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 it. One robs an existence at least as rich as that of a living man from the vampire in delivering it to the true death. The soul has perhaps long fled the rotted shell of the zombie. But is it absent from the titanic intellectual existence of the lich? Isn't there something ingenuous in speaking of destroying liches and vampires and killing bacteria and mold? Isn't it things that one destroys and subjects that one kills? Is a vampire any less a subject than a living man? Is a living man any less a thing than a vampire? The difference then, if there is one, is life itself. Both creatures exist, both revel in their existence. Only one lives, only one is pumped full of positive energy, only one obeys received biological ideas, only one is "natural". Might it not be that liches and vampires deserve to be judged and found guilt before they are killed, rather than set upon discrimately by those who in destroying can do no wrong?