#(so it's not weapons designing that's bad - it's INEPT weapons designing? and it's not arms dealing that's bad but being ripped off?)

[amarriageoftrueminds]

TL;DR: It's not true that Tony didn't have any involvement with weapons at the time. The Maximoffs were killed in 1999. By that point, Tony had already been "merchant of death" and CEO of Stark Industries for 8 years.

Long answer:

IM1 specifically said of that period:

"...at age 21, the prodigal son returns and is anointed the new CEO of Stark Industries. With the keys to the kingdom, Tony usher[ed] in a new era for his father's legacy, creating smarter weapons, advanced robotics, satellite targeting. Today, Tony Stark has changed the face of the weapons industry..."

In other words, Tony's presence is framed as the thing which triggered the creation of smarter weapons (among other things, too). There's no indication that he started on the weapons part later on.

(In fact, he is personally credited with having changed the weapons industry. Not his father, not the company generally: Tony. And not the robotics or satellite industries, either.)

As Pepper said in IM3, Stark Industries profited off military contracts.

At the end of 1999, the year the Maximoffs were killed, Tony was in Bern, Switzerland for New Years Eve, famous enough to be delivering a lecture on integrated circuits at Bern 2000, while drunk. And important enough in the weapons industry for A.I.M founder Aldrich Killian and Extremis-inventor Maya Hansen to be trying to give him elevator pitches.

So he's a famous weapons designer, canonically- what, 800 miles away? -from Sokovia, doing science stuff, publicly, in the same year... but he's got nothing to do with his company's missiles being there? 🤨

By the time Tony was 40 in IM1, eleven years after the Maximoffs died, he had already designed the Jericho missile, was making personal pitches to the US Army, had a long-time buddy in the US Air Force, and was beloved of American soldiers (why? what's he done for them? obvious answer: designed weapons). And he was not acting as if any of this was a new or recent development for him.

Tony was building circuit boards when he was 4, engines when he was 6, robots when he was 16, graduated early from MIT at 17, and was CEO at 21. The implication of Tony being a wunderkind is that he was capable of making people-killing designs for a lot longer / from a much earlier age than you'd think.

In both IM1 and IM3 he was shown capable of making weapons from scratch by hand, with limited resources and without a computer's help (and weapons were his first idea; not, say, robots. He describes himself as a mechanic... but he doesn't make a machine. He makes improvised bombs and guns.)

He also had a pocket-sized "very powerful weapon" on him, for his personal use (which he gives to a child). Where'd that come from? It's antithetical to Tony's ego to be carrying something he didn't design himself, given the way he sneers at other weapons designers. So chances are that's a weapon Tony designed... years after claiming to be out of the weapons designing industry.

It's similar to the one Obadiah Stane used on Tony in IM1. And Stane said "you remember this one?" as he deployed it on Tony. So chances are… that thing was Tony's design too. (We don't know for sure. But we do know for sure that it was designed by Tony's company, that he was in charge of). Yet Tony still had something similar by the time of IM3: his weapons producing habits didn't alter outside the timeline of the movies; only his sales habits.

Also relevant: Stane described Tony as the goose that laid the golden eggs (viz. weapons designs) and that killing him would cause a fall off in designs. Because he wanted control over sales of weapons that Tony designed, including the ones government didn't approve. So Tony didn't just design weapons, he designed unethical weapons, and continued to do so even after falling victim to said weapons himself and (therefore) claiming to be out of the weapons designing business.

Sidenote: Unlike his daddy, who only "helped give us the atomic bomb" with US government backing. Howard made weapons with government backing, whereas post-IM1 Tony believes he's doing it outside of government control / believes he's not an arms dealer just because he's only dealing arms to Americans. But... he gives his designs to the USAF free of charge... and to daddy's corrupt American alphabet agency... despite already finding out they were hiding things from him way back in Avengers1... and then he signed the Sokovia Accords. 🤦‍♀️ (And this isn't even including his work on Project Insight and Insight 2.0, aka E.D.I.T.H.)! You can really see where the writing failed to point out the delusion and hypocrisy, here!

