To my implacable foe:

I write this letter on what was almost the cusp of our latest battle.  It would have been a surprise attack, because Sun Tzu tells us that we should never cede even the smallest advantage to our enemy.  I have not enough foresight to provide oracular details of how the battle would have transpired.  It is equally possible that both sides would have sustained critical injuries.  In lieu of that conflict which -- up till this very hour, I relished -- I have decided to surrender.

I do not take this course because I feel obligated by a sense of decency or Ghandian desire for a less violent path.  Quite the contrary: recent actions against our person were as objectionable as the first skirmishes fought so long ago.  Just as vile.  Just as disconnected from that which is right and good and true. It is also likely that -- absent a taunting blow from me -- you will continue rampaging as you have been, terrorizing those who hold you dear and devastating the whole of your own kingdom.  The St. Georgian way would be to take sword to dragon and strive for peace for the good of all in the swath of danger.  Yet I turn from the sword stroke with disgust and loathing.

It is no victory to strike down a man who -- in his madness -- strives only to curse the wind for blowing.  Such a man already perceives the swells of the world's ocean as being purposefully malicious against him alone.  To fight against such an opponent brings no glory or fame.  Even the satisfaction of retribution is denied to the aggressor, for there is no satisfaction in besting one's nemesis in the form of a child at play.

Those wiser than I have already argued that to leave you alone is to grant you influence in absentia.  No doubt they are correct, as the near-term consequence of my surrender would have been to allow my momentum to flag and turn the advantage to your side.  What a blessing for me, they might say, that the battle was still unexpected by my foe.  But I have seen what you can not.  I have seen beyond the castles and the fields of our conflict.  The great world you seek to best me in?  It is like unto a sand castle in the desert.

So I bestow on you the victory!  My boon is my buried lance point.  I give way on the ground you hold dear, for I have no desire to clutch and spit and claw at one who feels betrayed by even the clothes upon their back.  The hostility that roared in me like a blacksmith's flame but scant minutes ago is utterly quenched, leaving only the cold and distant fumes of pity.  That is what remains of the great passion and furious anger -- nothing but a dim sadness for the diminishment of what you were and could have been.

I surrender the battle because it means nothing.  Not because I expect to "win the war", as the wags say.  No. For even the war itself no longer matters.  The world has changed.  You are left in the dreadful stillness of the closed theater, watching in terror as the lights fizzle out singly and the darkness swells deeper and higher, from all directions at once.

And I do not wish to watch.

For the first and last time, I say good bye.
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