Mercy Kill / Literature

Mercy Killing in literature.

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• The 100: Clarke injects Lily with a deadly dose of medication to save her from a slow and painful death by radiation poisoning.
• Age of Fire: In the first novel, Dragon Champion, when AuRon makes his way back west on his mission to infiltrate the Wyrmmaster's forces, he finds that they have already attacked the headquarters of the Chartered Company of dwarves that he once worked for. And worse, he finds that his friend Djer has been mortally wounded, having literally his entire face covered in burns, and even had his lungs damaged. Djer manages to croak out a request to be put out of his misery rather than wait in agony to die, and AuRon doesn't hesitate, crushing Djer's skull and killing him instantly.
• And the Mountains Echoed has Parwana doing this to the paraplegic Masooma, and Nabi doing this to the paraplegic Mr. Wahdati.
• Animorphs:
  • At the end of The Return David begs Rachel to do this for him rather than force him to live out the rest of his life as a rat. The book ends with Rachel crying in front of David, and whether or not she killed him is never revealed.
  • It's implied that Jake gave the order to kill Tom partially because he'd suffered enough as a Controller for years, and it was far too late to free him.
• In the Arcana Chronicles by Kresley Cole, main character Evie does this to an entire valley full of people dying from an illness with no hope of survival and a guarantee of a long, agonizing death, by blowing poisonous spores into the valley.
• The Black Arrow: As he is riding through a fen, Dick comes upon a horse struggling uselessly to get out of a mud pool. Since Dick could not pull the horse out of the quicksand because it was sunk up to the belly, he opted for drawing his crossbow and pulling it out of its misery swiftly.
  Half-way across, and when he had already sighted the path rising high and dry upon the farther side, he was aware of a great splashing on his right, and saw a grey horse, sunk to its belly in the mud, and still spasmodically struggling. Instantly, as though it had divined the neighbourhood of help, the poor beast began to neigh most piercingly. It rolled, meanwhile, a bloodshot eye, insane with terror; and as it sprawled wallowing in the quag, clouds of stinging insects rose and buzzed about it in the air.
  "Alack!" thought Dick, "can the poor lad have perished? There is his horse, for certain—a brave grey! Nay, comrade, if thou criest to me so piteously, I will do all man can to help thee. Shalt not lie there to drown by inches!"
  And he made ready his cross-bow, and put a quarrel through the creature's head.
• In Black Beauty, Captain, Beauty's fellow cab horse, is injured in a cab accident to the extent that he can no longer work reliably. Jerry, the kind-hearted cab driver, can't afford to continue boarding and feeding a horse that can't work, but the prospects for an injured horse are grim, and Jerry can't bear the thought of selling Captain into a life of hard labor and misery. In the end, he decides the best thing he can do for Captain is to put "a sure bullet through his heart" so he won't have to suffer.
• In Jo Graham's Black Ships, the narrator is forbidden from seeing blood shed. Nonetheless, when she and her companion Xandros come across a man whose insides are... not so inside anymore, she gives Xandros the go ahead, and he slits the man's throat.
• Bruce Coville's Book of... Spine Tinglers II: The final fate of The Packet, which has a small creature trapped inside that's miserable and only wants to die... so Rikki obliges, putting it out of its misery.
• At the end of Calculating God, euthanasia is given to relieve pain for the terminal main character.
• In Andre Norton's Catseye, Zul tells Troy to help him kill the Uplifted Animals, because the alternative is the patrolmen getting the truth out of them and then killing them.
• The Chronicles of Dorsa: Megs had killed her brother Milton at his urging after he was shadow infected. It left her with deep guilt nonetheless.
• In PC Hodgell's Chronicles of the Kencyrath, Kencyr Lords and officers have a duty to walk the battlefield and cull the wounded, identifying those who should survive with ''dwar'' sleep and medical care and those who will die; if the latter cannot end their own lives, it is their duty to use a suicide dagger to dispatch them. Lords in particular feel a compulsion to aid those who are bound to them who are in distress.
• Chronicles of Thomas Covenant:
  • In The Illearth War, one of the Ranyhyn (sapient horses) stumbles into an acid swamp and suffers horrific and incurable burns. The lead stallion of the group, after evidently obtaining its permission, beats its head in with his forehooves to kill it instantly.
  • Elsewhere, after Lord Verement has been enspelled by Fleshharrower and is being forced to worship Lord Foul, his Bloodguard Thomin kills him where he stands before making a spirited attempt to kill the Giant-Raver with his bare hands.
• The Circle Opens: In Cold Fire, the villain of the story is sentenced to be burned at the stake. Daja decides that no matter what he's done, she can't stand there and watch that, and uses her magic to incinerate him instantly. Several other mages present join in to help.
• Jim Butcher's Codex Alera: In book one, Furies of Calderon, Fidelias snaps the neck of a girl that was going to be eaten alive by the Marat he and his cohorts were allied with.
• In H. P. Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space", a visitor to the blighted farm finds the ruined, half-disintegrated remains of Nahum's wife dying in the house. When he exits, nothing living is left behind him, and the narrative state that it would've been an atrocity to leave her alive.