Ergo: Tony has always been a weapons designer and truly never stopped, so designing and selling a missile that killed the Maximoffs is totally within his wheelhouse. He didn't for some reason suddenly become inept / unconnected to weapons design, during the period of the Maximoff's death, just because it's icky and he was in his 20s at the time. 🤷‍♀️

(And I don't think it's a coincidence either that Tony's baby Ultron is obsessed with "peace", and tells Wanda "men of peace create engines of war," War Machines if you will, when Tony specifically keeps framing himself as creating a "peacekeeping initiative", having "privatized world peace" etc. right before the scene where Pietro describes how their parents were killed by one. You are meant to see the connection to Tony, not just the Stark company.)

However: what we don't know is whether that specific missile that killed the Maximoffs... was one of Tony's designs, or Howards, and/or when it was bought.

In AOU (2015) Strucker's Hydra base fired missiles on the nearby Sokovian city, and the locals reacted with hostility to the appearance of Iron Legion bots (Tony's proprietary tech). If the same base deployed the Stark missiles that killed the Maximoffs in 1999, then you could interpret that as showing the connection between the Starks and SHIELDra. (Though it makes the idea that the twins would then volunteer to work at that base... completely baffling?? 😵)

The missile that killed their parents could've been one of Howard Stark's designs from the 19?0s, kept in storage for years before it was deployed in 1999. But it's equally possible that it was a brand new design of wunderkind Tony's, recently sold to SHIELDra.

But that is irrelevant.

Because either way Tony did still get the profits from that missile sale. He was an active part of Stark Industries weapons designs already, on the same continent, and made money off the thing that killed the twins' parents. He still should have apologised; or at least paid compensation or something (what did he profit from those missile sales, I wonder? How much does one cost?)

The fact that Tony may or may not have personally designed and sold that specific missile (or if he didn't personally assemble it, with his own bare hands) is immaterial when he was the one who reaped the rewards. It'd be like claiming Elon Musk isn't to blame if someone was killed in the emerald mine he inherited from his father, when he also happens to run a 'making things that kill people in emerald mines' company.

The real problem is the double standard of protagonist-centered morality.

Wanting to kill the person responsible for your family's death is framed as villain/antagonist behaviour when Wanda, Pietro, Vanko, T'Challa, Zemo, various Spidey characters, etc. do it. But Tony is allowed to want to kill someone actually innocent of voluntarily killing his parents (which Tony admits to knowing, mid-fight) and still be regarded as a hero.

Everyone else is made to either nobly give up their desire for revenge (as a sign of their heroic nature), realise they were targeting the wrong person (as a sign of acquired wisdom), or both... or remain a villain. But not Tony. 😕 Tony tries to kill the wrong person and someone extra just out of spite, and he gets apologised to!

And so far from personally apologising to Wanda, they never have scenes together (ditto Bucky), and CACW has Tony shifting the blame off himself and mansplaining to Wanda & the gang how they don't care about civilian casualties like he does... after yet another Stark design murdered her twin brother! And by EG, he's back to claiming that Ultron (indistinguishable from Hydra's Project Insight, and what Baron Strucker was working on) was a great idea anyway!

