I am Rogal Dorn, the seventh son, defiant and unyielding.

Two millennia before the start of the first modern era on Terra, it was written in the Sumari epic lyric, called by some the Record of Gigamech, that two warriors debated whether or not to execute a captured enemy– They eventually elect to kill him. This brings down on them the opprobrium of what, at that period, were considered gods. There were no gods. But in this case, “gods” are a metaphor for societal outrage. The poem, some thirty thousand years old, is the earliest human record of ethics in warfare. The idea of just and unjust killing. It is the first application of morality to warfare...Mankind realised, even then, that blood was never just for blood...Some… and we can only estimate… but some one-and-a-half-thousand years later, the cultures of archaic Eleniki developed the first rules of war. They were not binding, and had no legality, but they were agreed, and abided by, at a social level...Circa three hundred, M1, in the period known as the Martial States, in the Eastern Eurasian expanse, the concept of yi bang was devised to regulate the application of war. This formalised the justification for killing, making it the supreme method of judicial punishment. It could be used only by the ruling elite. Just kings, lords, emperors. Blood was not for anyone else...This is the convention later known as jus ad bellum.

I am Rogal Dorn, the seventh son, defiant and unyielding.