• In Peter F. Hamilton's Commonwealth Saga, Bruce, the Starflyer Assassin, has a brief moment of clarity where he asks Gore to Mercy Kill him.
  Bruce: Do it. Kill the alien.
  Gore: Good for you, son.
• In Sarah A. Hoyt's Darkship Thieves, Thena urges this on Kit after she's burned by radiation.
• In Earle Birney's poem "David", a mountain climber is injured badly, and is pushed off a cliff by his friend.
• The Deryni series contains several examples:
  • At the climax of High Deryni, this resolves the four-on-four duel arcane between Torenth and Gwynedd. After Stefan Coram reveals he's poisoned Wencit and his colleagues with an incurable and slow-acting toxin, Kelson is advised this is a good idea. Bishop Arilan claims to recognize the substance Coram took to speed his own death, and it's said that the others will take at least a day to die. Also, the terms of the duel will keep all of them there in the circle until all of one side are dead. Wencit himself asks for death. Morgan offers to do it, but Kelson insists on doing it himself and all but commands Morgan to show him the means: the same spell Charissa used to murder King Brion months earlier.
  • The Bishop's Heir: In a combined secular and ecclesiastical meeting discussing the plight of the captive Bishop Istelyn, Bishop Arilan says, "Prayers will not deliver him from the agony Loris intends for him. If I could give him the coup and save him Loris' spite, I would." Archbishop Bradene and Bishop Hugh de Berry look startled at his words, but Dhugal recalls having to give such a death blow to a clansman who had fallen from a cliff.
  • King Javan's Year: The evil Earl Murdoch of Carthane suffers an Agonizing Stomach Wound during a Duel to the Death. He knows he's a dead man, but the wound could take days to kill him, and he'll spend whatever time he has left in horrible pain. So he asks his friend Lord Rhun to finish him quickly, and Rhun reluctantly agrees.
• A Desolation Called Peace: When a starfighter is hit with an anomalous alien weapon that starts slowly dissolving it, the pilot begs the fleet to shoot her down. Veteran Four-Star Badass or no, Nine Hibiscus is badly shaken by giving the order to fire.
• Dexter: In the second book, on encountering a "yodeling potato" (a truly horrific Fate Worse than Death), Doakes tries to shoot him. His fellow cops stop him. This is one of very few instances in which Dexter and Doakes agree on something. Dexter considers Doakes's solution quite reasonable given the circumstances.
• Several examples from Discworld, in keeping with Terry Pratchett's views on the matter:
  • Night Watch Discworld: Vimes does it to torture victims who are beyond saving. "Just in case, and without any feeling of guilt, Vimes removed his knife, and... gave what help he could".
  • In Witches Abroad, a wolf unable to bear living any longer as The Big Bad Wolf begs Granny Weatherwax for "an ending, now". She deputises the job to the conveniently available woodcutter and the wolf gets what it wanted. She then insists on burial.
  • In The Fifth Elephant, Angua makes Carrot promise to hunt her down if she should ever turn into a monster like her brother Wolfgang. The fact that it'd be Carrot doing it is what makes it a Mercy Kill, as he's shown when he has to do it, he does it as a "good" man would: swiftly and surely.
  • In Carpe Jugulum, the issue is played with: Granny Weatherwax insists Oats should kill her if it turns out necessary, though it's not Mercy Kill so much as "defend my friends for me."
    • Later in the same book, she offers a mercy execution to Count de Magpyr, although in the sense that being a vampire he can come back from death fifty or so years down the line. The alternative is she'll do something like turn him to dust and scatter him in the ocean, or put him in a bottle and throw him off the edge.
• Dragonriders of Pern:
  • In Dragonseye, part of the preparation for the return of Threadfall is a medical conference on treating Thread injuries. Some of the medics get into a discussion on the ethics of giving "mercy" to a Thread-injured patient.
  • In Dragonsdawn, the first generation of Pern settlers (some of whom are war veterans) wind up giving "mercy" to Thread victims. One old soldier reflects "he had given mercy several times, too many times."
• In the Dreamblood Duology, the basic purpose of the Gatherers is to allow a peaceful death to those who are too old or too sick to be healed and who do not want to be a burden to their family and society. Because souls travel to the Dream Land after death, it also ensures that they have a peaceful afterlife and don't get stuck in a nightmare by a traumatic death.
• The Dresden Files: In Changes, Harry sacrifices Lloyd Slate, who had been tortured into insanity and a lot more by Mab. Harry, however, refuses to use this as an easy way out of the guilt, acknowledging that he's killing him for power, not out of mercy.
• Dumarest of Terra: Earl Dumarest had to do this more than once in the series. In one book, a man was taken by giant spiders which laid eggs in his flesh. Dumarest went into the spiders' nest to find him, and the narrative states, "There was no cure and only one mercy. Dumarest administered it..." Another character commented that the dead man was lucky because "'Sometimes that's what a friend is for—and he had one of the best.'"
• Emberverse:
  • In Dies the Fire, some of our heroes happen upon a group of Eaters (cannibals), some of whose victims are still alive but in horrible, and thankfully undescribed, condition. One of the protagonists asks them if they want to die, and since none of them are mentioned later, we can assume he kills them.
