I'm a fairly compassionate person at heart.
I believe that kindness given comes back around someday, and from a young age I was raised to mind my behavior—to at least never cause harm to others, even if I couldn't always do good.
That upbringing became my values and my conviction.
But the medieval era is a brutally cruel and merciless world. Religion served as the brakes that kept the nobility's excesses in check, but as the Church grew steeped in worldliness, even those brakes began to lose their function.
In such circumstances, nobles like me who do good deeds with no strings attached are vanishingly rare. The residents of an occupied territory are little more than the occupying army's spoils, unable to resist in the face of brutal violence.
Even though Fried had only sanctioned plunder, in places out of sight, massacres were carried out by mercenaries whipped into a frenzy—a tragedy that followed right on the heels of the battle's end.
