The Four Conditions For Destructive Force

The only four states in which a guardian may destroy — and the sentence that closes the list: no conditions other than these.

Life is being taken, or imminently will be. A being or beings face death or grave injury, and nothing else available — talk, withdrawal, healing, delay — can prevent it in the time there is. The guardian steps in, applies the minimum that will stop it, and stops when the threat to life stops.

A protective field has been breached and the breach cannot be closed by clearing alone. What has entered cannot simply be cleared out; it must be met at the layer it is operating on, and the engagement ends when the breach is closed (Shield, Exorcism, Guard the Membrane).

A structure can no longer be sustained without participating in violation. Sometimes what must end is not a person but a thing — an institution, a covenant gone bad, a coalition that has drifted into predation. Dissolving it is an act of destruction and simultaneously an act of restoration of the wider field it was distorting (Disbanding, Impeachment).

One's own capacity or training must be released. The most personal case: a guardian who recognises that their own cultivation has drifted, or that a capacity is no longer being held faithfully, destroys what has gone wrong in themselves. This is the terminal clause of The Warrior's Vow — I release the Power if I cannot hold this Vow — pointed inward.

The closing sentence is the instrument. No conditions other than these. Revenge, ideology, and the convenience of removing someone disliked are excluded by name, and a guardian who destroys on any of those grounds has broken the Vow and forfeited what was cultivated (The Dark Initiate Failure Mode).

Two rules travel with the list and are not separable from it: minimum force, released instantly and completely when its purpose is met; and the one whose sovereignty has been temporarily forfeited by their own act is still a being whose soul is in ØNE's keeping — the aim is that the harm cease, not that the person be destroyed (The Sacred Use Of Force, Proportionality).

Also called: when destruction is required · the four conditions Stands on: The Warrior's Vow · The Sacred Use Of Force · Guardianship · Right Relationship Opens onto: Restraint As The Refusal To Act · Restraint's Two Tells · Protective Preemption And The Faithful-Elder Test · The Funeral Of Destruction · The Threefold Capacity · Proportionality · Self Defense · The Dark Initiate Failure Mode In play: beyond the table — the list a guardian is expected to know cold before they ever need it Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Books/The Sacred Warrior Guidebook/Sacred Warrior — I.8 Destruction (unmarked — the book postdates the canon's audit and carries no disposition) · The Warrior's Vow (Card, draft) · lionsberg.wiki: The Sacred Warrior Guidebook Open: The conditions are stated for an individual acting under time pressure; who authorises, reviews, or refuses an engagement at any larger scale is handled elsewhere and not reconciled with this list. · The whole Guidebook is absent from the canon's audit ledger, so nothing in it has yet been reviewed by a second reader.