  • In a later book, a mortally wounded woman asks her commander to kill her quickly.
• The Empirium Trilogy: When one of the crawlers attacking her turns out to be her mother, Eliana kills her, knowing that it's too late to save her.
• The Executioner:
  • Mack Bolan had to finish off undercover federal agent Georgette Chebleu after finding her still alive after fifty days of Cold-Blooded Torture by a sadistic "turkey doctor."
  • In "Canadian Crisis", Mack Bolan orders the Action Girl with him to give a Mercy Kill to a wounded mafioso she's just shot. However in this case he's trying to discourage her from going down the same violent path that he did, by showing her that War Is Hell.
• In Fate/Zero, following Emiya Kiritsugu's Exact Words contract with Kayneth Archibald, he personally is forbidden from killing Archibald... but the contract neglected to include his partner, Maiya. Following this, the semi-immune to bullets and surprised Archibald requires a mercy kill from Saber.
• George R. R. Martin gives to the Big Bad's Dragon, Sour Billy Tipton, in his novel Fevre Dream. Tipton has earnt a partial redemption by attacking his deceitful boss, but received further terrible wounds in so doing (he's already been damaged so badly prior to this that he's been hauling himself along the floor by his fingertips, biting on his knife to dull his pain). Afterwards, Joshua York quietly breaks Tipton's neck. "There was no hope for him."
• In The Final Reflection, Emanuel Tagore has one of these in his backstory, which he recounts while explaining why he's an Actual Pacifist.
• Mercedes Lackey's Firebird: Running from another of his brothers' pranks, Ilya and his friend the horse become lost and encounter a wounded wild boar, which savages the horse severely. Knowing the spilled blood will attract wolves, the horse asks Ilya to make it quick rather than allowing the wolves to eat him alive. Ilya slits his throat.
• Forest Kingdom: Used multiple times in the Hawk & Fisher spinoff series.
  • In book 1, the sorcerer Gaunt has to do this to his succubus companion after she's badly injured by a werewolf.
  • In book 4 (Wolf in the Fold), Hawk and Fisher use a magic-nullifying stone to end the anguish of several still-conscious dissection specimens, human and animal, in an evil sorcerer's house.
  • In book 6 (The Bones of Haven), Wulf Saxon kills one of the villains of the book at the man's request, as he's been fatally injured already.
• in Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Onzell gives Ruth an overdose of morphine as she is dying slowly of ovarian cancer.
  Onzell: Miss Ruth was a lady, and a lady always knows when to leave.
• In Frostflower and Thorn, Frostflower speeds up a condemned warrior's time to help her die faster. Later on Thorn threatens to kill them both unless Frostflower uses her powers, believed to have been lost due to her rape earlier in the story. The threat backfires when Frostflower agrees it's probably for the best.
• A recurring theme in The Gargoyle: Francesco asks his brother to do this for him when he is dying of the plague that killed his wife, by shooting an arrow made from their wedding rings into his heart. Later, the 13th-century version of Marianne does this for her husband when he is being slowly tortured to death.
• In the world of The Girl from the Miracles District, this is a sadly common occurrence, as local magical instabilities can cause people to mutate into mindless monsters, which are impossible to cure.
• The Girl With All the Gifts: Dillon shoots another soldier who's being ravaged by the hungries. Later Parks begs Melanie to shoot him before he becomes one, and she does.
• In Plague, the fourth book of the Gone series, Sam does this to Hunter to save him the slow, agonizing death that would come with the bugs eating him from the inside out. Dekka wants Sam to do the same for her, but he figures out a way to save her.
• Harry Potter:
  • In Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Snape kills Dumbledore. Next book, it's revealed that Dumbledore asked Snape to kill him, since he was already dying from a very painful and irreversible curse.
  • Comes up in the climax of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when Voldemort takes possession of Harry and tries to goad Dumbledore into killing him. Harry, who is both in extreme agony and reeling from the loss of Sirius, hopes that Dumbledore will do it. It ends up not happening, as the goodness in Harry's heart ends up purging Voldemort.
• In the Heralds of Valdemar series, Healers — doctors who sometimes have Healing Hands and other times use surgery and medicine — keep a strong sedative called argonel on hand. They administer an overdose of the stuff in cases where someone is in constant pain but cannot be saved.
• In Diana Wynne Jones' Hexwood, Mordion has a very nasty example in his backstory: he's forced to kill his only remaining sibling, who's been horribly tortured, to spare her further pain. The torturer then informs Mordion then if he ever shows any reluctance in his job as assassin, the same thing will be done to his target; in a sense, everyone he kills from then on is a preemptive Mercy Killing.
• In Hive Mind (2016), the man who kidnapped and partially brainwashed the main character as a child has finally been captured. He's in the middle of a catastrophic mental meltdown, and will soon be turned over for incredibly painful and inevitably fatal "destruction analysis". The main character opts to shoot him instead.
• Homecoming (Drizzt): Jarlaxle stabs Braelin in the heart after the latter was turned into a drider.
  Jarlaxle: Ah, Braelin, my friend. I fear this will prove my greatest gift to you of all.
