Cruel Mercy / Literature

Moments of Cruel Mercy in Literature.

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• 1% Lifesteal: Freddy's resistance to torture and interrogation eventually sees him placed on a list of 500 prisoners being transferred elsewhere. The person managing the list considers slating him for execution, but decides that selling him into Indentured Servitude would be a better punishment.
  Had he cooperated, he would have been granted the mercy of death a long time ago.
• The Adventures of Teebo: Vulgarr survives the final battle, but is subjected to a magic curse that leaves him catatonic, is planted in the ground, and transforms into a twisted, ugly tree.
• Animorphs:
  • Rather than kill David following his betrayal, the team traps him as a rat and leaves him alone on an island.
  • When Visser One (formerly Visser Three) is finally captured, he's made to give up his prized Andalite host body, put on trial for his many, MANY crimes, and forced to live out the rest of his life in his natural Yeerk state (i.e. blind and helpless), imprisoned, in complete isolation, and with no chance at ever getting another host body.
• The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga: Ice Forged by Gail Z. Martin. Because Blaine had a damn good reason for killing his father (in addition to raping his own daughter Mari, he had beaten Blaine and his brother Carr for years), one of King Merrill's advisers convinces him to commute what should be a beheading offense to transportation to a Penal Colony in the far north. It's not much of an improvement: despite Merrill sending the prison warden a note saying he is explicitly forbidden from killing Blaine, it's only Blaine's own determination and badassery that let him survive. Downplayed in that Merrill is genuinely being merciful here, but can't simply pardon Blaine for publicly killing a nobleman.
• The Belgariad:
  • Belgarion punishes a Cultist who threatens his family and kingdom by giving the man a small farm... on a tiny, remote Deserted Island in a bleak, storm-wracked sea, where his fellow cultists will never find him.
  • Historically, the Dagashi assassins rewarded the slaves who built their desert stronghold by setting them free... without homes, provisions, or passage out of the desert. Most of the slaves jumped off the walls instead.
• This is advocated in The Bible. "If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. You will be heaping live coals on his head." — Proverbs 25:21-22, quoted by Paul the apostle in Romans 12:20.
• God in Stephen King's Desperation.
  "You said 'God is cruel' the way a person who's lived his whole life on Tahiti might say 'Snow is cold.' You knew, but you didn't understand. Do you know how cruel your God can be, David? How fantastically cruel? Sometimes he makes us live."
• At the end of A Day of Fallen Night, Nikeya learns that her father contracted a special form of the draconic plague when he made a pact with Taugran the wyrm and assassinated the Emperor. Rather than offer him a swift end to his suffering, she patiently waits and watches as he dies in agony.
• Discworld:
  • In Wyrd Sisters, Granny Weatherwax attempts this by showing the villain her True Self. Subverted because it doesn't work: Lady Felmet is proud of her strength and cruelty. While she's busy boasting about it, Nanny Ogg clubs her with a cauldron.
  • Featured a lot in the witch books, actually. In Witches Abroad, Lady Lilith locking the witches in a dungeon instead of having them executed is described as this.
  • The Elf Queen tries this on Granny Weatherwax in Lords and Ladies, describing how she'll drive Granny insane, reduced to looking through scraps while remaining aware of how the villagers see her. Too bad Granny already knows what the villagers think of her, and doesn't care.
  • In Maskerade, a band of muggers threaten Granny Weatherwax, only to injure themselves in an encounter with the Ankh-Morpork Opera House's famous Phantom. Granny decides to take pity on them by stitching up their self-inflicted wounds... with a blunt needle.
  • Witch philosophy as a whole runs like this: if you kill your foe, your foe is dead and that's that. If you beat your foe, but let them live, then your foe is beat and knows they've been beaten, and they'll know it for the rest of their life, and there's no point in beating a foe if they won't be around to know they've been beaten afterward. This is explicitly given as one of the reasons for the setting's Unequal Rites; when one young witch learns a bit of simple Wizard combat magic (which is based on killing your enemy before he kills you) her peers can't see the point of it.
