Those to Whom Evil is Done...
In "The Path of Fear" (Tales of the Empire 1.1), the young Morgan Elsbeth, one of the Nighsisters of Dathomir, experiences the destruction of her home at the hands of General Grievous and his droid army. Grievous inflicts two specific wounds on Morgan: first he kills her mother while she watches, and then he orders his troops to burn the forests of Dathomir.
Morgan survives the attack on the forest and is taken in by Dathomir's Mountain Clan. Scarred by her experience, she defies the warnings of the Clan's peaceful elder and stokes fear in its other young women, taking them with her to find weapons with which they could defend against another droid attack. However, in the very act of searching for weapons to avert an attack, Morgan triggers one, resulting in the death of the elder's daughter. Morgan, who watched her own mother die at the hands of droids, brings about a situation in which another mother has to watch her daughter die at the hands of droids.
Years later, Morgan becomes the Imperial Magistrate of the forest planet Corvus. In "The Path of Hate" (Tales of the Empire 1.3), after the fall of the Empire, an emissary of the New Republic offers Morgan the chance to break the cycle of vengeance by submitting to the justice of a fair trial. "Don't burn everything down around you," she urges, but Morgan refuses: "My world has been burning since I was a child. Why should this one be any different?" She then has her droids burn the forests of Corvus, just as General Grievous' droids burned the forests of Dathomir.
Because she reacts against her suffering with fear, anger, and hate, Morgan ends up inflicting the exact same suffering on others. As the poet W.H. Auden writes in "September 1, 1939":
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
The path of the dark side leads to a never-ending cycle: those who suffer pain go on to inflict pain, ad infinitum.
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Characters: General Grievous / Morgan Elsbeth
Shows: Tales of the Empire
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