They do as we do, my dear. They take what joy they may find in life as they can. As you well know that Skelly has run off to do tonight, also. The shadows of harsh times creep over us. For in a battle between dragons and men, my love, it is not only the Elderlings who must decide where they stand, but you and me as well.
All that is of dragons belongs only to dragons.
She fell silent, overcome at what humans, in their ignorance, had done.
My fate was a runaway horse, dragging destruction like a broken cart through so many lives.
A catalyst was DarAles for his time, a changer of hearts and lives. He came not to be hero, but to enable the hero in others. He came, not to fulfill prophesies, but to open the doors to new futures. Such is ever the task of the catalyst.
When circumstances are right, unlikely people do extraordinary things.
He pleasures his body with drugs and deadens his soul with his savage amusements. Aye, and spreads the disease to those around him, until they take no satisfaction in a contest of skill that draws no blood, until games are only amusing if lives are wagered on the outcome. The very coinage of life becomes debased. Slavery spreads, for if it is accepted to take a man’s life for amusement, then how much wiser to take it for profit?
It was all in your mind,” Chade told me sometime later, and it stung that he dismissed so lightly all that I had endured. All of life, I wanted to tell him, is in our minds. Where else does it take place, where else do we add up what it means to us and subtract what we have lost? An event is just an event until some person attaches meaning to it.
He has had his wish. He will not bow his head.
Perhaps the gods punish us by bringing us face to face with our own foolish mistakes, condemning us to watch our children fall into the same traps that crippled us.
I was very tired of being hit, but it seemed like the one thing I did well lately.
Look at her. The sun soaks right int her and shines back out of her. She’s magnificent.
Fitz, you are angry. I can feel it like storm waves lashing my shores.
Sweet Eda. Fitz, he has your face. Right down to the break in your nose.” Amber cleared her throat. She spoke breathlessly into our shocked silence. “Fitz. Please. I can explain everything.
The white prophet Gerda was barely twenty when she set out into the world to find her Catalyst. She had dreamed of her often since she was an infant. She travelled far from the peaceful green lands of her birth, going both by sea and by land, to a village far in the mountains where a peak smoked in the distance and glowed red at night.
This was misery that could not yield, for he sorrowed for a time he could not return to, and a self he would never again be.
The puppet dances, He turns flips and he jigs. His painted red smile looks happy but he is screaming, for he performs on red-hot coals. His wooden feet begin to smoke. A man comes in with a shining axe. He swings it. I think he will cut off the puppet’s burning feet, but instead the axe cuts all his strings. But the man with the axe falls just as swiftly as the puppet leaps away, free.
Think of what is and don’t let what might have been distract you.
Be now what you must be to succeed at the end of your journey, and when the end comes, you will find it is just another beginning.’ Althea.
And he is a Farseer,” Dutiful suddenly interjected, startling both of us. “One whose vow to his family has already cost him many things. So, this time, as your prince, I command this, FitzChivalry Farseer. Keep your vow, to yourself. Be as true to your own heart as you were to Verity’s, and to King Shrewd’s before him. That is the command of your king.