Evil was the most contagious of diseases, so virulent that no herb, surgery, or dream-humor could cure it. One’s sense of what was normal, acceptable, became distorted by proximity to wrongness; entire nations had succumbed this way, first to decadence, then collapse.
And what do they even call this? It’s not a threesome, or a love triangle. It’s a two-and-a-half-some, an affection dihedron.
It would be cruel to break that hope before it fades on its own.
When the world is hard, love must be harder still.
You’ve read accounts of attempts by the Sixth University at Arcara to capture a stone eater for study, two Seasons back. The result was the Seventh University at Dibars, which got built only after they dug enough books out of the rubble of Sixth.
In a child’s eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way.
How terrible to be a god of change and endure grief unending.
Men who served anyone could be trusted by no one.
Real love lasts years. It causes pain, and endures through it.
Embrace love while you have it, priest – from whichever direction it comes, proper or improper, for however long it lasts. Because it always, always comes to an end.
Sometimes that’s all it takes to save a world, you see. A new vision. A new way of thinking, appearing at just the right time.
It takes great strength to compromise, Shahar. More than it does to threaten and destroy, since you must fight your own pride as well as the enemy.
Time grows short, my love. Let’s end with the beginning of the world, shall we? Yes. We shall.
This is the lesson: Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.
Beware ground on loose rock. Beware hale strangers. Beware sudden silence.
Is tact simply not in your nature, or are you this offensive on purpose?
Discomfort is understandable. It’s the rudeness that isn’t.
It is important to give just the right instructions. He thinks in loopholes.
It’s a waste of your time to teach them.” This dismissal, inexplicably, starts to eat through your patience. “It’s never a waste of time to educate others.
He is older, crueler, more experienced, perhaps stronger, but survival has never really been the province of the fittest. Merely the hungriest.