Category:Killer

A killer snuffs out the life of another being.

Depending upon the identity of the killer, of the killed, and of the witnesses, the act of killing may, or may not, constitute a crime. For example, a lumberjack might think nothing of killing a tree; the state would agree with him so long as the tree was his to kill and as long as any consequent taxes were paid; a druid would agree with neither opinion and would, at a minimum, see any gratuitousness on the part of the lumberjack as a crime.

Nevertheless, most individuals do not even conceive of those working in forestry or agriculture as being killers. Indeed many individuals fail to conceive of themselves as killers when dealing with vermin. And what about medical researchers experimenting on animals? To say nothing of mad scientists obsessed with stealing the fire of the gods and creating life . . . . Did Dr. Victor Mordenheim think of himself as a killer when he decided to shut off the laboratory pump that was keeping the brain of Rudolph von Aubrecker alive? The threshold beyond which one becomes a killer in one's own eyes can be elastic in the extreme.

And what of those confronting the undead? A creature that has returned from the grave is not exactly dead and is not exactly alive. It is trapped somewhere in between. One robs precious little from a skeleton in destroying. The same cannot be said of the destruction of vampire. The soul has perhaps long fled the rotted shell of the zombie. But is it gone from the ceribral lich?

nearly as much if n

not further from life than it is from death.

Is it too convenient to say that life has not returned a creature that has risen from its grave to rejoining the living.

One does not snuff out the life of the undead. The individual who has risen from the grave is not alive, the life that fled before he was put in the grave has not returned.

It is ingenuous to deal the ethical question raised by that decision by of that decision by ma

The destruction of the undead is not killinPerhaps only in Necropolois would it be seriously suggested that the destruction of the undead is killing. For to survive the grave is not to come back to life and it presupposes that life has been snuffed out already.