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It was hard to look at Ridgemark the same way, though. The utterly miserable and inhumane conditions in Miro lingered in Raul's mind. Knowing that there was such suffering taking place within such close proximity of the city left a bad taste in his mouth, even as he filled it with another extravagant meal.

He didn't have much of an appetite. And his two brothers were much the same, he noticed. The three of them were all lingering over their half-eaten dinners, prodding their food or staring at it while obviously lost in thought.

He'd never seen slavery in person before.

He knew, however, that the term "slavery" lacked certain important context and could, in truth, refer to very different circumstances to what one might imagine. He remembered how the reapers of House Blackburn had made a point of teaching all of the family's young servants--and even non-servants, indirectly--about slavery throughout history. Their Arman ancestors had fought against the slave-hordes of the Lyzakks, after all. The subject was very near to their hearts, on a cultural level, even if the practice was comparatively rare in the modern day.

In the ancient world, slavery had often been used as a form of legal punishment. It provided criminals with a path to redemption, if they agreed to become a slave for a designated period of time to the person whom they had wronged. Steal from a shop owner? You could pay him back through slave labor.

And slave owners, supposedly, were held legally responsible for the well-being of their slaves. Physically abusing them was outlawed and could even result in the early termination of their slave-contracts.

Raul could understand such practices, especially since those people didn't enjoy the same level of prison infrastructure as they did today. Hell, a part of him could even see that system as being, in some ways, better than simply throwing criminals in a box and leaving them to rot. The opportunity for penance was invaluable as a means of reintegrating criminals back into civilized society.

It made sense to him.

But not all slave trades had been conducted that way, of course. Far from it, in fact.