  • Magnificent Bastard Vetinari knows usurping rulers like to employ this trope and plans for it. "Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself." Said dungeon has locks and bolts on the inside of the door, a secret stash of food, keys, and other things. Also, room service (intelligent magically-mutated rats).
• In the backstory of Dragon Bones, Oreg is an immortal slave who Cannot Self Terminate, so provoking his owner, the only one who can kill him, into doing it, is his only means of committing suicide. An attempt to do so failed, his owner decided to have him beaten to what would usually be death by someone else, thus keeping him alive.
• The Dresden Files:
  • If you've pissed off Harry Dresden and he doesn't kill you, it's because he's making sure you really suffer. On one occasion, a man possessed by a Fallen Angel "agreed" to repent before Knights of the Cross — since technically, getting such repentance is their job, it gave him immunity from them, but not from Harry. This comes back to bite him later.
  • Mab keeps giving Harry the option of giving her disgraced Winter Knight a Mercy Kill. Harry says he doesn't deserve it. Harry does eventually kill him but he's only doing it because he needs to claim the Mantle of the Winter Knight. He refuses to consider it mercy.
• In Dune: House Harkonnen, Duke Leto invokes this trope on a man who was involved with the death of Leto's son (and is very remorseful about it, to the point that he is considering suicide):
  Leto: I sentence you... to live.
• In the end of Thomas Sniegoski's The Fallen series, the hero, Aaron, forgives Verchiel, causing him to go back to heaven. Since Verchiel has spent the last few millennia systematically wiping out various angelic offspring, allowing eldritch abominations to thrive on Earth by ignoring his job, and generally being a douche, the welcoming reception is not pretty.
• In Roger Zelazny's Forever After, Gar Quithnick uses a nerve strike on a deposed villain that will kill him the instant he holds himself superior to another person, although he can still live a long life of humility.
• Implied in Mary Shelly's Frankenstein. After Frankenstein's death, the monster himself explains how letting the monster live would have been more satisfying revenge than killing it outright, since forcing it to live alone and in the guilt of its crimes would be torturous.
• Hainish: In The Word for World is Forest, when Selver captures Captain Davidson, the human who raped his wife causing her death, Selver ignores his demand that he Get It Over With and has the Athsheans maroon him on a now barren island that was deforested by the human loggers under Davidson's command. He could adapt to this, but Selver acknowledges that Davidson will more likely Go Mad from the Isolation instead. No-one's going to go looking for Davidson either — the humans have agreed to leave Athshe and assume he's been killed anyway.
• In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry convinced his godfather Sirius Black not to kill Peter Pettigrew, the man who betrayed his parents to Lord Voldemort and framed Sirius for this crime, condemning him to a decade of horrible imprisonment in Azkaban. Sparing Peter and turning him over to the magical law enforcement is actually worse than killing him, as Azkaban is guarded by Dementors, foul creatures that suck every positive emotion out of their victims, inflicting a horrible depression on them. Unfortunately, this mercy backfires, as Peter Pettigrew manages to escape and is ultimately responsible for Voldemort's resurrection.
• Anastasia Furan does this to Laura in the seventh installment of the H.I.V.E. Series by making her a student of the Glasshouse instead of killing her. She showed Laura the setup of an execution of Otto, Wing, Shelby, and Franz, and then led her away letting her believe the death of her friends was her fault. Laura was thrown in with the rest of the Alphas, who blamed her for their predicament. In addition, Laura was very physically weak, and at a distinct disadvantage in the Glasshouse's rigorous training.
• Honor Harrington: When pragmatic politics requires that she can't simply have them offed, or even tried, Queen Elizabeth III of Manticore forces the two conspirators most responsible for her father's death into exile on newly-annexed and quite primitive Basilisk, away from their political power bases, and allows the third to move to Sphinx and perhaps find a treecat to adopt her. Being empathic, every treecat will know she's a traitor.
