Dathan Herulus now faces a court martial for refusing to obey a direct order.  He reflects upon his situation in a prison cell at the Ice Dragon Inn.

    As a man in combat, I had been deprived of my right to make moral choices. I had to obey, or die at the hands of my own people--even though I found the raping repugnant and the slaughter senseless. When people think themselves worthy to commit such atrocities with impunity, we become angry little gods whose wrath, like a wildfire, can never be sated.

    My soul searched for an impartial standard by which to judge the atrocities I had witnessed, but found only my own mind at work. Do the victors create moral authority when they triumph on the battlefield, or must we answer to a higher power in the end? Does the victory in war belong, as our priests so fervently proclaim, to the nation whose actions most closely approximate the ideal of godliness?

    Listening to Legate Braegan bring up arguments of this nature was like listening to an adulterer boasting of his great love for the forsaken wife of his youth. I realized now that we could not claim the moral high ground over any of the people whose land we had taken, even though I had once believed that the Illithians of Shirak were corrupt and deserved the destruction of their city.

    The image of that lovely Lith maiden, whose bright eyes had glistened in the green-tinted light, inspired in my mind a sudden realization that she'd not been enraged, but rather, simply hadn't wanted to hurt anyone. Her conviction must have been that preserving life, even that of an enemy, was a better course of action than taking it, for when given the opportunity to either kill me or run, she had chosen the latter. With profound clarity, I realized that every warrior she’d killed had tried to kill her first, and I now understood why she’d been waiting for me to pull the trigger. . .

    Why then, is a soldier who chooses the moral path so easily condemned when the act of defying a corrupt and senseless authority is arguably far more noble than the mindless conformity he would be otherwise lauded for when simply following orders? This line of reasoning brought me to the conclusion that the moral conduct of that breathtaking Lithian girl far exceeded my own, and that the comfort I'd found in ignoring the cruelty of our conquest because I was carrying out orders seemed cowardly in the closer scrutiny to which I now subjected myself.

    If my impending death meant anything, it was an act of justice for not having done the right thing sooner. I determined in my mind that while the guilty would sit in judgment and condemn me for refusing to conform to their evil conduct in the recent past, the cumulative weight of personal responsibility for my earlier transgressions would be the real reason for my execution.

    Driven relentlessly downward into an abysmal and severe depression by the hopelessness I felt, my slumping sense of personal esteem found a strange comfort in the cold starkness of my prison surroundings. Deprived of food and given only dirty snow for water, my mind felt unfettered of its need for nourishment. In this transcendent austerity, I contemplated my every secret with such focus, I barely noticed the legate's leaving and found cold, dark days drifting into long, wintry nights until my mind began to dull and I found myself listening to the screaming wind for hours.

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