• Honor Harrington, The Service of the Sword: At the climax of the running battle on Refuge, Sergeant Gutierrez checks his pistol in preparation for giving Abigail one of these. Captain Oversteegen pulls his Big Damn Heroes before it's necessary.
  Mateo Gutierrez had cleaned up behind pirates before. And because he had, there was no way Abigail Hearns would be alive when the murderous scum at the foot of that hill finally overran them.
• In The Host (2008) an old man in the human community is painfully dying of bone cancer. Jared steals enough painkillers for Doc to give him an overdose.
• In The Hunger Games (novel and film), Katniss mercy kills Cato to put him out of his misery when he's being ravaged by mutations. In the movie, she does it immediately as they get to him, but in the book she waits for them to finish him off for hours, only to realize that the game masters won't let him die by any hand other than hers; at this point what remains of him is very far beyond anything medicine can salvage..
• Hurog: Oreg wanted to die hundreds of years ago, and tried everything in his power to get a Mercy Kill but his father, who had made him the soul of his castle deliberately avoided killing him. Ward later does kill him at his request.
• At the very end of I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream Ted realizes that death is the only way out of AM's suffering; he quickly kills Benny and Gorrister, while Ellen kills Nimdok. Ted manages to kill Ellen, but is unable to save himself from AM's wrath.
  "Surrounded by madness, surrounded by hunger, surrounded by everything except death, I knew that death was our only way out. AM had kept us alive, but there was a way to defeat him. Not total victory, but at least peace. I would settle for that."
• In The Impossible Virgin, a Modesty Blaise novel, one of the first things we're told about the villain, Brunel, is a character recalling having to perform a mercy kill on "the still-living ruins of a man" who had incurred Brunel's displeasure.
• Inkmistress: Asra kills Leozoar, a twisted old demigod who became a murderer and wants to die, at his explicit request, though she has very mixed feelings about it.
• Johnny Got His Gun: Joe asks for this, but is denied. The film has a nurse try to do this, but she's stopped.
• Journey to Chaos: Basilard is willing to do this when necessary.
  • When Zettai was in agony from Bladi Poisoning, he was going to cure her and then let her die. Tasio twists his arm into truly saving her.
  • When Eric mana mutated, he was explictly going to "put him down". Kallen intervened and said she could reverse his mutation.
• The King in Yellow: "Government Lethal Chambers" are introduced in "The Repairer of Reputations" so that any citizen who desires it can end their lives.
• Knowledge Of Angels: Palinor is killed with a material that emits deadly yet painless fumes to spare him from being burned alive.
• In Robert E. Howard's "The Shadow Kingdom", Kull and Brule promise each other this, in event of their being mortally wounded — because the Snakemen can enslave the souls of those they kill.
• In The Last Full Measure, one nameless soldier shoots a wounded man so he doesn't have to burn to death after the Battle of the Wilderness.
• In Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet novel Invincible, the bear-cows kill their wounded. The humans come to suspect that it's a means of keeping them from being kept alive as prey.
• This occurs at least twice in the Madgie, what did you do? series. Once, in "It looked like falling snow...", Toki mentions having to euthanize a badly burned Stinky (Bunny's cat) and, the second occurred in Broken Wings, with Doki and a badly burned Madgie, however, the latter is more subtle as it isn't outright stated but she was mentioned to have become Madgie's "angel of mercy".
• The Maze Runner: In The Death Cure, Newt gives a note to Thomas, telling him not to read it until the time was right. The note begs for his death. Finally, Thomas shoots a desperate Newt on his request.
• In Metro 2033, Artyom is forced to kill Daniel, when the latter is ambushed in the library by a librarian and is fatally injured by being disemboweled by it. What makes it even worse is that the librarian's hand is feeling around in Daniel's stomach/torso, and mimicing both Artyom and Daniel whilst they talk.
• Averted in My Enemy, My Ally. While Tafv tr'Rllaillieu was already mortally wounded, his mother Commander Ael isn't acting out of mercy when she kills him in his sickbay bed. She's exacting vengeance for him betraying her.
• In Stephen King's Needful Things, Ace Merrill does this to his partner, "Buster" Keeton, after he's shot in the stomach.
• Happens to several characters over the Newsflesh series, when they're facing viral amplification. This is also a safety measure for those around them.
• In the Nightside books, John Taylor is forced to kill his friend Razor Eddie in a possible future, because Eddie — as an immortal — is suffering through being used as an insect incubator. Over and over again, since the insects, the last surviving things on a ruined Earth, lay eggs in his flesh. Then the larvae hatch and eat their way out. Then they lay eggs in him again. The cycle has been repeated for eighty-three years.
  • Also in the Nightside series, Suzie Shooter invokes this trope for a woman who's in the process — the slow process — of being eaten piece by piece by demons.
• Of Mice and Men:
  • A dog is shot for being too old and 'no use to anyone'.
  • And later, Lennie is shot in the head just like the dog by George, because George considers that the fate that would await him at the hands of the other farmhands (particularly Curly, who wants vengeance upon him for accidentally killing his wife) would be worse, and also because Lenny was basically too dangerous for society. The Film of the Book makes it seem less like a Mercy Kill and more like a I'm Fed Up With You kill.
