A common danger unites even the bitterest enemies

“A common danger unites even the bitterest enemies” is a maxim attached to Kenatos’s founding history: the city endured because its diverse peoples joined together to defend it against the Boeotians. Its force lies in the contrast between Kenatos’s deliberate cooperation and the repeated attacks that threatened to prevent the city from taking root.

The Founding Threat

According to Possidius Adeodat, Kenatos was established on an island in a lake as a place where representatives of different races and cultures could live together and preserve their traditions and knowledge. The Boeotians rejected that project. On learning of the city’s founding, they vowed to destroy it and attacked the island by boat for centuries. They also tried to make an earthen bridge to reach it, while ambassadors sent to negotiate were killed. Against this history, the maxim identifies a shared danger—not shared affection or agreement—as the reason otherwise divided peoples had to act together.

Cooperation as Kenatos’s Principle

The maxim belongs to an account that presents Kenatos as a political and cultural collaboration, not merely a defensible settlement. Its founding brought together representatives of many peoples after other races had been decimated and their crafts and knowledge lost. The city’s collective defense protected what that compact was meant to preserve: the possibility of cultural continuity through cooperation. Kenatos’s survival therefore depends on the same alliance that gives its founding purpose.

A Maxim Tested by Conflict

The phrase also resonates with other pressures in the story, though the account of the Boeotian attacks supplies its clearest meaning. In Kenatos, common laws apply within the city, and the Bhikhu administer the Arch-Rike’s justice; beyond its walls, customs and authority differ. On the road to Havenrook, Paedrin is warned that neither the city’s laws nor its familiar social order will necessarily protect him. The maxim offers no promise that cooperation resolves these divisions. Instead, it marks the circumstance in which collective defense becomes necessary: a danger severe enough to make common cause possible among people who might otherwise remain apart.

The Limits of Unity

The founding account preserves a sharp exception to the city’s invitation: the Boeotians refused to join Kenatos, and the conflict with them continued across generations. The maxim is thus both an explanation of survival and a measure of its cost. Kenatos was protected because its peoples banded together, but the account does not turn that alliance into reconciliation with its enemy. Unity is presented as a practical response to danger, capable of defending a fragile common undertaking without erasing the divisions that made it vulnerable.