• In one of the Horrible Histories books, Terry Deary writes an account of Lambert Simnel, a peasant boy who was chosen to be the figurehead of a rebellion against Henry VII because he resembled the Earl of Warwick. Henry crushed the rebellion and made Simnel one of his servants in a display of Pragmatic Villainy. In Deary's account, Simnel is left shellshocked by watching the rebels being slaughtered, and writes: 'Cruel Henry had the real Earl of Warwick put to death, but cruelest of all, he sentenced me to live'.
• Breq's orders regarding their captive instance of Anaander at the end of Ancillary Mercy, overruling Sphene's offer to throttle her: let her go, because she can't really do anything to hurt them, and now she'll have to ask nicely to be taken to another system instead of being able to order it — and that will, subjectively, be way worse than simply being throttled.
• A rare villainous example: This (or Sugary Malice?) is the modus operandi of Sybil Rorke in the EF Benson short story "Inscrutable Decrees." When her act of unconcealed cruelty resulting in the death of a small girl is revealed, she is very likely Driven to Suicide.
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream is very, very much about this: The antagonist is an insane, sentient supercomputer who has brutally murdered the entire population of Earth, save for five people he keeps indefinitely alive inside his own systems and tortures for his own amusement. And when four of these five people find a way out, the supercomputer punishes the remaining survivor by making him incapable of suicide and altering his perception of time. The computer game adaptation expands on the supercomputer's motivations, by explaining that in becoming sentient, he was driven mad by only being able to use his vast intellect to kill others.
• In the third book of the Inheritance Cycle, Eragon does this to old blind Sloan by cursing him to wander in the land of the elves and never visit his beloved daughter again unless he becomes a better man. By the end of the series, Sloan hasn't changed enough to break the curse, but Eragon at least restores his eyes so Sloan can watch his daughter and granddaughter from afar.
• Discussed in Robert Harris' Imperium series. Julius Caesar likes to spare the lives of his opponents (many other characters are not so lenient). Not only does it allow him to present himself as moderate and peaceable, but it also screws with his opponents:
  Cicero said to me later that of all the clever strokes that Caesar pulled, perhaps the most brilliant was his policy of clemency. It was, in a curious way, akin to sending home the garrison of Uxellodunum with their hands cut off. These proud men were humbled, neutered; they crept back to their astonished comrades as living emblems of Caesar’s power. And by their very presence they lowered morale across the entire army, for how could Pompey persuade his soldiers to fight to the death when they knew that if it came to it they could lay down their arms and return to their families?
• Jack Reacher: At the end of Bad Luck and Trouble, Reacher and his allies leave a Smug Snake terrorist client of the Big Bad tied up to be taken into custody and possibly tortured.
  Mahmoud's eyes were full of fear. He knew what was heading his way. Reacher figured he would prefer to die, which was why he left him there alive.
• Used in one of the John Carter of Mars books. A minor bad guy has just been caught rigging a duel to put John Carter at a disadvantage, and the jeddak orders said bad guy to duel Carter. Carter simply carves an X in the guy's face, then disarms him and declares that he's satisfied because living with that scar is a Fate Worse than Death.
• William Johnstone westerns do this on occasion.
  • "Talons of Eagles", "Rage of Eagles", "War of the Mountain Man" and "Blood Bond: Gunsight Crossing" all have the Big Bad (or in "War of the Mountain Man", his unsavory brother) spared in the aftermath of a climatic battle that sees most of the mans Mooks slaughtered due to said villain suffering a Sanity Slippage, being left facing a lifetime of confinement in a Bedlam House (which, given the standards of care of such asylums in the 1800's is often seen as a Fate Worse than Death In-Universe).
  • "Blood Bond: Gunsight Crossing" also has an earlier scene where a hired killer named Monty Brill has his gun hand maimed in a fight but is left alive so that he'll be easy prey for the many vengeful relatives of the people he killed. Although this is subverted when a random dying Mook kills Brill in his hospital bed a few chapters later just so he can go to his grave feeling that he killed someone tougher than he was.
  • "Blood Valley" has a Mook spared from being arrested and possibly executed... on the condition that he marry his Abhorrent Admirer, to the man's visible dismay.
