But the Light grants us freedom from existence alone as the measurement of our worth. Oh,
evolution has made us afraid of nonexistence, certainly; and it is good to fear and to avoid
nonexistence because without existence, we cannot experience joy. The idea that death is an escape
from suffering is a trap. Death is not an escape from anything. It is a wall, a cessation, meaningless.
I do not embrace death. There is no possibility in death; life is our only chance to live.

Darkness helps us avoid death. It helps us to go on existing. It is necessary. We must remember what
hurt us so that we will not be hurt again.

But Darkness alone points to an eternal existence of mere survival-to a universe where the only
judge of a good existence is the ability to go on existing. It is the grace on the Light that grants us
the dignity to choose a finite life of compassion and common good over an eternity of competitive
subsistence.

The Darkness, of the being that speaks for it, claims that the extermination of all those who choose
the Light is inevitable; that the universe will be inherited by morally impoverished advantage-seekers
like the Vex and Hive. Logically, I cannot see an escape-so long as I accept the Darkness’s logic.

But this is exactly why we fight, Sen-Aret. Not to preserve our own lives, but to preserve the
possibility that we represent. When all choices are measured by their fitness pay off-by what they do
to benefit the continued existence of the chooser-the Darkness has won completely.

The most important thing we can do, the most formidable blow we can strike against our true
enemy, is to offer irrational grace: to choose unreasonable hope and unreasoning compassion even if
it goes against calculated advantage.

It is only by disregarding the logic of mere survival that we can create a possibility of existence
outside that logic.

So. If they do not offer you a spot at the campfire. If they call you naïve. If they dislike your
complaints about the casual violence of the casually violent. If they quote from the Unveiling texts,
tell you how the Gardener lost because it always stopped to offer peace, and the Winnower always
struck-then ask who they would rather sit by at the fire: Gardener or Winnower.

Then ask them if they would like to live to live in a universe where no one ever sits beside anyone else at
the fire.

Never forget that even in the miserable logic of the prisoner's dilemma, it is the cooperators who
create the best world. Two cooperators will score higher, together, than two defectors ever could. A
world of cooperators would defeat a world of defectors if the defectors could only be kept away from
the cooperator's bounty.

Never forget that what we achieve together, what we accomplish by leavening Darkness with Light
and Light with Darkness, tempering grace with memory and memory with grace, is quite literally
more than the Darkness alone can imagine. The Hive may have extinguished entire galaxies of
allied life, but before the Hive came, those ecumenes accomplished titanic works. What do the Hive
have to show for all their conquest? Miserable warrens and rotting moons. Even their libraries are
just catalogs of death. Even their queens want a way out.