"It wasn't worth it," Ruin said quietly.
Martini and Azrael exchanged a glance, but neither of them looked at him. Reverend Mercy was walking a bit ahead, staying close to Gorsack the Magnificent.
It wasn't that he minded killing humans. Even the ones who lived here in Duendewood -- and there were quite a number of them, especially in the more populated cities and the centers of trade -- were not to be trusted. The ones outside, well... war was still coming, and a good many of them needed killing. No, the issue was...
The issue was that the druid had been minding his own business. He hadn't been a danger to anyone, at least not until Azrael filled his house with webs and Ruin attacked his bear. And then there'd been that brief, disorienting moment when everything was gone, and he a tiny little thing trapped at the edge of the most horrible water imaginable, staring up at a raging beast that could have ended him with a casual gesture. He pretty sure he'd pissed all over the stone floor at that point, not that anyone including himself had really noticed. He'd had the vertiginous sense that his mind was slipping, that he was about to lose all sense of himself and disappear into being a frog, before he'd suddenly reverted back.
He thought Mercy had been chanting at that point, so he probably owed the human another one. Which was exactly the thing with humans: many of the deserved to die, but it was because of what they did and sometimes what they were, not because they happened to be human. And in helping to murder the druid, he'd made himself no better than them.
Martini wouldn't care. Azrael... it wasn't so much that the boy wouldn't care, it was that he wouldn't think of it at all. Marshall Mercy... Ruin wasn't sure. He still didn't have the full measure of the human cleric, but he thought that under other circumstances the priest might have found some common ground with the druid, given their shared love of their animals. But Ruin...
Guilty. For the first time in his life, Ruin felt guilty over the death of a human.
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