• Literary/film example: Old Yeller is a classic example. Due to an earlier fight with a wolf, the dog develops rabies and has to be put down.
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: Towards the end of the book, McMurphy is lobotomized and left as an Empty Shell. Chief smothers him to death with a pillow due to not wanting his old friend to have to live like that.
• The WW2 potboiler Operation Stalag, by Charles Whiting, opens with the commander of the Destroyers being shown a mutilated British officer who has gone insane from torture. After the Destroyers are given the assignment to kill the person responsible, the briefing officer waits till everyone else is out of the room, then gives the man a lethal injection of morphine.
• The Perfect Run: Ryan's Black Elixir power allows him to kill immortals. In cases like Geist, they welcome the chance to actually die.
• In the Pilgrennon's Children novel The Emerald Forge, Dana throws the "sphinx," a Mix And Match Creature consisting of a monkey head grafted to a cat body created to satisfy Gamma's obsession with mythological creatures, off a building because she can sense its constant misery and desire for death.
• In The Powder Mage Trilogy Adamat asks Bo to do this to his eldest son, who was kidnapped and subsequently turned into a Warden — a mindless Human Weapon designed specifically to combat the titular Powder Mages.
• The Power of Five: Present!Matt is killed this way by Richard, after being captured and tortured by the Old Ones.
• The Princess Bride: The albino attendant in the Pit of Despair has seen what The Machine does, and offers to kill Westley instead of letting him go through it, but Westley insists on surviving so he can find his way back to Buttercup.
  Albino: I've got some good poison. I beg you. I've seen the Machine. I was there when the wild dog screamed. Please let me kill you. You'll thank me, I swear.
• Quarters: Healers in Shkoder swear to euthanize patients who are beyond all other help so they won't suffer anymore as part of their vows.
• A variation occurs in various swashbuckling novels — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Refugees for instance — the hero and heroine find themselves facing a Fate Worse than Death from which the heroine requests the hero to save her by shooting her (usually The Cavalry arrive just in time to prevent this). Usually takes place before the Fate Worse than Death can occur and while the suicidee is still undamaged. Not I Cannot Self-Terminate as the emphasis is on dying by the hand of someone who loves you rather than being functionally unable to do it oneself.
• The Reynard Cycle: Reynard provided this to his own mother, after she lost her mind and was still being used as a prostitute. A lot of other people end up going with her.
• Rhythm of War: Raboniel and her daughter Essu are among the Fused, ancient singer souls made immortal by Odium and endlessly reborn to prosecute their war against humanity. The cycle of repeated deaths and rebirths has driven Essu catatonic, and Raboniel desperate to end the war at any cost. Raboniel spends much of the book trying to create the theoretical "anti-Light", a weapon capable of utterly annihilating a Fused soul beyond even Odium's power to bring it back. When she finally discovers how to create anti-Light, Raboniel immediately uses it to destroy Essu's soul, and later Navani does the same to her at her request (to keep her from dying and coming back mad).
• The villain of Rubbernecker, a murderous doctor who works in a neurological ward, sees himself as a hero who puts hopeless vegetables and their families out of their misery. The only murder he feels even slightly bad about is Sam Galen, who awoke from his coma just on time to see Spicer murder the man in the next bed and was slowly regaining the ability to communicate when Spicer killed him to stop him from talking. He gives a Motive Rant about how people can live for decades with severe brain damage, unlike in films where you're either in or out of a coma.
• A potential motive for one of the murders in Sad Cypress. The accused, Elinor Carlisle, is suspected of her aunt's murder. The strongest possible motive is said aunt's huge inheritance, but another is the Mercy Kill; the aunt was an invalid who just had a second stroke and couldn't stand the thought of being helpless.
• Safehold:
  • Referred to as "Pasquale's Grace" in the series in the context of euthanasia. At least one Temple Loyalist commander has ordered it done to wounded Reformists since it's more merciful than taking them alive so that the Inquisition can torture them to death instead. Later, a savage naval battle features the Dohlaran navy giving no quarter to several Charisian sailors and multiple characters ponder how much of it was fury at their enemies in the Holy War, and how much was sparing their Charisian counterparts from being taken alive and sent to the Inquisition.
  • It was also done by a captured captain to one of his midshipmen after spending a lengthy period as the Inquisition's prisoners, again to save him from yet more torture.
  • Another book has Dialydd Mab sniping a priest who had been sentenced to the Punishment, a horrific death by torture, for providing decent food to suspected heretics who hadn't been convicted of anything yet. Mab makes a point of killing the man quickly. He also snipes some of the priests who ordered the Punishment be done in the first place, for less merciful reasons.
  • In book 9, Merlin arranges for everyone in a notorious Inquisition prison in Zion to be killed with the use of nanotechnology that will kill them very fast. Regarding the prisoners, one of whom is the point-of-view character as it is occurring, it's a mercy killing. For the Inquisitors, on the other hand...
• The titular protagonist of Sarny describes seeing horses torn to bits during The American Civil War. Even in their poor shape they try to get up until they're shot. The humans aren't so lucky. Soldiers are abandoned to die if they are mortally injured.