  • "Dream of Eagles" has Jamie Ian Macallister delver a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown to the Amoral Attorney who's been hiring assassins for one of the novel's main villains (breaking almost every bone in his face), then he breaks open the man's safe and burns all of his money and stock certificates before dumping him in an alley where he'll wake up disfigured and penniless.
  • In "Trail of the Mountain Man" a smarmy Young Gun murders one of the members of the team assembled by Smoke Jensen by shooting him in the back one the battle is over. The young killer is quickly disarmed, but Smoke spares his life, while giving a Breaking Speech about how now due to killing a Living Legend, he'll have to spend the rest of his (likely short, given his limited actual skill) life moving from town to town, being hounded by reputation-hungry young wannabe gunmen just like him, unable to have the time to spend the money he earns or enjoy a moments rest. And to make sure he can't just change his name and disappear, Smoke shoots off one of the mans' ears so that he'll be recognizable wherever he goes.
  • In "Law of the Mountain Man" Smoke fights a gunman named Larry Noonan in a knife fight and cuts the tendons of his arm but leaves him alive so he'll be useless as a gunman and easy prey for any of his old enemies. It's mentioned that Noonan spends the rest of his life working a menial job under an assumed name, with only the use of one arm.
• The Kingkiller Chronicle:
  • Lanre lets Selitos live after destroying all they hold dear, partly in hope of driving him past the Despair Event Horizon and into a Face–Heel Turn. It's hinted that the former also hopes the latter can kill him.
  • Kvothe himself does this to the leader of a group of thieves and rapists pretending to be Edema Ruh. The rest of them he simply kills, but he wounds the leader fatally in the stomach and leaves him alone to die by inches, leaving behind a water skin only so that dying of thirst won't end his pain before the wound kills him.
• In Les Misérables, Valjean frees Inspector Javert, the man who hunted him for nearly 20 years of his life, when the latter is captured and sure to be executed by La Résistance for spying on them. Valjean doesn't mean it to be cruel, but for Javert, it's the cruelest thing he could have done: it breaks his brain that he should owe his life to Valjean, whom he thought of only as a criminal and fugitive. His sworn duty is to bring Valjean in, but his honor requires him not to do something like that to a man he owes his life to. The Cognitive Dissonance drives him to suicide, and he goes to his death damning Valjean because he can't see this as anything other than the man's goal from the beginning. See the entry under Theatre.
• The Lord of the Rings: When Frodo only exiles Saruman for attacking the Shire and trying to kill him, Saruman assumes that it's a calculated cruelty to leave him alive with nothing at all but the memory of his defeat, failing to grasp that it's a final act of mercy to a Fallen Angel. Fortunately (from Saruman's point of view), he still has Wormtongue to help him out.
  Saruman: You have robbed my revenge of sweetness, and now I must go hence in bitterness, in debt to your mercy. I hate it and you!
• The Anti-Hero of The Mental State is a big believer in this trope. He actively enjoys watching his enemies suffer for as long as possible, preferring to maim, traumatise or isolate his opponents without actually killing them. Over the course of the story, he only kills one person (a psychotic street thug who was never likely to feel any regret for his actions, and this was regarded as a mercy killing).
• In the final Mythos Academy book by Jennifer Estep, Gwen is fighting her nemesis, Vivien, who murdered Gwen's mother and many others. She uses her psychometry magic to shove every bit of suffering she'd experienced in her own life or through others' memories into Vivien's head until her mind broke. When last seen, Vivien is curled up in a ball mumbling and begging for it to stop. It's implied that her condition is permanent; rather than kill her, the good guys stick her in prison to live out the remainder of her days.
• In Day Watch (the second book of the Night Watch (Series)), a group of Dark Others is convicted of a serious crime and given the option between two fates: execution by hanging (as opposed to the more severe dematerialisation) or being allowed to live in return for never using their powers again and living a normal human lifespan. When they choose the latter option, Gesar (head of the Light One delegation) is asked if he has any opinion, and he reluctantly recommends that their sentence be commuted to permission to perform extremely minor magic, which is granted. One of the Day Watch witnesses notes that, in the long term, this is even crueler than being killed or having no magic at all, as using incredibly weak spells will act as a constant reminder of the power they truly have but can never use.
