"When does strength cease to protect life and begin to desire its destruction?"

There is a chamber of iron and embers where everything is a challenge-even silence provokes. A sword rests upon black stone, not guarded, but displayed, as though inviting one to test its own edge. There dwells Golachab, those who burn in consuming fire, the shadow of Geburah, the stern hand that cuts away evil in order to preserve life. The name this severity without love takes, when it grinds its teeth and speaks, is Asmodeus-the twin and opposite of Astaroth: where she drowns through limitless sweetness, he burns through relentless rigor without mercy. Two pillars of the Tree, each ruined when left to stand alone.

In the seventh volume of The Tree of Death, Frater Eisenheim sits before the intelligence of combat-the one that turns every question into a challenge and every wound into a war, calling weak anyone who retreats before it, knowing that many men act out of pride what they would never commit out of malice. Asmodeus neither seduces nor demands: he provokes. Every answer is a hook cast into the pride of the one who asks-until the interviewer learns the only thing capable of saving the blade from its own edge: neither to cast it aside nor to brandish it recklessly, but to temper it, cooling it from its fury and restoring it to its rightful purpose-to protect, not to wound.

This is not a manual. It is a blade-and what it preserves is the exact distance between the strength that defends life and the strength that desires only to see it burn.

The Tree of Death - Interviews with the Adverse Sephiroth - Book VII