• The Scholomance: Given the standard maw-mouth foul-mockery-of-life-cycle and the fate of everything it eats, those that somehow manage to kill (save through absorbtion by other maw-mouths) or even measurably damage them ends up doing a great deal of this. Even moreso as maw-mouths are at their core Targeted Human Sacrifices tortured and purreed into Loss of Identity and unending Horror Hunger.
• In the Secret Histories, Eddie does this to an entire roomful of alien abductees who'd been surgically mutilated on board a concealed spaceship. And then wreaks a whole bunch of entirely unmerciful kills upon the aliens responsible, for what they'd done to their victims and forced him to do in response.
• Shannara: In Antrax, Quentin Leah and Elven Hunter Tamis spend the entire book trying to perform one on their Mentor, Ard Patrinell, who has become one of Antrax's brain-controlled wronks, something that is acknowledged in-universe as a Fate Worse than Death (the victim remains alive and aware but subjected to Antrax's will). Given that the wronk in question is an Implacable Man, this is not easy and ends horribly for all involved with Patrinell and Tamis both dying and Quentin completing his transformation into a Failure Knight.
• The Sharing Knife series by Lois McMaster Bujold:
  • Dying Lakewalkers are supposed to be killed by other Lakewalkers with special knives made from Lakewalker bones because that is the only way to create the magic knife needed to kill a malice. This is more like a Heroic Sacrifice in practice, as the killed Lakewalker is usually aware and willing to die for the cause.
  • After a malice is killed, the mud men {animals twisted into human-like forms} revert to their animal minds, but are still trapped in their twisted bodies which they don't know how to use, so it's best for them to be put out of their misery to save them a more lingering death.
• Shatter the Sky: It's not stated explicitly but even so clear that Naava kills the dragons in the oubliette as they are too mad due to abuse and cannot recover.
• Shtum: When the Nazis reach the area, the nurses at the Jewelly Sanatorium for Autistic Children quietly kill all the patients to save them from the camps. The Nazis retaliate by gunning down the nurses.
• The Silerian Trilogy: One of the rebels, Amitan, has Tansen end his life when he's dying slowly of a stomach wound, sparing him a long death in agony over several days.
• In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion, Fingon almost kills his cousin Maedhros, who is being tortured by hanging from a cliff and is out of reach; but at the last moment he is given a way to reach his cousin...who cannot be freed and again begs to be killed. Then Fingon has another idea.
• In The Skin Trade by George R. R. Martin, P.I. Randi Wade is attacked by police officer Michael Rosoff who's secretly a half-breed werewolf working for the Alpha that killed her father. He's on her before she can load her gun with silver bullets when the summoned demon Skinner teleports in through the police car's rear view mirror. The Skinner catches werewolf Michael and it'll kill him it like does its other victims: ritually bind them with silver chains (these inflict 3rd degree burns to a lycanthrope) before skinning them alive with its silver claws. Before the Skinner can totally drag Michael through the mirror, Randi shoots him in the head with a silver bullet.
• In Small Game Kyle suffers a broken leg. Without medical treatment the infection spirals until he's barely conscious. Ashley shoots him in the head and claims he asked for it (plausible given his earlier behavior, but untrue).
• In Someone Else's War, Ruth kills her baby daughter so she won't grow up to live the same life her mother did.
• Whenever a wounded soldier asks for mercy in A Song of Ice and Fire, they're usually referring to this kind of mercy.
  • In a variation, Ned kills the direwolf Lady himself because she deserves better than a butcher.
  • Daenerys Targaryen's killing of her husband Khal Drogo when he's left an Empty Shell by a Blood Magic spell.
  • Maester Lewin asks Osha to finish him off when he's been stabbed in the gut.
  • Sandor Clegane comes to mind as a frequent dispenser of such mercy, and helpfully teaches little Arya where the heart is so that she can do it, too. Ultimately, he, wounded and feverish, ends up begging mercy of her. She refuses, saying that he doesn't deserve it.
  • Lord Manderly identifies the death of Little Walder as one of these. Because, had he lived, he would have grown up to be part of House Frey.
  • Joffrey Baratheon sent an assassin armed with a Valyrian steel dagger to kill Bran Stark after he is left crippled and in a coma. Joffrey overheard his father Robert make an off-hand remark that living as a comatose cripple is a fate worse than death. Joffrey being a somewhat twisted "Well Done, Son" Guy arranged the "mercy kill" hoping to follow his father's example.
  • Although there were many factors involved in it, Jaime Lannister's Bodyguard Betrayal and murder of King Aerys "The Mad" has a huge wedge of this to it, combined with putting down somebody hell-bent on Put Them All Out of My Misery before he, you know, could deliver on it. Aerys was a mess, and needed help he didn't get long before he hit his nadir.
  • In the fifth book when a brainwashed Theon Greyjoy is sent to treat with Ralf Kenning, the suffering the dying Kenning is going through, having been poisonned and left to literally rot alive, is enough to make him break out of it and cut Kenning's throat in an act of compassion.
