Journal of an Itinerant Wizard (Genzir Malark)
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Genzir came back to the camp for the second time after his ill-fated attempt to magically bewilder a large group of Eastlander archers. The first time was right after his body had been carried back to the temple of Tyr in Peltarch. Since then, the battle had moved completely to the other side of the cave. Now, he found Raisa tending to the wounded in the Defender camp. They set off for the forward field hospital in the cave near the front.
When they arrived, the battle had already run its course, the Eastlanders had fled, and the whole valley was a grisly scene of fire and death. They made their way through the wreckage, looking for wounded to tend. Raisa began performing a ritual of pacification in a field of trampled crops and Genzir came across his Legion superiors who had been in the fight.
"General Lyte, I think we should do something for the innocent victims of this war." The general agreed and Genzir once again found Raisa and they set to looking for children, the old, the sick, and those too scared or weak to flee.
First they coaxed a pair of young children out of a copse of trees. They took them back to a part of the cave near the Defenders' field hospital, gathering them there. By nightfall, that part of the cave held a good-sized mob of children, a stunned crone and her crippled sister, several young women, a one-legged man, and several infants whose young mothers had been taken by Peltarch soldiers.
Days earlier, just as the first push into the cave was about to begin, some of his comrades heard a child screaming amidst the sounds of catapult fire. The paladin, Kara, went ahead, alone, searching for the source of the sound, despite many loud warnings from their comrades that it was a trick. "Children will die. This is a war," he remembered saying to Lilly. And what did this gallant gesture mean, to risk one's life to save a child, a child that might not even exist, when the victory they sought would mean that tens, maybe hundreds of children would die? Or be orphaned…
And would things have been any different if he'd stayed out of it altogether? In his time with the Defenders, he had protected the camp from Peltarch renegades, helped his comrades fight Eastlander soldiers... what if they had lost? What if the Eastlander fortress had stood firm, Atol in command, Rass overhead?
He started leading the mob back to the city. The Eastlanders had evacuated the village and fortress when the tide of battle turned against them.
"It's not just the war that matters, Bugs... what happens after the war, that matters too, maybe even more. Don't you agree, Bugs?"