• The ending to R.S. Belcher's Nightwise features this in the final showdown between Laytham Ballard and Dusan Slorzack: after a grueling Wizards Duel, Slorzack realizes that with his supply lines shut down, there'll be no more deliveries of food and water to his home in the Greenway; worse still, thanks to his previous Deal with the Devil, he can't leave the Greenway to stock up on supplies without Satan claiming his soul, and due to its nature as an impenetrable sanctuary that even the Devil can't touch, Slorzack can't affect the world outside the Greenway. So, caught between dying of starvation and suffering for all eternity in Hell, he decides to let Laytham kill him, even delivering an impressive speech in an attempt to Face Death with Dignity... only for Laytham to shoot him in the leg and leave him to it.
• Isaac Asimov's Pebble in the Sky: Balkis begins his interrogation of the protagonists by claiming that they are scheduled for a quick death, but if they don't agree to help them, he will guarantee that they will experience a very unpleasant death. It is at this moment when Schwartz claims to be able to kill Balkis with a thought. He's decided instead that Balkis should live, promising a terrible retribution. Schwartz begins by puppeting Balkis, leading them to escape their imprisonment.
  "Or perhaps you, Schwartz. You killed our agent. It was you, was it not? Perhaps you think you can kill me?"
  For the first time Schwartz looked at Balkis. He said coldly, "I can, but I won't."
  "That is kind of you."
  "Not at all. It is very cruel of me. You say yourself that there are things worse than simple death."
• After Mr. Wickham runs off with Lydia in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Mr. Darcy tracks them down and bribes Wickham into marrying Lydia and going into the priesthood on the condition that Darcy gets to beat the crap out of Wickham. The punishment is threefold: Wickham is trapped for life with the most annoying person in the entire P&P&Z universe, he has to give up gambling and seducing women, and he can't run away from any of this because he can't move under his own power. Considering that the Bennett family probably would have just killed him, this punishment is somewhat more fitting.
• The Prisoner of Cell 25: The Electroclan has to figure out what to do with Nichelle, a sadistic goth who has been Hatch's top enforcer and has tortured more than one of them. Michael decides to send her home, without any of the possessions she "earned" by torturing the other Electric Children into obedience, forcing her to live as just a normal teen. Nichelle immediately tries to provoke the heroes into killing her.
• At the end of Realm of the Elderlings: Fool's Fate, the Pale Woman's prophecies have all been thwarted and her power destroyed. She screams at Fitz to kill her, saying that her visions told her this would happen if she failed. Fitz responds that they are not in her vision of the future, but his, and that she dies slowly, alone. She does.
• In The Rising of the Shield Hero, the Queen appeals to Naofumi's sense of vengeance with precisely this, saying that if the King and her first daughter were to die, it would be like throwing away a golden opportunity for a moment's satisfaction. Naofumi agrees and instead decides to let them go after stripping their titles and changing their names via royal edict.
• The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok: When Aslaug leaves Aki and Grima, the couple that murdered her foster-father, she forgoes taking revenge on them, because they also raised her; but she predicts that their lives will be unhappy and will only go downhill from there.
  "[...] I will not do you any harm—but I now pronounce that each day will be worse for you than those that have passed, and your last day will be the worst."
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, Daylen thinks that the Light thwarting his attempt at suicide and making him live with his guilt is A Fate Worse Than Death. His trial at the end is also this, as Daylen hoped that the Senate would execute him, but they instead said that they Can't Kill You, Still Need You.
• The Scarlet Pimpernel deliberately invokes this in the sequel Sir Percy Hits Back when he tells his Arch-Enemy Chauvelin that he finally has his chance for revenge. Chauvelin naturally assumes that the hero intends to let Chauvelin's daughter be executed, but finds out at the end that Sir Percy's "way of hitting back" is to save his daughter and spare his life. No! Anything but that!
