Far to the north, in Brevoy, there was once a man who loved his son more dearly than life itself. His wife had died in childbirth, and so he was raising his son alone, but he never grew wrathful, nor gave up on caring for his son, no matter how difficult it was.

The man worked at the docks to provide for his son, and the docks were not a safe place for a young boy. In Brevoy there were no public daycares, so each day he left his son in the care of one of his neighbors. Years passed like this. Every day his son grew bigger and stronger and more clever, and every night he told his son stories of his late mother.

Yet one day, when his son was nearly grown, his son went out drinking with a few other young men. The father did not see what happened, but words turned to blows, and at the end of it his son was dead.

The man demanded to know which young man had slain his son, and all of the young men named the same of their fellows, a man just a few years older than the man's dead son — all but one, for the man who had done the deed had already fled home, fearing the father's wrath.

And he was not wrong to fear it, for the rage which burned inside the man was mighty indeed. He took a kitchen knife and set off for the house of the man who had killed his son, thinking that he would send that man to the Abyss.

He reached the man's house and marched inside, where the man was speaking in hushed tones to a young woman.

"Are you the man who killed my son?" he asked.

The younger man prostrated himself on the floor and began to apologize. But this did nothing to cool the father's wrath, for he knew that apologies could not restore his son to life, and he heard only excuses in the young man's words.

"Go outside," he commanded the young woman, for he did not wish a woman to see what he was about to do.

She nodded and began to make for the door. Yet as she did, the bundle in her arms shifted and began to wail, and the father realized that it was her child.

"Is this your child?" he demanded of the man who had slain his son.

The younger man nodded, but said nothing.

The father stood there, holding the knife. For he could not bear to see his son's killer live, but nor could he bear to leave a child fatherless.

The woman stopped walking, and knelt down on the floor by her husband. "I will not ask you to forgive my husband," she said.

There were many things the man might have expected to hear from her lips, but that was not one of them. "What?" he said.

"I will not ask you to forgive my husband," she repeated. "He has done a wrong to you that cannot be righted. But it will not be righted if you kill him, either. I ask only that you spare him, however you feel in your heart."

The man still ached with pain and anger, but he allowed the knife to fall from his hands. For when he looked upon the woman as she clutched her infant child in her arms, she seemed almost to remind him of his lost wife. And he knew that killing her husband would not restore his son to life, but only leave another child fatherless.

The child whose father he spared grew up wise and strong, and when the man had grown very old, and no longer had the strength to work, the child cared for him and ensured he had enough to eat. And though the man's anger never fully disappeared, in time it was joined with relief that he had not killed the young man, foolish and careless though he was.

Once upon a time, in Andoran, shortly after the civil war, there lived a woman who believed she was surely damned. For when the revolution had come to Andoran, she had not fought for freedom, but instead had taken bribes from the forces of Hell to carry out espionage on their behalf; and she knew that this was a great Evil.

Before the war, the woman had been accustomed to tormenting the poor and destitute on the streets of Almas. And so it came to pass one afternoon that she found a homeless beggar and began to taunt him with demands that he humiliate himself in exchange for scraps of bread.

"Why are you doing that?" came a voice from behind her. "Don't you know it's Evil to mistreat the weak and vulnerable?"

The woman turned, and saw a much older woman standing before her. There was something familiar in the lines of the older woman's face, but she did not recognize it.

The woman might have lied, for she knew that her fellow citizens expected her to be Good, but when she opened her lips to speak she found that she could speak nothing but the truth.

"I do not care if it is Evil," she said, "for I am damned regardless. Why shouldn't I do Evil things, if they bring me pleasure?"

"Does it bring you pleasure, then?" asked the older woman.

The younger woman opened her mouth to say that of course it brought her pleasure, but she found that she could not speak. For in truth she had not enjoyed such deeds in a long time, and had come to do them merely out of habit rather than out of joy.

"It seems foolish to me to damn yourself merely for mortal pleasure," said the old woman. "But it seems far more foolish to damn yourself for something you don't even want to do."

"Then what should I do instead?" the younger woman demanded to know.

"You like cooking, don't you?" said the older woman. "There is a soup kitchen not far from here, but many of its volunteers have fallen ill, and there is no one to chop the carrots."

The younger woman did not know how the older woman knew she liked cooking, but she could not deny the truth of her words. She went to the soup kitchen, and began to chop the carrots, and she found that she enjoyed it far more than she had been expecting.

When she left late that evening, carrying a bowl of soup for her own dinner, she saw the beggar once again. He flinched away from her, and she knew that he was not wrong to, for just a few hours earlier she had demanded that he perform all manner of unspeakable deeds for her own amusement.

She felt the warm bowl of soup in her hands, and knew in her heart that she had been given a chance to make up for what she had done to him. She set the bowl of soup down in front of him. "This is for you," she said.

The man was suspicious, but he was very hungry, and so he began to eat. The woman left him in peace to do so, and as she returned home, she found that she was far happier than she had been in a long time.