The Click of a Firing Pin

That's all it takes. The click of a firing pin and the crack of a rifle shot is all that is now needed to lay someone at the door to the Black Path.

The people realized as much. I was still young when it happened, but I remember travelling with my parents through the Jewel of the Dominion in its last months. Though the rioters were met with blades and shields as they'd ever been, though hoarse voices shouted from within the formation to desperately urge the citizens that their fears were misplaced, they knew. They'd seen what a gun could do to a man on the first true night of the riots, when a repeating rifle scattered the crowd for the first time.

That was enough to cow them for a while. But when the rains kept up that maddening pattern for weeks on end, their desperation grew and grew. They were trapped, like livestock waiting for the slaughter, abandoned by a King whose own radiance had long blinded him to their suffering, and cursed by a world that had turned on them. They wouldn't, couldn't, fear the guns anymore. Pouring through the streets, bearing torches and makeshift weapons, the weary and malnourished made their last stand.

Gunfire couldn't scatter them. Blades couldn't cut them down fast enough. Their addled minds seemed to merge through each other, unfurling, washed away by the rain until all that was left were burning hot cores of instinct and rage. Almost as quickly as they were slain, Shades would leap to the fore, each death only accelerating the horror of the riots until all that was left was an ocean of twisting shadow, both sides subsumed by the Hell their city had become.

All because a man decided that his soldiers, for whatever reason, needed guns.

That was the first step. The people hated it, the outsiders hated it, all eyes were upon them. Riots lit up the streets almost immediately after the first report of soldiers wielding firearms against the Khesil. The Dominion had been violent with its people before: uprisings had not been that uncommon throughout its shaky history, and each time the guardsmen were hardly hesitant in crashing their blades down on civilian skulls. The nightmare of a man in a tower cutting them down with but the pull of a trigger must have truly shaken them.

Though time and again they have been tricked, or strong-armed, into following the whims of monarchs, I feel pride in the people of Elstren. They are not fools. Merely disenfranchised, held back, whether in the bindings of royal law or in heavy iron chains. Even if they did not care for themselves, or if not even for the causes of others, they knew that the introduction of firearms into warfare would spell calamity for all.

Many letters are preserved from those last months, and one that stuck out to me was sent by a mother whose child sought to enlist with the King's Army. She worried, rightly, that if the Kingdom began to use firearms, then perhaps so would others—and warfare would no longer be tests of mettle punctuated by the aftercare of a healer. Instead, a battle would become a storm of lead crossing an empty divide, striking the hearts from soldiers in the blink of an eye.

Every aspect was foreseen. Whether it was the civil concern of firearms being turned on their own people in times of duress, or a broader concern about the arms race that adopting firearms would cause, making warfare vastly more lethal for all involved. The Lantern Bearers and the Verdant Grasp both agreed, despite their differences, that this arms race could not be allowed to take place, and just about everyone followed suit... save for the Dominion.

And here we are, now. The Dominion's restless corpse festers among the mountains, and the rest seem to have learned from their example... or so I would hope. The horrors wrought by the advent of firearms surely linger in the collective conscious, and the people are diligent to police the forces that remain. Though that rotting monarch that currently fouls the Starpeak throne is an irredeemable wretch, he's no fool—and perhaps he knows that arming his men in such a way would spell the death of his reign just as it had for Reimer's. I only hope that the people maintain this awareness that each and every tool that finds itself in the hands of their oppressors will surely be wielded against them.

Technology deserves scrutiny. The people deserve to know what is being built, and to what end.