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Violence often becomes self-perpetuating.

This lesson many of the best philosophers in both the north and the south tell us repeatedly. But humans, especially those well trained in the scholastic dialectic, are ingenuous at finding rhetorical ways to define their atrocities as just actions and their enemies’ actions as atrocities.

Any careful observer, however, surely must admit the key effects on history’s unfolding of specific atrocities.

The massacre at Oak Haven, a small village about twenty miles west of Paradise, and an assassination in Paradise, the largest city on the southern continent, indisputably fueled the ferocious rage motivating the Republic’s officers and soldiers as they confronted the oligarchs, the Stradagh and their allies, and the imperial armies. The atrocities created the whirlwind of emotions that led directly to some horrific meeting engagements on several battlefields.

The massacre at Aletta, one of the southernmost of the Free Cities, was not only an awful chapter in the city’s history but also a catalyst for the Southern Republic’s new justice system. At the war’s beginning, the Duchy of Ravenwood had been experimenting with judicial reform. But because of massacres like the one at Aletta and in several other places, the Southern Republic responded with fanatical belief in the importance of the work of its new Justices of the Peace and its new City and Town Watches.

For perhaps the first time in history, funding for law and order initiatives, while still not at ideal levels, reached a high enough level to make a difference on the streets. The bromide that a young woman could walk across the Southern Republic’s lands with a bag of gold in her hand was a ridiculous exaggeration. But in many regions in the new Southern Republic, anyone who harmed or stole from that young woman would be hunted relentlessly by the combat veterans and young idealists manning the Watch’s blockhouses. In the Republic, the undeniable truth now was that crime did not always pay; in fact, it frequently ended your wealth, your freedom, or your life. People could believe in justice and public safety again, and so many did.