• In the Ray Bradbury story The Utterly Perfect Murder, Douglas, a successful concert pianist in his 60's, returns to his hometown with the intention of murdering Ralph, who had bullied and tormented him half a century earlier. On discovering that Ralph is now a pathetic, lonely, and frail old man living in poverty, Douglas decides that the best revenge is to let Ralph just continue on with the rest of his pitiful life.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • When Lysa Arryn's prisoner, Tyrion Lannister, wins his Trial by Combat, Lysa is forced to release him... so she orders him to be escorted to the Kingsroad, where he will be at the mercy of bandits. This ends up backfiring on her badly. He has the bandit tribes (up to that point only a threat to small groups of travelers) united and armed with military-grade gear, then points them right back at her.
  • Sansa Stark deliberately invokes this trope by convincing Joffrey to spare Ser Dontos by appealing to the Royal Brat's sense of cruelty, telling him it would be far harsher to make Dontos live as a Fool at Court rather than to have him executed on the spot. She was genuinely trying to save the guy's life, and both Dontos and Sandor certainly helped her sell it. Once they cottoned on to her angle. It kind of comes back to haunt her later, though.
  • Arya Stark refuses to grant Sandor Clegane a Mercy Kill when he's wounded and feverish, instead choosing to ride off and leaving him to slowly die. It's implied, however, that despite Sandor's atrocities, she is simply very reluctant to actually kill him after all they've endured together. She repeatedly tries to maintain it was this trope all the way, but the Faceless Man training her doesn't buy it for a minute. (The TV show, fitting its much less ambiguous characterisation of Arya as an emotionally shut-off revenge machine, portrays her version of events as the truth.)
  • In the backstory, there was the final fate of Queen Alicent Hightower, Viserys I Targaryen's second wife. Despite being responsible for instigating the Dance of the Dragons by convincing her son to make a play for the Iron Throne, she managed to avoid being physically harmed or killed throughout the war and its aftermath, and was merely jailed in Maegor's Holdfast until her death. What she did suffer, however, was seeing every single one of her loved ones die one after another, starting with her father, to her brother, to all of her children (including the very one whom she tried to install as king), to all of her grandchildren. To rub salt into her wound, her grandchildren died without begetting children, meaning Alicent's line was extinguished upon her death, while her stepdaughter Rhaenyra, whose lineage she tried to snuff out (and who suffered a cruel death by dragonfire), left behind two sons that continued the family line. Archmaester Gyldayn, writing years after the Dance, opined that the real mercy to Alicent was not being spared from execution, but dying of a fever two years afterwards, because living longer would have only prolonged her psychological torture.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • When Boba Fett escapes from the sarlacc's stomach, he considers killing it, but leaves. The sarlacc asks him why, and he says that leaving it alone in the desert, immobile and depending on creatures falling into its mouth every few years for food, will be more fitting revenge.
  • Attempted but ultimately defied by The Emperor and Darth Vader. Darth Sidious had little interest in exterminating every last Jedi after he had already issued Order 66; in his eyes he had already won, and he wanted the remaining Jedi to spend the rest of their lives hiding in the shadows without hope like the Sith had for a millennium under the Rule of Two. Vader, however, couldn't keep his Blood Knight impulses in check and Sidious was forced to form the Inquisitorius to hunt down the remaining Jedi for him so Vader would quit screwing around and help him manage their galaxy-spanning empire. It didn't work out as well as he would've hoped.
• In Sharon Kay Penman's first novel, The Sunne in Splendour, Edward of York has every good reason in the world to execute the defeated Marguerite d'Anjou, but refrains. She asks him the Armor-Piercing Question: "Even if it were a mercy?" His response: ''Especially if it were a mercy."
• Wizards in the Sword of Truth like doing this. Zoranders and Rahls are especially well-known for it.
• Deconstructed in Villains by Necessity, through the actions of its chief Hero Antagonist Mizzamir, who could best be described as a lawful Evil Overlord.
  • Mizzamir detests killing, which he views as barbaric and wrong, preferring more "enlightened" methods of dealing with criminals. Unfortunately, these involve turning them to stone and stripping them of all their free will. Even though Mizzamir is doing his best to adhere to the Thou Shalt Not Kill trope, the story does display that the action isn't really that much better and only technically counts as "merciful." The book's leads (and who include among them an unapologetic assassin) openly admit they'd prefer being killed to what Mizzamir would do to them.
