War.
War never changes!
A statement so profound in its simplicity, so absolute in its truth, that it has echoed through the Folds since the first thinking being decided that the shiny rock their neighbor had would look much better in their own cave.
When war did come, a great and terrible symphony of endings, the question always lingered in the quiet aftermath, whispered by the survivors amidst the rubble of their certainties: Who truly benefited?
Was it the soldiers, the countless millions whose existences were reduced to statistics on a casualty report?
Their families might receive a neatly folded flag and a ruler's empty words, a poor trade for a lifetime of absence.
Was it the nation, its coffers drained, its fields fallow, its next generation a cohort of orphans and widows? Unlikely.
No, the naive would say that wars have no winners, that all sides lose in the grand, bloody calculus of conflict.
Obviously, such beings were naive!
