I shall ever forget them. Each death was either for wealth or for survival, never for god or country or anger, and save for the one death I did not intend, I feel guilt for none of them. I am separated from the monsters of the night only by the fact that I took no pleasure in their deaths, either.

It would be innacurate to suggest that, growing up in Venice, I had no choice but to become a drug dealer and, later poisoner. I did have other options available to me -- poor options, but options still. I could, I suppose, have entered my father's business, or even the clergy (which I dare say would have allowed me as much underworld contact as my later career did). No, what drove me to join the gangs and the thieves was simple expediency and the drive to survive. Whatever my other flaws, I've always had a strong desire to survive, regardless of the cost. Survival may not be the highest goal one can aspire to, but it's often the only realistic one, and everything I've done in my life has been dedicated to survival. In one form or another, of course.

I don't believe in good or evil, per se. I've seen priests who practically radiated holiness, but on the other hand I've seen crusaders so corrupt that they made me look moral in comparisson. I don't think of myself as a bad, evil, or even cruel man. I've only ever killed ten men, which I reluctantly admit is rather more than most people ever manage but is still a far lower body count than I might easily have reached. I've done evil things to survive, because survival is the greatest good. I am by no means the martyr sort, willing to die just to be good, or, god help me, noble. Lord Guaconi and his men made my companions and I into monsters, but only an individual can make themself into a monster. If I am a monster, then it's because I am prepared to do whatever it takes to survive, and not because I revel in it.

Tell me, please... exactly what is the point of being good? That's not to say that there's a point to being evil, of course. Most peasants, who follow the church in any and all things, would tell you that I am evil for selling drugs, or, indeed, for using them, even to the small degree that I do indulge. My family would say that my profits are evil because rather than bending my skills to honest merchantry (as if my thrice-cursed father has had an honest dealing in his life), I turned towards information brokerage and, from time to time, spying. My enemies would argue that I am evil for being an assassin and poisoner, but of course, they more often than not would sing a different tune if they were hiring. Though born a Christian, I have not had a devout thought in my life, and so the Man in the Pointy Hat shall never be the one to decide for me what is right or wrong. I believe in the value, not of good, but of humanity and decency. I have killed, but to preserve my own life (and, admittedly, fortunes). What i have never done, though, is torture. I'm repelled by the sight of blood (or was, until a few short weeks ago) and cannot abide the sight of human pain (with the understandable exception of when the person in pain is armed, armoured, and trying to kill me). I was born into a moderately noble house and I have a standard of living to live up to... being good and pious does not pay the bills, even if I do no longer eat. Still, even in protecting my life or my coffers, and even when taking lives, I always tried to find poisons which would be both quick and painless. How evil is it truly to kill if there is no suffering? If an act is necessary, then it cannot possibly be evil; evil would be if that regrettable death was preceeded by pain.

It is the art of the assassin, to my mind, to be able to kill painlessly. If the death is painless, there's little evil. On some few occasions, I know with certainty that the quiet, merciful death I provided was far more pleasant than the death-by-pointy-object which my employers would otherwise have contrived and funded. If I could profit while dispensing this mercy, where is the harm? I have to live too, after all, even if the people I apply my art to soon stop doing so.

I am not evil for being a vampire. I did not choose to become one, and in fact resisted to the best of my ability (although today, when I can bend steel in my bare hands and knock burly knights off of their feet, I can scarcely remember why). I am not a monster; I am a man, and a man can do good or evil. Yes, I now feed on human blood, but all this has done is make literal what I spent years doing before. In point of fact, by virtue of my newfound state, I have found that my bite brings the greatest of pleasure to the humans I feed from... I am fed, and not only do they experience no pain, but they very much enjoy the experience. In many ways, this is precisely the exchange of services and goods which I survived on as a recreational alchemist, selling euphoria for my daily sustenance. How can anyone possibly see evil in that?