The one thing that frustrates me about Wanda hating Tony and blaming him for what happened to her parents was that he didn’t have any real involvement with weapons at the time and he didn’t have any change to apologize or clear up anything about it and we can all blame the writers instead of blaming Wanda or Tony

[throwaway8472]

An American Fairy Tale

Once upon a time,  A village burned.  Ever since Prometheus passed along the idea of making fire to a caveman somewhere at the dawn of civilization, human beings have enjoyed burning things. It started with wood, moved on to your neighbor’s wood, and then the natural progression was to set fire to your neighbor as well. Prometheus would have rolled in his grave if he’d ever been allowed to die. But this fairy tale takes place before the Catholic Church had gotten its world renowned reputation for burning people in all sorts of ingenious and incredibly creative ways, when the concept was still on the cutting edge of brutality and not something that happened on a day to day basis. Burning villages was still an avant-garde art-form that only the most cultured artists of the era had tried their hand at. The most talented among these was a man named Atilla the Hun, who had reached the forefront of his field slowly and methodically. Like most fools, what he lacked in talent he made up for with endless practice and quite admirable tenacity. Through sheer force of will a man who is inept at a task may slowly become a master.  That is also an accurate summary of the human race’s plodding and asinine progress through the last ten thousand years or so.

 But that is not the point of this fairy tale. This fairy tale follows in the same classical tradition as the immortal and universally hallowed morality tales of the great Greek storyteller Aesop. It is a homage, if you will. Which is to say is to say that its message is about as subtle as a brick flying out of the back of the truck in front of you, smashing through your windshield as quickly as it takes a grumpy old man to complain when you change the channel from yet another NCIS rerun, and near instantly pulverizing your skull so completely that when the paramedics finally show up to scrape your lifeless husk out of your 1973 Oldsmobile Omega, the grizzled 20-year veteran paramedic actually gags a little.

 This is one of those kinds of fairy tales.  Once upon a time,  A village burned.  A young man stumbles from the ruins. He is covered in ash, and the softly moaning wind blows his soot stained shawl up against the side of his body, revealing his hollow chest and the bones of his rib-cage. If you’re having a hard time picturing this, imagine him looking a bit like like a character from Loony Toons who’d blown himself up chasing a roadrunner, but admittedly it’s a lot less comedic considering the boy’s circumstances, which are as follows:

 Two days before, he had gone out into the wilds alone on his first hunt. This was the right of passage into manhood for this particular village, in which when a boy reached the age of thirteen, all of the older men in the tribe forced him to go out into the nearby forest alone covered in nothing but what amounted to a tattered sack. Sometimes they gave them a stick, too. He had three days to kill an animal of some sort, preferably a big one that tasted good, then bring it back so the village could throw a big party and eat whatever the boy caught. After this set of arbitrary conditions had been met, the boy was thought to have become a man, and everyone congratulated him for slaughtering the animal and not getting killed after they had all abandoned him in the woods. It was a sort of proto college fraternity hazing ritual, basically. The French anthropologist who first studied this practice, Arnold van Gennep, christened it “rite de passage” and so ever since anthropologists have called this the “The Rites of Passage Tradition”, but everybody else calls it “Fucking Retarded.”  On the second day of his rite de passage, the boy returned with a promising deer only to discover every single person that he had ever known was dead. If you actually took the time to trace the modern Gregorian calendar all the way back to when the boy came back to find that everybody and everything that he’d ever known was on fire, you would find that it in fact occurred on a Monday, which anybody probably could have guessed anyway, since it’s without a doubt the worst day of the entire week.