  • Catelyn Stark's death during the Red Wedding is this. The Freys originally want to take her in as hostage, but Cat, having seen her firstborn son, Robb, die before her eyes and thinking that she has outlived all of her children, goes ballistic and starts clawing her face while laughing. One of the Freys surmises that she has lost it, and orders someone to just end her suffering.
• When Stannis and Melisandre execute Mance Rayder (actually Rattleshirt glamoured) via fire, Jon has his crossbowmen shoot the man to death instead to spare him a long and extreme agony.
• In Andre Norton's Star Guard, every Terran soldier carries a special dagger whose sole purpose is to "give Grace" to a direly wounded comrade. The main character uses it ... at the specific request of a severely burned man.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • In Young Jedi Knights: Shadow Academy, Luke Skywalker, after seeing a herd of wild rancors, expresses regret that he had to perform one on Jabba's pet rancor. He considers the species to be fine animals, but notes that Jabba's one was so badly damaged by years of mistreatment and imprisonment that rehabilitating the creature would have been impossible, and considered it far kinder to put the animal out of its misery.
    Luke Skywalker: The Keepers forced Jabba's rancor into a dungeon where it could barely move. It was half-starved. Though I didn't have a choice, I'm still sorry I had to kill it.
  • Stunningly enough, this occurs in the X-Wing Series novel Mercy Kill. It transpires that the reason Piggy is such a Shell-Shocked Veteran is that he was forced to personally mercy-kill his Fire-Forged Friend Runt.
• Strange Weather:
  • A prominent character in Snapshot has had her memories almost completely erased by a camera that steals memories and imprints them on the pictures it produces, leaving her in a state akin to advanced Alzheimer's disease. The protagonist, after defeating the villain and taking the camera, eventually uses it to wipe the last of her memories. Her body shuts down soon after.
  • In Rain, Honeysuckle encounters a man who has found his cat gravely wounded by the crystalline rain needles, and ends its suffering by breaking its neck.
• Being set in feudal Japan, Tales of the Otori is all over the various "a good death is better" tropes. Early the first book, Takeo climbs a castle wall to finish off members of a persecuted religious group who have been hung there to die. Later in the same book, he does the same for his adopted father, Shigeru.
• Talion: Revenant:Nolan kills Marana in the end, with them both treating it as merciful, since she's now homicidally mad and just wants to die.
• The title of Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? derives from the practice of shooting injured horses to put them out of their misery. After the novel's protagonist is arrested for shooting another character — who'd been Driven to Suicide, couldn't bring herself to pull the trigger, and begged him to do it for her — and the cops ask him why he did it, he recalls seeing his grandfather euthanize a horse in this manner as a boy, and utters the phrase.
• A variation occurs in The Thin Red Line, where a sergeant delivers morphine to a mortally wounded soldier so that the latter can overdose on it.
• In Those That Wake, this is done to Brath in the first book, as hopelessness has corrupted him beyond help.
• Tigana: Sandre brings poison to his captured son Tomasso, to save him from being tortured and killed by the Sorcerous Overlord in the morning.
  Sandre: This is the last thing I can do for you. If I were stronger I could do more, but at least they will not hurt you in the morning now. They will not hurt you any more, my son.
• Happens a few times in Timeline-191, most notably when President Evil Jake Featherston is forced to kill his secretary and Morality Pet, Lulu.
• In the Towers Trilogy, Xhea mercy-kills Shai to save her from her And I Must Scream fate of being used as a Living Battery to power a Tower.
• In Vampire Academy, when discussing what one would want if turned into a Strigoi, killing them could be interpreted as this, because if there was a shred of that person left, they would most likely want to be killed. Becomes a foreshadowing when Rose has to do this to Dimitri.
• Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga: Averted in Shards of Honor, where Cordelia refuses to allow Aral to mercy-kill one of her junior officers who is horribly and irreversibly brain-damaged. He is much confused, as this is standard procedure for his military and they're in a desperate situation even without the soldier as a liability. In a much later book, she apologizes to the ensign's memory; it's ambiguous whether this is because she feels she made the wrong decision or because she can't bring herself to do the same for Aral.
• Comes up a few times in the Warcraft Expanded Universe book Wolfheart. The orcs consider this a way of honoring a Worthy Opponent who would otherwise have a slow and agonizing death from battle wounds. Early on an orc looks for a night elf courier they stopped to confirm her death or offer her this. Another orc does it for a defeated night elf foe later. On the Alliance side, Jarod Shadowsong uses the threat of not doing this to get information about one of the book's antagonists.
• The War Against the Chtorr: The very first scene in the series has the horrified protagonist watch while his superior officer sniper-shoots a young girl who has been captured by the eponymous aliens, because what they probably had planned for her was far, far worse.
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In Graham McNeill's Ultramarines novel Dead Sky Black Sun, when Uriel and Pasanius want to rescue some captives, the renegade Space Marine Vaanes shows them the prisoners and explains that freeing them would be pointless and death a mercy. They do not actually kill them but leave them to certain death. On the other hand, this foreshadows Vaanes's willingness to leave people behind. Later, Uriel looks at a Chaos fortress they destroyed and sees that all the victims of their experiments have been granted the Emperor's peace.