Good, if I dare to use the term, is to minimize the pain of others while one profits oneself. We live in an unfair, unjust, and horrific world, where good is all but impossible to accomplish and evil is institutionalized into everything from our market squares to the churches who rule the world. Now, facing the very real opportunity to live not just one but dozens of lifetimes, I cannot afford to waste my time and energy in pursuit of an impossible good when I can bring much more happiness and mercy to the world simply by curtailing my own evil. Who cares about good and evil, as long as I survive another day without causing undue pain to those around me? As I see it, I'm rather ahead of the game by any stretch of the imagination.

I do not, personally, believe in evil. It is inconceivable to me that the universe, broad and inexplicable as it is, might possibly be broken down into two comprehensible forces, let alone factions. The duty of the mage is to study and understand the universe through reason and logic, and to accept the existence of either good or evil, in and of themselves as absolutes, is to take one immense leap in precisely the opposite direction.

As a corrolary to this, of course, one can only conclude that there is no such thing as good or evil by which one is responsible to regulate one's behaviour. That which advances knowledge and serves one's own ends must, by necessity, be good, and that which destroys knowledge or which weakens onself must be an evil. This is a universal truism which, it seems to me, is understood only by mages and merchants. It is beyond my comprehension why this would be an incomprehensible fact to the vast majority of sentients.

There is one point on which, perhaos, I should clarify. Good and evil can exist as absolutes, in so far as that it is an incontrovertible fact that the upper and lower planes do exist. I have witnessed divine magic (and, thus, the hands of the gods, or being close enough to divinity as to make no difference). I have personally summoned forth both the celestial and the infernal and observed them. On the other hand, these incarnations of morality are extremes; mortals are never quite so polarized, and so even if the incarnate lifeforms can be said to exist within a context of absolute good and/or evil, such contexts can never possibly apply to any other creature. I suggest that, in the case of incarnate life, they have taken on good or evil as their natures because it is, in a sense, the element of which they are composed, just as most prime material is either carbon or silicon based. Good and evil, to incarnate life, are as innate to their very biology as water is to ours, but by the same token, it is for this reason exactly why good and evil cannot be said to be what makes up prime material life. It is not what we are made of, and treating good and evil as though they are concepts to which we must perpetually hold is folly.

We often consider the so-called "alignments" of creatures, the tendencies they have towards acting according to the popular conceptions of good, evil, law, and chaos. While studying wizardry, I took the opportunity to have a diviner utilise his magic to determine my own alignment, as I had never felt that I am innately good or bad. Indeed, it was quite predictable that his spells would reveal me as being neither. The diviner himself explained this as my being "neutral" which is in itself an utterly ridiculous concept if good and evil do exist at all. It seems much more probable to me that, as with everything else, good and evil are context; I do not think of myself as good or evil, and so his spells could find none within me. I attempted to share this line of thought with some local clerics, but strangely enough, they refused to speak to me after hearing my initial suppositons. It is precisely this sort of barbaric thinking which keeps the prime material species grounded in baseless mysticism rather than enlightenment and knowledge.

If good and evil cannot properly be applied to most life forms, then most activities cannot be said to be evil, no matter how immoral they may appear to someone of an opposing viewpoint. In my life, for example, there are three primary activities: I am a mage, I am a worshipper of Shesh, the god of Fear, and I am a merchant. Each of these three activities, from time to time, put me in situations where "evil" acts are necessary, or at least expedient. I cannot see them as such, however. Consider my faith. I worship fear... I find fear fascinating and enthralling, one might even say beautiful. I enjoy observing the effects of fear on animals and I am not above causing that fear. A lesser mind might easily choose to see "scaring innocent people" as an evil act, which I can understand to a degree. I would never stoop to being so crass, however, as to merely frighten an innocent individual simply for the sake of frightening them; this would not be evil, but simply crass. I use fear to obtain clearly defined goals, and never indiscriminately. I might terrify a shopkeeper into selling me a precious item cheaply, for example... but I would not force him to sell it such that he makes no profit. I use my fear magic against enemies and those who would harm me, but only ever against those who have already proven their ill intentions towards me -- self-defense, if sometimes pre-emptively so. Fear is a precious and exciting thing, but an artist does not stoop to paint the portrait of every beggar in the street... the energy and inspiration is saved for those times when the art will do the greatest service to the artist. A lesser mind might spend hours debating if I am evil for frightening others or good from refraining from frightening those I could, but such a debate is, as I said, for lesser minds, who still apply such terms as good and evil to the acts of mortals.

