War: The state of intense armed conflict between different nations, states, societies, or governments, characterized by extreme violence, aggression, destruction, and morality, using regular or irregular military force.

It was a symptom of disease actually.

I'd seen it ravage through the masses, infectiously affecting host after host, and it started within my family. They were sick. They were plagued by their own hands and stained with greed that bled so deeply into their cores that they fell ill under its hex.

War, devastatingly, was only the wake of corruption.

*

"Lady Yuxin, please, the order is to deliver you to the border of Gou-"

"I won't go. Can't you see what's happening to our town outside?" 

Beyond the shutters of a modest palace sprung towers of billowing smoke that polluted the skies, spurred from wildfire spreading through the clusters of rooftops that made up a quaint little village among the grasslands. The palette of the townscape, once vibrant with yellow, green, and golden hues from stalks of cane and wheat and grass, had fouled into ominous reds and purples and black, tainted with fire and blood and smoke. It broke the youngest majesty's heart to witness it spiraling to ruins.

"I can't leave it behind like this. I can't just run away! Go to the border yourselves. Go and spare your lives and tell the leaders of Gou what has happened here. The Kingdom of Kai will pay dearly for rising against us unprovoked."

There in her words was her fighting spirit, a force none had been able to waver, and at her willing, her troupe obeyed and left her chambers without delay.

"Al Tharmen... The world will know your name. They'll know your sins and bury them with you - I'll guarantee it with my dying breath if  need be."