When next you see Anomander, tell him this from me: he chose wisely. Each time, he chose wisely. Tell him, then, that of all whom I ever met, there is but one who has earned my respect, and he is that one.
If holy words could not offer up an answer to despair, then what good were they? If the truths so revealed did not invite restitution, then their utterance was no more than a curse. And if the restitution is found not in the mortal realm, then we are invited to inaction, and indifference. Will you promise to a soul a reward buried in supposition? Are we to reach throughout our lives but never touch? Are we to dream and to hope, but never know?
Wisdom did not belong to mortals, and those whom others called wise were only those who, through grim experience, had touched the very edges of unwelcome truths. For the wise, even joy was tinged with sorrow.
Truth cared nothing for stories. The real world was indifferent to what people wanted to be, to how they wanted everything to turn out. Betrayers came from everywhere, including inside his own body, his own mind. He could trust no one, not even himself.
He reached out and laid a hand against Quick Ben’s brow, then grunted. ‘He’s on his way back. It’s protective sorcery that’s keeping him asleep.’ ‘Can you speed things up?’ ‘Sure.’ The healer slapped the wizard. ‘Quick Ben’s eyes snapped open.
There had been times – he was almost certain – when he’d known unmitigated joy, but so faded were they to his recollection that he had begun to suspect the fictional conjuring of nostalgia. As with civilizations and their golden ages, so too with people: each individual ever longing for that golden past moment of true peace and wellness.
But the world had its layers. To the simple it offered simplicity. To the wise it offered profundity. And the only measure of courage worth acknowledging was found in accepting where one stood in that scheme – in hard, unwavering honesty, no matter how humbling.
I am Crone, eldest of the Moon’s Great Ravens, whose eyes have looked upon a hundred thousand years of human folly. Hence my tattered coat and broken beak as evidence of your indiscriminate destruction. I am but a winged witness of your eternal madness.
Laws are broken. Existence holds to no laws. Existence is what persists, and to persist is to struggle. In the end, the struggle fails.
Language changes over time. Meaning twists. Mistakes compound with each transcribing. Even those stalwart sentinels of perfection – numbers – can, in a single careless moment, be profoundly altered.
He’d seen enough of life to know he wouldn’t miss it much. His only regret was the grief his death would level upon those who cared for him. Venes.
There is but one god, and its name is beauty. There is but one kind of worship, and that is love. There is for us but one world, and we have scarred it beyond recognition.
Rely not upon conscience,’ Feren said, hearing the bitterness in her own voice and not caring. ‘It ever kneels to necessity.
I have tolerated the deceitful and the malicious for long enough. My sword shall now answer them.
He had been born into debt, as had his father and his father before him. Indenture and slavery were two words for the same thing.
The dust dreams of the world it had once been. But the dust, alas, does not command the wind.
He was asked, then, who was this Winged Grief? And Gallan said, ‘There is but one left who would dare command me. One who would not weep and yet had taken into his soul a people’s sorrow, a realm’s sorrow. His name was Silchas Ruin.
Too old to dream of perfection, perhaps, she had instead discovered a certain delicious appeal in flaws.
He is strong enough to stand exposed, revealing all that is vulnerable within him. He is brave enough to invite you ever closer. If you hurt him, he will withdraw, as he must, and that path to him will be thereafter for ever sealed. But he begins with the gift of himself. What the other does with it defines the future of that particular relationship.
You cannot be remade unless you are first broken.