Disclaimer: I own nothing. I'm a poor college student.
Summary: Sakyou and Shizura are very nearly polar opposites, but for some reason they are inexorably drawn together.
Hopefully I'll update this one better than usual... maybe?
On the Nature of Evil:
Throughout his life Sakyou often wondered what good and evil were. When he was a boy his mother told him that murderers were evil. His grandmother was convinced that demons were the true evil in the world and inspired good people to do bad things.
Sakyou, she told him, was a good boy.
His mother didn't believe in demons and she often told him that he was a bad boy.
Sakyou just thought that he was different.
As he grew older he became fascinated with language. How people used it. How they manipulated others with it.
He loved words: loved the power they had.
Good and evil were polar opposites in the written word, but a thing could be both beautiful and cruel. Like the way a land with no water became brittle and parched: a trap for creatures once living. And yet the swirling dust was art.
He discovered that he loved to possess power. And so he used his beautiful words to create traps for the unsuspecting.
In this way he became rich.
Money was another kind of power, and it was one with no limits. One could do anything if one had the money.
He bought his mother a new house, servants, and all the comforts of luxurious society. She told him that perhaps he wasn't such a bad boy after all.
His grandmother was dead.
He visited her grave and told her that he didn't think that he was truly the good boy she had thought he was.
She didn't answer, but the wind played with the grass around her headstone. He imagined tears in her eyes and a sad shake of her grey head.
He felt a pang of regret.
He wished that it was her living in the grand house with the servants and luxuries instead of his mother. Then she could go on believing he was the good boy she had always told him he was.
Then one day he discovered the Dark Tournament. For a very short time he reveled in the idea that his grandmother had been right.
He didn't go to her grave and tell her though. She already knew.
But then he began to understand the enemy. He observed the fighters – demon and human. Some fought by strict honor codes. Some killed mercilessly.
The wealthy human gamblers watched it all. Thought only of the money, laughed, and had no excuse.
Demons, his grandmother had told him, have no morals because they need no morals. They have powers that humans can only dream of, are answerable to no one. Their evil is a baseless one. Never having learned anything else they could act no other way.
This, Sakyou now knew, was very nearly not true.
Humans, she had said, knew what love was, and justice. And because they knew this they should be able to choose good.
This however was only rarely true.
Sakyou understood though, that because of this one differentiation that his grandmother had made between humans and demons: the knowledge and experience of love, this made human evil so much the worse.
Human evil was conscious evil.
The Dark Tournament made him realize these things and it made him wonder.
He wondered if his grandmother still thought he was a good boy.
He wondered if she still had hope for him.
He had very little for himself.
At least, though, while he was alive, he had power. And now, those he destroyed destroyed others as well. It was all almost above the simple dichotomy of good and evil.