 He hadn’t stayed in his village long after he had returned to find it burning, only pausing to take a broken sword from what was left of his own home. He didn’t bother gathering any food; he didn’t plan on traveling much. This was because the young man had decided to kill himself. The burning village had been his home his entire life. He was born there, and he had once expected to live a long life, start a family, and eventually die there surrounded by friends and loved ones. That was obviously off the table now. "Up in smoke”, if you will.  Like many suicidal people, the boy also developed a certain inexplicable taste for irony and the macabre. The shattered sword he carried had been passed down from father to son for generations. He supposed now that since his father and brothers were dead that it now belonged to him. His plan was to travel far enough away from his old home so that he could no longer see the flames and billowing smoke rising from what was left of the village, and then take his broken sword from its sheath and slit his throat. There was a cliff outside the village, and for a time he stumbled toward it slowly like a zombie from a bad horror film, but he never got there. He kept looking back on the life that was behind him, and each time the fires in the distance reflected in his eyes. Eventually he stopped and sat on a rock, and sadly watched as his future slowly turned to ash. It would be a disservice, I think, to call what he felt sadness. Nor would it be accurate to call it the mind-numbing torturous emptiness that sucks at a person’s chest like an open wound, which we name despair. It was a kind of peace, maybe, but not the kind which gives us grace in times of trouble. If there were any word to describe it, perhaps it would be resignation. Yet even that is a disservice to the countless millions that have died by their own hand. Who can say what is in the mind of a person who is about to take his own life? They silenced their own voices before they could tell us their stories– their thoughts, whatever they might have been— are gone now forever, hidden from us as though behind the reflective sheen of a darkly tinted two-way mirror: from the outside looking in, impossible to understand, and from the inside looking out, impossible to explain.  But don’t worry. The boy did not die. Well, he did eventually, of course, but not like that. This isn’t some horribly-ending German fairy tale, after all, but an American one. It’s right there in the title.  The sun would soon set in the west. The boy took his sword from its sheath and placed it alongside his throat. The steel was as cold as something that’s really cold, and a drip of blood slowly began to pool at its point.

 “Evenin’, traveler. I think I know you.”    The young man spun wildly towards the source of the voice. He was especially quick to move the blade from his neck. Human beings still have a shred of modesty burned into them, even when they are about to kill themselves. The sword fell to the ground almost instantly in a quick jerking motion of his arm, a thoughtless reflex action, like the legs twitching on a dead cricket, and he assumed a position and posture that insisted wordlessly that “Oh. Hey. I had just been standing around with a sword next to my neck.” and that people doing this particular activity were as common as sneezing or starting inane  conversations about the weather. He’d just been thinking, that’s all. Sword? No, I hadn’t had a sword held to my neck. You must have seen me at a bad angle, and gee, isn’t it nice out today?  “It’s harder to kill yourself with someone watching, y'know. Makes people feel ashamed, because something in them knows it ain’t right.”    The young man stared at the the new arrival in disbelief. Anybody living today would have recognized what was standing before him as quickly as they would recognize the Coca Cola logo. Here is what the boy saw:  The stranger wore a white button up shirt, and a rugged brown leather vest, with a sort of cloak thrown over it to protect him from the elements. He wore blue denim jeans. His boots were of an odd design. They were tall, brown, the tips were pointed, and there were odd circular metal rings hanging off the back of them which were ringed with spikes. He wore a belt that had a sheathe for some kind of weapon on his right and left leg, but they were not swords. Instead of having a straight handle like that of a sword, these had a strange curved handle made out of wood. Behind the man, the sun setting in the west  gleamed off the blue steel of the two weapons he wore on either hip.

 Most importantly, he wore a hat the likes of which the boy had never seen before. It had a wide brim that circled the man’s entire head.

 “Howdy,” the mysterious stranger said. For some reason he was squinting so hard that he looked like somebody who was staring straight into the sun, even though the sun was at his back. It was the sort of weather-worn face you couldn’t ever imagine having smiled.

"Who’re you?“

 The squinting man shrugged casually, and a brown cylindrical object suddenly appeared in his hand.  He put it in the side of his mouth, and casually walked over toward where the boy was sitting alone on the rock. The boy wasn’t frightened by this. He was in a place beyond fear now. He wasn’t even afraid when the mysterious stranger sat down next to him, reached into his pocket for a small box, made a quick flicking motion, and fire appeared in his hand as if by magic. He lit the tip of the thing in his mouth with his magic fire, took a deep breath. After a moment he breathed out a cloud of smoke with a sigh that sounded like it was weary with the weight of a thousand troubles and a long and profoundly annoying 62 year Hollywood career.  "Are you a god?” the boy asked.