  • The book's backstory reveals that brainwashing people and robbing them of their free will was a recent act for Mizzamir, and his previous actions were even worse. When his compatriot Sir Pryse's brother was turned to the dark side, Pryse begged Mizzamir for mercy and not to kill him. Mizzamir's "mercy" was to turn Pryse's brother into a horse. This really turned out to bite him in the ass, as Pryse realized just what a horrible person Mizzamir was below the surface and joined the forces of darkness to dethrone him.
• Vorkosigan Saga:
  • In The Mountains of Mourning novella, Miles Vorkosigan had to judge an old woman for the killing of her "mutant" granddaughter (who only had a harelip, actually). The woman was upholding cruel traditions she'd grown up with, but executing her (per the law) would not serve any purpose other than to make people cling more tightly to the backwards traditions rather than less. Instead, Miles declared her legally dead and forbade anyone from performing traditional funerary rites for her. In her mind, and in the minds of those who would have agreed with her killing her granddaughter, this effectively destroyed her soul. It also made her legally dependent on her daughter, the mother of the child she had murdered.
  • In Memory, Miles's boss/mentor Illyan's biochip was sabotaged by one of Illyan's subordinates and friends, which nearly drove him insane to the point where he begged for a clean death. After they ferret out the culprit, Miles wonders if the man will commit suicide now that he's been caught, and asks Illyan if he would want to allow that.
    Illyan: Dying's easy. Living's hard. Let the son of a bitch stand his court-martial. Every last eternal minute of it.
• Warhammer:
  • In Malus Darkblade, someone with a tremendous grudge against Malus looks at his situation halfway along the narrative, with most of his allies dead and everything he ever wanted permanently out of his grasp, and decides not to kill him, because he deserves no such mercy.
  • Also in Malus Darkblade, Darkblade interrogates a Death Seeker Khainite zealot by threatening to treat his wounds and let him live. The horrified zealot tells Darkblade everything he wants to know on the condition that Darkblade kill him afterwards.
• Warhammer 40,000 Expanded Universe:
  • The Bleeding Chalice: A Battle Sister refers to the villainous version of this trope: Chaos troops sparing Imperial soldiers because they'll suffer more that way, after she was spared by the "traitor" Sarpedon (who was actually sparing her because he was a good guy at heart(s) and admired her determination).
  • In Trooper Caffran's Day in the Limelight in Ghostmaker, his squad encounters and defeats a Khornate Chaos cult, which worships death. As a reward, he gets to execute the cult leader personally — but refuses, saying that since the cultist longs for death, keeping him alive is the real way to punish him. Gaunt agrees.
  • One of the short stories in Fear the Alien anthology book has a Dark Eldar Archon sparing the life of a woman who answered his question, despite her begging to die since her husband was killed. Unusually for Dark Eldar, though, the Archon was not being intentionally cruel: he spared her life so that she may savour her agony, which the Dark Eldar (being beings who feed on pain and misery) would consider a good thing.
  • The Traitor's Hand wraps up with Cain deciding to pull a few strings to get Commissar Beije out of a probable death sentence, not because he likes Beije (he doesn't) but because he knows Beije will hate having to live with the knowledge that he's alive thanks to Cain.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • Rand does this by accident when he sentences the murderous usurper Lady Colavaere to be stripped of her noble titles and properties and exiled to fend for herself on a tiny homestead. He simply couldn't bear to execute a woman and, as a Farm Boy by birth, didn't understand that a high noble would prefer death to utter disgrace and the obliteration of her legacy. She hangs herself instead.
  • One villain deals with an uppity mage underling by blocking off her magical abilities with a permanent, insanely complex shielding spell. She then explains that she used the shield rather than an irreversible De-power spell so the underling could live the rest of her life in the faint hope of finding someone capable of dispelling it. This, in a world where mages who are cut off from their powers tend to die of despair within a few years. By the end of the series, she's still shielded.

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