All that being said, given the choice between acts which are perceived by the great unwashed as good or evil, good is typically more profitable and safer. Society depends upon individuals behaving towards each other honourably and coureously, or else society falls apart and we lose immesuarbly. Evil is a path to quick and easy power, but good is a path, more often than not, to a strong social circle, a profitable network of connections and allies, and the support and coin of the low majority. Particularly to a non-human such as myself living in human lands, power is enjoyable but often pales before the strength of the simple torch-wielding mob. If only for purely selfish reasons, I have always felt that it is better to be loved than hated, and doing "good" in the eyes of the people is the surest way to amass the love of the population and, at the same time, find yourself a more or less unending supply of smite-deserving enemies upon which to vent your frustrations. I do rather prefer the title of "hero" to that of "monster." Not only is it good for self-esteem and health, but it also brings in considerable business.

One of the very few decent counter-arguments to my conceptualization of good and evil might come in the form of any individual who has the capacity to hurt me. If no action at mortal hands is inherently good or evil, can I condemn anyone who is stronger than me from taking what is mine? Certainly, yes. Good and evil may be meaningless concepts, but honour is not, nor is pain, humiliation, death... If an individual does not wish to be robbed or hurt, then while it may not be evil to hurt them, it is certainly not honourable, considerate, polite, or nice. It is foolish to suggest that the ends justify the means, and I can sympathise with anyone who seeks to bolster their own wealth by taking mine, but even in the absence of absolute good and evil there is some measurable good in avoiding (or at least, minimizing) harm done to others. And, if I may say so, particularly harm to me. The rational and logical individual must acknowledge that as surely as one does not want harm done to them, it is reasonable to assume that another individual does not want to be hurt themselves. There are times when hurting them may still be necessary, or desirable, but it is wise not to make a habit (or at least a public spectacle) of such things.

Good and evil exist. They are real and measurable. How could they not be? It takes no more than a brief look upon the face of the world to see good and evil -- more commonly the latter. Left to their own devices, normal, everday good people will inevitably slide into corruption, because it's easier and because it's more fun. This is why the gods, in their wisdom, have send forth their clerics into the world. Without people who know good from evil and actively remind the populace of which is which, evil reigns. Men like myself exist to seek out evil, to teach the good how to remain good, and where necessary, to strike the wicked with large, heavy objects.

Goodness is not merely intent or action, but both. Good requires that we believe in what is right and that we do what is right. We must do the right thing and refrain from doing what is wrong. We also must find those who are doing evil and tell them that they are wrong... usually, at high volume, and several times, and sometimes while hitting them if they are not inclined to listed on their own.

When I first became an initiate of the Church of Yohan, I was taught what good and evil are. Quite literally from our first day in training, we were taught the ways of the monsters, because this illustrates the ways of good and evil both realistically and metaphorically. They taught us first about vampires... a topic which was quite close to my own heart. Evil is simple, you see. Evil is a creature which feeds upon others giving nothing in return, a parasite, a creature which drains energy and life and leaves only waste and death in its wake. This is true for animals and actions; an action which takes life from around it and gives nothing back is evil. An action which brings healing, which brings life back to the wasted and the blighted, this is good. It is also not enough.

