As I said earlier, there were cycles that went against Oric, they never came to fruition however.
Killing Riltia is a quest, we would get loot for killing her. Therefore, Ciro would kill for the loot, we've established this already as being loot crazy maniacs.(also the loot craziness inside the preprogrammed reincarnation memories, and the preprogrammed KILL HER SHE'S EVIL messages)
She's probably just going to steal all your stuff and kill you later.
Stupid guardian. That'll teach her.
We were supposed to kill Proxxy. Under any circumstances.
you managed to engineer the exact set of actions to ally with the one enemy on DL2 you were absolutely supposed to kill.
We were supposed to ignore Cain, he is most likely the only sibling with a bypass to go past them, and it was encouraged we bypass his level; and it even seems purposefully hard! Too hard with not even enough of a loot gain! And talking to him, would only promote his plans to kill Oric, which he has the potential to do.(which is why his Star was confiscated, as well for his sins)
Caring about mercenaries means that you are spending less energy caring about the other Non-Illborn people who give Soul Charge when they die.
As cain said, the purpose of the cycles were to feed the Underworld and it's inhabitants, the Seraphim. They introduced Oric in order to systematically get infinite Soul Charge, for the purpose of consuming it. Riltia would die at one point, and we would systematically kill every Sibling afterwards(but not every cycle we killed each Sibling, sometimes we have died early on; which is why Cain said some Siblings change less)