The dull, hazy light played along the polished blade like water.
Rigga, Riggalai the Seer, the wax-witch who trapped souls in candles and burned them. Souls devoured in flame –.
The game the mind must play to unleash destruction. He’d stood amidst the ranks more than once, sensing the soldiers alongside him seeking and finding that place in the mind, cold and silent, the place where husbands, fathers, wives and mothers became killers. And practice made it easier, each time. Until it becomes a place you never leave.
The thief dragged his attention from the wooden block. ‘I’m listening.
There is power in nature,’ Ilgast replied, ’and what is often forgotten is that nature lies within us as much as it does out there, amidst high grasses or shoreline. To heal is to draw across the divide; that and nothing more.
The panic that had filled him was subsiding, perhaps having burned itself out.
When it is all one can do to simply hold on, then to suffer is to weather a deluge no god can ease.
What is given away for free comes back wounded. Value is not always shared and some hands are rougher than others.
Judgement, the coarse, thorn-studded brambles of retribution, they could snag an entire people, and as the blood streamed down each body was lifted higher, lifted from the ground. The vicious snare carried them into the righteous sky. Reason could not reach that high, and in the heavens madness spun untamed.
War needs no gods, only mortal contestants, two enemies and whatever reasons they invent in order to justify killing each other.
Leisure is not a relevant notion. Consider the weariness that often afflicts your kind, late in their lives. Then multiply that countless times. This is the burden of being long-lived.
Sites of battle held on to a madness, as if the blood that had soaked into the soil remembered pain and terror and held locked within it the echoes of screams and death cries.
This is what was, once. Terrible armies of T’lan Imass. We hunted down the Jaghut. We gave them what I see here. By all the spirits, is this our only voice?
A pang of regret hit Tattersail upon meeting the boy’s bright, eager gaze. Chances were, he’d be dead within a few months. The Empire had many crimes staining its banner, but this was the worst of them.
The pot-thrower in the hut behind the shop, hands and forearms slick with clay, dreaming, yes, of the years in which a life took shape, when each press of a fingertip sent a deep track across a once smooth surface, changing the future, reshaping the past, and was this not as much chance as design? For all that intent could score a path, that the ripples sent up and down and outward could be surmised by decades of experience, was the outcome ever truly predictable?
The righteous will claim sole domain on judgement. The righteous are the first to make hands into fists, the first to shout down dissenters, the first to bully others into compliance.
It was compassion. The tragic kind of compassion, the kind that sacrifices itself and sees that sacrifice as the only choice and thus no choice at all, one that must be accepted without hesitation.
The detonation was deafening, the blast a bruised gout of flame that drove back the airborne sand and the wind carrying it, and flung the attackers and their mounts like a god’s hand, backward onto the road and off the sides.
As he made his way back to his estate, Baruk recalled his lone meeting with Vorcan, only a few nights after her awakening. She had entered the chamber with her usual feline grace. The wounds she had borne were long healed and she had found a new set of clothes, loose and.
Expectation is the hoary curse of humanity. One can listen to words, and see them as the unfolding of a petal or, indeed, the very opposite: each word bent and pushed tighter, smaller, until the very packet of meaning vanishes with a flip of deft fingers. Poets and tellers of tales can be tugged by either current, into the riotous conflagration of beauteous language or the pithy reduction of the tersely colourless.