It is good to heal the sick and the hurt. It is the highest good to which a being can aspire. But the individuals who choose to heal will always be outnumbered by those who choose to hurt. Even among the gods, the dark ones outnumber the light and always have. I spent my formative years in churches dedicated to life but I have still encountered more individual clerics of the dark ones than the light. Good demands that some go forth to heal, but if the good only heal, they are obligated to also heal the wicked and the cruel. Thus, for good to survive, let alone thrive, some of those who believe in good must be willing to actively oppose evil. The Church of Yohan teaches mostly healers, mostly men and women who will go forth and bring light to the dark places. But it also trains the Hunters, those who, like me, go forth and rather than merely bring light to the dark, actively beat the darkness back so that light can spread on its own. One many planes, it has wisely been observed that for evil to flourish requires only that the good do nothing, and the Hunters of Yohan are those who never, ever do nothing. To do nothing would be as evil as if we were the ones hurting the weak ourselves.

Good is the lay your hand upon one who is hurt and watch their flesh mend. Good is to go to a grieving family and show them that their dearly departed has moved to a finer world. To me, a far more tangible good is to watch my sacred tetsubo crush the skull of an undead monstrosity and scatter its foul brains upon a wall. Good is to wipe out evil, utterly, without mercy and hesitation. Good is finding those who do wrong and helping them change their ways, and if they refuse, hitting them until they stop moving.

Yohan has always taught that there must be more healers than Hunters, and I can well see why. Even among the good, there must be many who balance out men like myself, who preach temperance and tolerance, and thus ensure that we who fight continue to fight only the true evils. But there must be Hunters, because mediation and tolerance may turn the heart of a wicked banker but will never turn aside a zombie horde. Only steel, sinews, anbd righteous fury will do that. This is good.

I was, i am told, something of a terror when I returned to the church to take my turn teaching there in the twentieth year of my service, as tradition demands. I bore with me the ancestral wepaon with which crushed the bones of countless monsters, the sacred tetsubo, Educator, which has been in my family for generations, which has sundered the most powerful of magical weapons and whose enchantments alone could buy a kingdom. I would stand before the students and ask them what is good and what is evil. When they were wrong, Educator was quick and my aim unerring. It was a harsh way of teaching, perhaps, but necessary, because the young must know what is good and what is evil. Whgat they fail to learn from ancient illuminated manuscripts, they rarely fail to learn from cold iron at high speed and the harmless bruises which follow. Some of my students hated me, true... but only those who were consistently wrong. This is soomewhat evil, perhaps, for I could have been more gentle, but a gentle hand would not have turned aside the minions of darkness and it would not teach the young to know good and evil. Some of those studnets, today, are among the most respected of our church, and they wear the mantle of the Hunters with pride and dilligence. Where they find evil, they offer forgiveness thrice and then they crush it but once.

This is good, and if it is not the greatest of goods, then it is at least that which most surely holds back the darkness.

Good and evil are curious things... more than anything else, they are shaped by how you are raised, yes?

I have traveled many miles among the humans and have visited more cities than I can easily recall. The Great Races of the world have wrought many fine investions and many fine philosophies. I have read with great interest -- one might say, devoured -- the teachings of many gods and sages, and I flatter myself to imaigne I have some modest understanding of how morality is seen the world over. The laws and customs across the lands of the Races have many parallels and similarities, just as they have many differences. The parallels -- do not kill, do not steal, do not harm unless they aren't your species, religion, or local culture -- and the differences -- worship god number one versus god number two, eat only these certain foods, follow only these certain careers -- are quite fascinating, particularly to one who is raised in a land of vastly different thinking. The Great races have indeed produced some great minds and wise sages, but almost without exception, their philosophy is shaped by one salient fact.

They are prey, yes?

Humans are a wonderful species. They are quick-witted and learn easily. They can take the devices of other, superior species and improve upon them, or at least, modify them without rendering them non-functioning. But humans are also something of an abberation, in their own way, accepted as a natural species only because they proliferate. Humans exist outside of nature... they are monkeys, and by all rights should never have left the trees, to say nothing of built cities. They are food which somehow learned how to fight back against their predators. In this light, it is natural that their greatest fear would be to once more become prey, yes, and so they craft their laws and their faiths and even their souls around prohibitions against killing. At the depths of their souls, the humans cannot deal with being prey, and this is reflected in their views of good and, heh, evil.