 The man sat there for a long while before replying, seeming to ponder this as he stared off into the distance. The sun was getting lower now.  “‘I 'aint no god. I only been here just as long as people have been around to think me.” His voice was as rough and gravelly as asphalt. He took another long drag of his cigar, exhaled. “Kid, y'know, each drag burns different, but in the final moment, they all become wind.”  The boy told him he didn’t understand.

 The stranger nodded toward the broken sword on the ground, which had only so recently been up against the boy’s throat. “That 'aint no way to die.”

 The boy shook his head. “I don’t have anything left. Why not do it?”

 At this, the stranger took the cigar from his mouth and gestured toward the setting sun and the burning village in the distance.

   “Kid, you been lookin’ at the wrong thing out there.”  The boy looked. He saw the life he had thought was his future burning. But then he saw something else, beyond, further in the distance. It was smoke, but not from the burning village. They were campfires, thousands and thousands of them.“  "That’s them,” said the stranger, “the ones that burned your village. They’re out there waiting for you to go fight them.”  The boy looked down at his scrawny body. “But if I do that, I’ll die.”  The stranger took another long drag from his cigar, exhaled, and watched the smoke as it billowed away into nothingness. “Like I said kid, in the final moment, they all become wind.”

 This time the boy understood. He picked up his shattered sword and stood up. Before he could start walking toward the horde amassed on the horizon, the stranger put a hand on his shoulder. “Figure I’ll go out there with ya’, and besides, think you could use a horse.”

 The stranger worked his magic again, and two horses were there so quickly it felt that they’d been there all along, just out of sight. He and the boy mounted up on the horses and turned them toward the fires of the army in the distance.  “Better to go out like this”, said the mysterious stranger to the boy, “and keep on fighting, for the rest of our lives.”

 “For the rest of our lives,” the boy agreed.  And so they rode off into the sunset together, and they kept on fighting, for the rest of their lives.

[lightholme]

An American Fairy Tale

  Once upon a time,   A village burned.   Ever since Prometheus passed along the idea of making fire to a caveman somewhere at the dawn of civilization, human beings have enjoyed burning things. It started with wood, moved on to your neighbor's wood, and then the natural progression was to set fire to your neighbor as well. Prometheus would have rolled in his grave if he'd ever been allowed to die. But this fairy tale takes place before the Catholic Church had gotten its world renowned reputation for burning people in all sorts of ingenious and incredibly creative ways, when the concept was still on the cutting edge of brutality and not something that happened on a day to day basis. Burning villages was still an avant-garde art-form that only the most cultured artists of the era had tried their hand at. The most talented among these was a man named Atilla the Hun, who had reached the forefront of his field slowly and methodically. Like most fools, what he lacked in talent he made up for with endless practice and quite admirable tenacity. Through sheer force of will a man who is inept at a task may slowly become a master.   That is also an accurate summary of the human race's plodding and asinine progress through the last ten thousand years or so.

  But that is not the point of this fairy tale. This fairy tale follows in the same classical tradition as the immortal and universally hallowed morality tales of the great Greek storyteller Aesop. It is a homage, if you will. Which is to say is to say that its message is about as subtle as a brick flying out of the back of the truck in front of you, smashing through your windshield as quickly as it takes a grumpy old man to complain when you change the channel from yet another NCIS rerun, and near instantly pulverizing your skull so completely that when the paramedics finally show up to scrape your lifeless husk out of your 1973 Oldsmobile Omega, the grizzled 20-year veteran paramedic actually gags a little.

