"Your words grow tiresome!" Niles broke in. "We are not our forebears. We do not choose to serve you!"
"Yet you serve Evil!" Morlock sneered. "Do not delude yourself. You and your men have come to throw your lives away out of moral cowardice. You have not come because you hate Evil. You have come because you hate yourselves."
"That is a lie!" Niles rejoined in a cold voice. "Say, rather, that we hate the evil in ourselves. That is not the same thing as hating ourselves. Do not think to deceive our ears with mere words, Servant of Evil! We are not our forebears. We have come to destroy evil. We have come to destroy you."
"Are you yourself not evil?" said the figure. "Did you not once kidnap the sister of the elf Palindor? And betray his trust, and the trust of his family?"
"She was not harmed," said Niles, a half-smile upon his lips at this further attempt to twist the truth. "I mistook her affection for me. We men of Astargoth do not take what is not offered. We do not seek to harm or defraud others. It is true that we were lost to ourselves for a time, in some insidious fashion, but we are not, nor were we ever corrupt, nor do we serve corruption." He approached the figure, sword upraised. "We do not serve you. We never have, and we never will!"