Editing Sigil:Temple Wars (section)

== Violence and Restraint ==

The wars produced genuine atrocities, although later religious histories sometimes tried either to exaggerate or suppress them. Temples were burned. Priests were killed. Villages suffered reprisals for supporting one faction or another. Sacred property was looted under theological pretexts that concealed very ordinary greed.

Yet the same period also produced many of the stories through which Triadic ethics came to define themselves.

An Ardisian abbess stands between a mob and an old sanctuary, refusing to allow its priests to be murdered.

An Inglorian commander rejects a victorious lord's demand to sack a town whose citizens supported the opposing temple faction.

Vannimari scholars preserve the books of a defeated cult because destroying knowledge would be an insult to Wisdom.

A magistrate rules that a shrine may retain its ancestral lands despite pressure from a wealthy Triadic foundation.

Whether every famous story occurred exactly as later generations tell it is impossible to know. Their importance lies partly in the fact that the Faith chose to remember them.

The heroes of the Temple Wars are not merely those who defeated rival temples.

They are often those who refused to become what their enemies feared.