  This is one of those kinds of fairy tales.   Once upon a time,   A village burned.   A young man stumbles from the ruins. He is covered in ash, and the softly moaning wind blows his soot stained shawl up against the side of his body, revealing his hollow chest and the bones of his rib-cage. If you're having a hard time picturing this, imagine him looking a bit like like a character from Loony Toons who'd blown himself up chasing a roadrunner, but admittedly it's a lot less comedic considering the boy's circumstances, which are as follows:

  Two days before, he had gone out into the wilds alone on his first hunt. This was the right of passage into manhood for this particular village, in which when a boy reached the age of thirteen, all of the older men in the tribe forced him to go out into the nearby forest alone covered in nothing but what amounted to a tattered sack. Sometimes they gave them a stick, too. He had three days to kill an animal of some sort, preferably a big one that tasted good, then bring it back so the village could throw a big party and eat whatever the boy caught. After this set of arbitrary conditions had been met, the boy was thought to have become a man, and everyone congratulated him for slaughtering the animal and not getting killed after they had all abandoned him in the woods. It was a sort of proto college fraternity hazing ritual, basically. The French anthropologist who first studied this practice, Arnold van Gennep, christened it "rite de passage" and so ever since anthropologists have called this the "The Rites of Passage Tradition", but everybody else calls it "Fucking Retarded.”   On the second day of his rite de passage, the boy returned with a promising deer only to discover every single person that he had ever known was dead. If you actually took the time to trace the modern Gregorian calendar all the way back to when the boy came back to find that everybody and everything that he'd ever known was on fire, you would find that it in fact occurred on a Monday, which anybody probably could have guessed anyway, since it's without a doubt the worst day of the entire week.

  He hadn't stayed in his village long after he had returned to find it burning, only pausing to take a broken sword from what was left of his own home. He didn't bother gathering any food; he didn't plan on traveling much. This was because the young man had decided to kill himself. The burning village had been his home his entire life. He was born there, and he had once expected to live a long life, start a family, and eventually die there surrounded by friends and loved ones. That was obviously off the table now. "Up in smoke", if you will.   Like many suicidal people, the boy also developed a certain inexplicable taste for irony and the macabre. The shattered sword he carried had been passed down from father to son for generations. He supposed now that since his father and brothers were dead that it now belonged to him. His plan was to travel far enough away from his old home so that he could no longer see the flames and billowing smoke rising from what was left of the village, and then take his broken sword from its sheath and slit his throat. There was a cliff outside the village, and for a time he stumbled toward it slowly like a zombie from a bad horror film, but he never got there. He kept looking back on the life that was behind him, and each time the fires in the distance reflected in his eyes. Eventually he stopped and sat on a rock, and sadly watched as his future slowly turned to ash.  It would be a disservice, I think, to call what he felt sadness. Nor would it be accurate to call it the mind-numbing torturous emptiness that sucks at a person's chest like an open wound, which we name despair. It was a kind of peace, maybe, but not the kind which gives us grace in times of trouble. If there were any word to describe it, perhaps it would be resignation. Yet even that is a disservice to the countless millions that have died by their own hand. Who can say what is in the mind of a person who is about to take his own life? They silenced their own voices before they could tell us their stories-- their thoughts, whatever they might have been--- are gone now forever, hidden from us as though behind the reflective sheen of a darkly tinted two-way mirror: from the outside looking in, impossible to understand, and from the inside looking out, impossible to explain.   But don't worry. The boy did not die. Well, he did eventually, of course, but not like that. This isn't some horribly-ending German fairy tale, after all, but an American one. It's right there in the title.   The sun would soon set in the west. The boy took his sword from its sheath and placed it alongside his throat. The steel was as cold as something that's really cold, and a drip of blood slowly began to pool at its point.

