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“We fight for our beliefs, Queen Medhbh,” said Amergin, “just as much as we fight for our lives. We must continue to conduct our affairs according to those beliefs. If we do not then we have no justification for living. Let us question these people fairly and listen to their answers before we judge them innocent or guilty.”

“The fate of sentient life itself sometimes seems to me to be at stake. Yet do I fear? No, I think not. I place no special value upon sentience. I’d as cheerfully become a tree!”

“Who’s to say they are not sentient?” Corum smiled as he set a pan upon the fire and began to lay strips of meat in the slowly boiling water.

“Well, then, a block of marble.”

“Again, we do not know…” Corum began, but Jhary cut him short with a snort of impatience.

“I’ll not play such childish games!”

“You misunderstand me. You have touched on a subject I have been considering only lately, you see. I, too, am beginning to realize that there is no special value to being, as it were, able to think. Indeed, one can see many disadvantages. The whole condition of mortals is created by their ability to analyze the universe and their inability to understand it.”

“How will the doctor fare?” Corum called. “The one who took me in.”

“He will die unless he is clever and denounces you,” Jhary told him.

“But he was a man of great intelligence and humanity. A man of science, too—of learning.”

“All the more reason for killing him, if their priesthood has its way. Superstition, not learning, is respected here.”

The man called himself a wizard, but Corum would have called him a philosopher, someone who enjoyed exploring and discovering the secrets of nature.

Chaos delights in creation but swiftly becomes bored with what it creates for it seeks not order or justice or constancy but sensation, entertainment. Sometimes it suits it to create something which you and I would value or find pleasure in. But it is an accident.

“It becomes so easy to believe what one wishes to believe,” Jhary said wearily. “So easy.”

“You think we are in danger there?”

“Danger? It depends what you regard as dangerous. Some wisdom may be dangerous to one man and not to another.”

Mortals and gods come and go, but nature remains.

“It has often been noted that gods could not exist without mortals and mortals could not exist without gods.”

“Yet gods, it appears,” said Corum, “can affect our destinies.”

“And we can affect theirs, can we not?”

“We are content here. None starves or goes in need of anything. There was no reason for the unrest. So we are victims of powers beyond our control, are we? I like not that—whether it be Law or Chaos. I would prefer to remain neutral…”

“Aye,” said Jhary-a-Conel. “Any thinking man does in these conflicts. Yet there are times when sides must be taken lest all that one loves is destroyed. I have never known another answer to the problem, though the taking of an extreme position will always make a man lose something of his humanity.”

Ultimately, Chaos brings a more profound stagnation than anything it despises in law. It must forever seek more and more sensation, more and more empty marvels, until there is nothing left and it has forgotten what true invention is.

Your imagination is notoriously poor. Not everyone holds identical ambitions to your own!