2nd Movement: Largo Dolore

Snowy Ishgard, beautiful Ishgard, proud Ishgard. Ishgard the betrayer.

One thousand years ago, you started a war you could not win. One of your own sacrificed her life for love, earning a peace you would squander, a beauty and connection that you did not appreciate.

All to satisfy your endless lust for power.

With that power, you took away Nidhogg's eyes, and forced him to vow eternal suffering upon your people. You subjugated your people, selling them lies and propaganda; you rewrote history, to force them to believe that the Dragons were the aggressors.

And by doing so, you doomed countless lives, of the Spoken and of the Dragons, to an early death.

How many times have I wandered Dravania, hearing the sad songs of its residents? How many corpses have I seen, how many tales of widowed spouses and abandoned children, how many hatchlings brutalized, their parents left to slowly bleed out as your people cruelly made them suffer -- believing that they were in the right?

One thousand years ago, you began this cycle of violence. Your children and your children's children continued it, until the truth of the original sin was forgotten completely, allowed to exist only in the memories of the most long lived dragons. You denied Shiva's sacrifice, branding her as a traitor, and in so doing denied yourselves any hope of reconciliation.

Eventually, you would believe your own propaganda, forgetting its truth entirely; and you would doom yourselves by looking to harvest the technology of the Allagans, and the power of the Primals. There is nothing short of a river of blood caused by the actions of Ishgard, and its perpetuators.

And yet...

Our reasons were different, our philosophies opposite, our methods incomparable. But can I truly say the blood on your hands is any lesser than the blood on mine?

How many corpses have I left in my wake? How many widowed spouses and abandoned children? I heal, and yet I harm. I have killed more than I have saved -- countless more. The common bandits have families that love them, the monsters terrorizing a town are simply hungry, the Tribes who summon nature-destroying primals are simply protecting themselves from others.

One person's heretic is another person's patron saint.

I have long since stopped believing in some measure of truly objective good or evil. Everyone has goals, everyone has interests, everyone has beliefs -- and some times, those things conflict, and result in violence. Some are altruistic, some are selfish, but at the end of the day, we all work towards the version of the world we most want to see.

So long as you believe in something, so long as you fight and refuse to accept that the world is not your ideal world, you will end with blood on your hands; and in my long life, I have learned one thing about those whose hands are stained.

One day you will be punished.

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