  • In The Killing Grounds, when the Lord of the Unfleshed was the only survivor of being possessed with the souls of the dead, and that with dreadful wounds, Uriel stays with him while he weeps, reassures him, and kills him quickly.
  • In Dan Abnett's Horus Heresy novel Horus Rising, when Space Marines are invading a church to put down insurgents, one dying man begs Loken for a blessing because the otherworld will shun him without it. Loken refuses, and when the man asks for help again, kills him, regarding it as mercy.
  • In James Swallow's The Flight of the Eisenstein, Voyen says they should give it to Decius. Garro bitterly accuses him of wanting to destroy the evidence of what the lodge (which he belonged to) had done.
  • Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts:
    • In Only In Death, Mkoll finds mutilated victims of the Blood Pact and Mercy Kills them. One is explicitly described as recognizing it and being grateful; Mkoll feels like a priest bestowing a final blessing. (Until he finds Gaunt. Him, he saves alive.)
    • In Ghostmaker, when a shuttle crash-landed in wilderness and two troopers are injured, Rawne says they should be "merciful." Gaunt refuses. Fortunately, rather than put four troopers to carrying them, they have Bragg carry them both. In the same novel, a soldier is impaled by debris from his vehicle and his teammate has to shoot him.
    • In Straight Silver, uninjured soldiers are screaming in agony because their psionically linked mounts are dead; the troops who come to rescue them end up mercy killing them.
    • In Traitor General, when it appears Feygor will not recover and carrying him costs them too much, Rawne attacks Gaunt, thinking he intends to leave him behind; Gaunt assures him that he always intended to be merciful. When Ezsrah's attempt to treat him causes Feygor to go into a frenzy, Rawne stops Gaunt on the grounds that he would do it himself; fortunately, when Rawne approaches with drawn gun, Feygor asks, coherently, what it is for.
  • This shows up a few times in the Ciaphas Cain series:
    • The Last Ditch: Cain doesn't know if the first crewman targeted by a daemonhost is alive or dead, but takes time (in a life-or-death battle) to put a lasbolt through the guy's head just in case.
      It was too late to save his life, but I might still have been in time to preserve his soul.
    • Later in the novel, Corporal Magot pauses to "grant the Emperor's peace" to a soldier critically injured by a tyranid.
    • Old Soldiers Never Die: It's mentioned at one point that if Jonas Worden hadn't been the Planetary Governor, he would have been granted the Emperor's Peace as soon as Cain learned Jonas had contracted The Plague. Political concerns meant they had to keep him alive as long as possible ... but at the end of the novella, with a cure found, Jonas was either killed or allowed to die.
  • In Dan Abnett's Xenos, Eisenhorn is running through a building full of people being prematurely roused from cryogenic sleep and dying. He explicitly says that he could have mercy killed one of them, but did not in order to prevent even more suffering — if he had, the local authorities would have buried him in inquiries and court cases for years while the Big Bad roamed free. He assures us he suffers bad dreams as a consequence.
• Warrior Cats:
  • ShadowClan medicine cats use deathberries to save dying cats from pain.
  • In Thunder Rising, Clear Sky's group encounters some orphaned kits, and he suggests that it will be kindest to kill them since they won't survive long without their mother. This says a lot about who he's becoming, considering that that was his instinctive reaction, rather than suggesting that his group adopt them or that they find someone else who can.
• The above entry also applies to The Wars, only with a horse instead of a dog and the man was shot for refusing to help when he should have.
• In White Wing by Gordon Kendall, the eponymous fighter squadron is pretty much all that's left of the human race after Earth is destroyed. The other species don't like them much, especially the "barbaric" custom where a badly wounded pilot requests "the Mercy of the Wing" — the other fighters form up and solemnly blast him and his ship to atoms. Public opinion does change a bit by the end of the book, when two facts have come to light: humans are immune to the enemy's Brainwashing, and Earth was actually destroyed not by alien invaders but by humanity, in a Defensive Feint Trap that invoked the same principle of "Mercy" on a much larger scale.
• In Wilder Girls, an infectious disease called the Tox spreads throughout an all-girls school that is then put on quarantine. As 18 months go by, the disease kills half the student body and all but two of the adults in charge, subjecting the survivors to strange mutations of their bodies. The Tox leaves one of the infected girls in a feral state and her girlfriend is forced to shoot her in the head. Later on Headmistress claims that was her intent when she locked the girls in a room and released a Deadly Gas and when she put gunpowder in water bottles.
• Subverted in World War Z.
  • A group of neighborhood protectors come under attack by what they think are zombies and one is bitten. He asks the others to kill him so he doesn't turn. Then one of them notices that the "zombie" bleeds red blood. He was just a human whose mind snapped.
  • Performing this "service" became standard practice for chaplains in the Russian armed forces, a task they embraced in order to avert bitten soldiers' church-condemned suicides. Unfortunately the government later uses this as a cover for death squads killing political dissidents on the pretext that they have been infected.
• The last verse of Kipling's poem "The Young British Soldier".
  When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
  And the women come out to cut up what remains,
  Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
  An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
• In Young Wizards, Ed the Master Shark explains that his role is to "end distress" - by finding those in distress and eating them.

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