[Blame Saphroneth] So I was reading one of the sequels to David Drake's The General series, and Abel Dashian strikes me as the type of person who would take the wizards' Oath.
Then a laugh. And something else he'd said, something she later couldn't believe she'd heard, had to believe was blurred by her fever into incomprehensibility. "Anyway, Zentrum is the local enemy. Zentrum works for death, even if he doesn't know. I want to work for life. I couldn't save my mother, so let me save her."
(for context, the book is set on a far-future type world that has undergone complete technological collapse. The resident AI is now forbidding all types of innovation, enforcing stasis - and also allowing deaths via things like sepsis due to not having proper medicine around anymore either, hence the death of Abel's mother.)
(Raj and Center - the deuteragonists from the aforementioned The General series - are scouting out the universe for worlds that can potentially be restored into a galactic Federation, or at least allowed to grow and change again.)
Then a laugh. And something else he'd said, something she later couldn't believe she'd heard, had to believe was blurred by her fever into incomprehensibility. "Anyway, Zentrum is the local enemy. Zentrum works for death, even if he doesn't know. I want to work for life. I couldn't save my mother, so let me save her."