But among my people, the glorious walkers farto the North where hairless human skin freezes and cracks, things are different. We understand nature, and we see our places in it. Humans are prey, but we, my people, are predators. When the humans first fell out of their trees, we were stalking the forests. We, the shapeshifters, hunted them and feasted upon them. They learned to fear us, and justly so, for upon the great ladder of the feast, we were as far above them as the dragons are above us. We pitied the hairless apes, who had but one shape where even the weakest of us had two or three, yes? But we were not so cruel that we allowed our pity to prevent us from the feast... they were cute and harmless, but they were prey.

Good and evil are part of nature. It is good to follow nature, and it is evil to resist it. We can fight disease with medicines and healing magics because we have the capacity to use them and natural healing enough to supplement. We can use tools to improve our lot, build houses to shelter us from the storms, because it is natural for a species to make do with whatever it can to survive. It is good for us to hunt, to partake of the great feast, because we are the hunters, and any animal -- or people -- who cannot hunt us is, by definition, to be hunted by us. The humans have forgotten this... and ironically, they can today hunt us in turn with such efficiency that even the maurauders of our most vicious villages pales at the thoughts of it. This too, is not evil... if the humans have the strength to hunt us, they deserve to suceed, yes? Because eventually, all races become prey, and our day may come, though not, I think, at the hairless paws of the humans.

Ahh, but that is the difficult point, yes? We partake of the great feast, and this is good, and we hunt and kill, and this, too, is good. It is what we are and what we, more than most any animal alive, were made to be. But it is good to eat your fill and leave the rest alive and unhurt to thrive, to live, to find their own feasts, alive to make art and write poems and brew mead and ale, alive to have pups so that our own children can partake of the feast. And all animals feel pain, and pain is evil. Our claws and fangs and swords and daggers cut flesh and draw blood, and this is tragic but necessary, but to revel in the pain, to cause undue suffering in the prey, this is evil. This is not the way of nature. It is the greatest weakness of my people that so many fall prey to this sin and learn to enjoy the pain of their prey, to kill more than they eat and not even share the meat. In the North lands, we call these weak ones the raveners, yes, and such is their evil that we train some of our young to do nothing more precisely than to hunt them, our own brothers and sisters and parents and children who disrupt the good of the great feast. I myself went forth from home, traveled South out of the snows and into the lands of the Great Races, first and foremost to hunt those of my people who were raveners and gloried in evil. My people hunt and kill and eat, but we see the way of the great feast and, to protect it, we would even hunt and kill our own kind. Even have I tasted of the flesh of other shifters, and found it good, though not so sweet and tender as the humans. We do not have enough animals who can prey upon us to keep down the evil of our people, and so we must prey upon each other, from time to time.

It is as just for them to defend themselves, to hunt and kill us, as it is for us to eat of them, and with their powerful magics they kill many of us each year. We understand this -- we mourn the fallen, even the raveners, and we do not seek vengeance, for this too is the way of nature, just as we would strive to hunt and kill any who hid amongst us and fed upon us.

We have walked this world for longer than the humans can imagine. We remember what it was to walk in but one shape, and to be prey. We remember, if only in song, the old time when we were weak and walked in but one of the two worlds of beasts and sentients. But we grew and evolved, and we became the best of either world, taking the form of either and hunting both. In time, the humans too will no doubt become something new, and then they may hunt us. In the meantime, we feast, and this, yes, this is good.

It is most fortunate for the humans and the other Great Races that we, the pure people, who know the worlds of man and beast, are here to hunt them. Lacking our own predators, we must hunt ourselves to keep ourselves from wreaking destruction, but we who feast upon the humans can do for them what no other animal does for us. This is the way of the feast, and this is the way of nature. This is good, and not evil, yes? But we can forgive the humans, who at heart remain prey, for not seeing our generosity for what it is. They do not understand good and evil.