The girl stopped to regard him, her small round face slowly coming to mirror Paran’s own frown.
Then darkness swept in around him and he knew no more.
How many great compassions arose from a dark source? A private place of secret failings?
It seems, captain, that as her power grows, her tolerance diminishes. They are like lodestones, pushing each other away. Does power not grant immunity? Does power not strengthen the armour; does power not find assurance in itself? Can it be that those who hold the most power also know the greatest fear?
It is the legacy of most intelligent beings to revel in slaughter for a time,’ Haut replied. ‘In this we play at being gods. In this, we lie to ourselves with delusions of omnipotence. There is but one measure to the wisdom of a people, and that is the staying hand. Fail in restraint and murder thrives in your eyes, and all your claims to civilization ring hollow.
Anarchists live in fear and long for death, because they despair of seeing in others the very virtues they lack in themselves. In this manner, they take pleasure in sowing destruction, if only to match their inner landscape of ruin.
They didn’t shelter their own, didn’t feed their own, didn’t heal their own, and yet, in the midst of all this inhumanity, they held themselves as the pinnacle of human civilization.
Absence of doubt? No, nothing so egotistic as that. Nimander has plenty of doubts, so many that he’s lost his fear of them. He accepts them as easily as anything else. Is that the secret? Is that the very definition of greatness?
When does it happen? All those wounds that ended up making us the adults we are?
Bah! You’re not worth the effort anyway!’ And all at once she collapsed into a heap of spiders that scurried in all directions.
Then we’re dead all that much sooner. So it goes.
The tall, leaning buildings to either side shrouded the narrow passage in shadow.
Hate was a lie that in feeding fills the hater with the bliss of satiation, even as his spirit starves. No, Pearl did not hate. Life was a negotiation between the expected and the unexpected. One made do. Draconus.
There were enough thugs in the world – and those thugs could well be wearing the raiment of a noble, or a Fist, or indeed a priest’s robes or a scholar’s vestments – enough of them, without question, who lusted for chaos and the opportunities it provided. For senseless cruelty, for the unleashing of hatred, for killing and rape. Any excuse would suffice, or even none at all.
What the soul can house, flesh cannot fathom. – The Reve of Fener – Imarak, First Destriant – MoI 657.
The sorcery that had been unleashed here today had been enough to fray the fabric between the worlds. Whatever dwelt beyond, in the Warrens of Chaos, felt close enough to reach out and touch.
To the joy and the life in the eyes of my friend, I will fight all those who deem him their enemy.
A faint frown wrinkled his broad forehead.
Hard lives begat hard laws, not just in the necessities of living, but also in those of believing.
We have a talent for disguising greed under the cloak of freedom. As.