    "Evenin', traveler. I think I know you."     The young man spun wildly towards the source of the voice. He was especially quick to move the blade from his neck. Human beings still have a shred of modesty burned into them, even when they are about to kill themselves. The sword fell to the ground almost instantly in a quick jerking motion of his arm, a thoughtless reflex action, like the legs twitching on a dead cricket, and he assumed a position and posture that insisted wordlessly that "Oh. Hey. I had just been standing around with a sword next to my neck." and that people doing this particular activity were as common as sneezing or starting inane  conversations about the weather. He'd just been thinking, that's all. Sword? No, I hadn't had a sword held to my neck. You must have seen me at a bad angle, and gee, isn't it nice out today?   "It's harder to kill yourself with someone watching, y'know. Makes people feel ashamed, because something in them knows it ain't right."       The young man stared at the the new arrival in disbelief. Anybody living today would have recognized what was standing before him as quickly as they would recognize the Coca Cola logo. Here is what the boy saw:   The stranger wore a white button up shirt, and a rugged brown leather vest, with a sort of cloak thrown over it to protect him from the elements. He wore blue denim jeans. His boots were of an odd design. They were tall, brown, the tips were pointed, and there were odd circular metal rings hanging off the back of them which were ringed with spikes. He wore a belt that had a sheathe for some kind of weapon on his right and left leg, but they were not swords. Instead of having a straight handle like that of a sword, these had a strange curved handle made out of wood. Behind the man, the sun setting in the west  gleamed off the blue steel of the two weapons he wore on either hip.

  Most importantly, he wore a hat the likes of which the boy had never seen before. It had a wide brim that circled the man's entire head.

  "Howdy," the mysterious stranger said. For some reason he was squinting so hard that he looked like somebody who was staring straight into the sun, even though the sun was at his back. It was the sort of weather-worn face you couldn't ever imagine having smiled.

 "Who're you?"

  The squinting man shrugged casually, and a brown cylindrical object suddenly appeared in his hand.  He put it in the side of his mouth, and casually walked over toward where the boy was sitting alone on the rock. The boy wasn't frightened by this. He was in a place beyond fear now. He wasn't even afraid when the mysterious stranger sat down next to him, reached into his pocket for a small box, made a quick flicking motion, and fire appeared in his hand as if by magic. He lit the tip of the thing in his mouth with his magic fire, took a deep breath. After a moment he breathed out a cloud of smoke with a sigh that sounded like it was weary with the weight of a thousand troubles and a long and profoundly annoying 62 year Hollywood career.   "Are you a god?" the boy asked.

  The man sat there for a long while before replying, seeming to ponder this as he stared off into the distance. The sun was getting lower now.   "'I 'aint no god. I only been here just as long as people have been around to think me." His voice was as rough and gravelly as asphalt. He took another long drag of his cigar, exhaled. "Kid, y'know, each drag burns different, but in the final moment, they all become wind."   The boy told him he didn't understand.

  The stranger nodded toward the broken sword on the ground, which had only so recently been up against the boy's throat. "That 'aint no way to die."

  The boy shook his head. "I don't have anything left. Why not do it?"

  At this, the stranger took the cigar from his mouth and gestured toward the setting sun and the burning village in the distance.

    "Kid, you been lookin' at the wrong thing out there."   The boy looked. He saw the life he had thought was his future burning. But then he saw something else, beyond, further in the distance. It was smoke, but not from the burning village. They were campfires, thousands and thousands of them."   "That's them," said the stranger, "the ones that burned your village. They're out there waiting for you to go fight them."   The boy looked down at his scrawny body. "But if I do that, I'll die."   The stranger took another long drag from his cigar, exhaled, and watched the smoke as it billowed away into nothingness. "Like I said kid, in the final moment, they all become wind."

  This time the boy understood. He picked up his shattered sword and stood up. Before he could start walking toward the horde amassed on the horizon, the stranger put a hand on his shoulder. "Figure I'll go out there with ya', and besides, think you could use a horse."  

  The stranger worked his magic again, and two horses were there so quickly it felt that they'd been there all along, just out of sight. He and the boy mounted up on the horses and turned them toward the fires of the army in the distance.   "Better to go out like this", said the mysterious stranger to the boy, "and keep on fighting, for the rest of our lives."

  "For the rest of our lives," the boy agreed.   And so they rode off into the sunset together, and they kept on fighting, for the rest of their lives.