To grieve is a gift best shared. As a song is shared.
No one valued the given heart, no one saw that sacrifice for the precious gift it was. No, just a thing to be grasped, twisted by uncaring hands, then wrung dry and discarded.
No matter how bad things can appear to be, they can always get worse. Such is life.
Mother Dark had turned away. She had left them to fates of their own devising, and in so doing, she had taken away their privilege of blaming someone else.
I advised you to not look for hope from your leaders, for they shall feed you naught but lies. Yet hope exists. Seek for it, Brys Beddict, in the one who stands at your side, from the stranger upon the other side of the street. Be brave enough to endeavour to cross that street. Look neither skyward nor upon the ground. Hope persists, and its voice is compassion, and honest doubt.
Pure genius. Why didn’t I think of that?’ The tone began rising once more. ‘Why? Because I’m not an idiot!!
Being alive... isn’t the same as feeling good about it.
His old name was on the toll of the fallen, after all, and beside it was Blackdog Wood, 1159 Burn’s Sleep.
He would have liked to call the man he had been a stranger now, but the world had a way of spinning unnoticed, until what he’d thought he’d turned his back on suddenly faced him again.
The Gate, which I suppose we must now call Kurald Galain, is an iteration of control,’ Caladan replied, ‘over a force that was and remains pervasive, existing as it does in opposition to Chaos.’ ‘To Chaos? Not Light?’ ‘Light, if you would consider this, is an absolution of Chaos. In its purity it finds order, with substance and hue. This is how Chaos seeks, in its own fashion, its own obliteration.
You can’t steer anyone away from the path they’re going to take. You can show ’em that there’s plenty of other paths – you can do that much – but past that? They’ll go where they go.
The terrible agony that had been unleashed here seemed to remain coiled in the air, poised, ready to snatch at his sanity. In self-defense, his soul withdrew, deeper, ever deeper.
It may come as a surprise to many humans,’ Adam said, and there was a new tone to the disembodied voice, ’but the assumption that an alien civilisation is interested in reaffirming the artificial hierarchy you have imposed upon yourselves is invariably the first one requiring readjustment.
Love could be such a squalid emotion: burning bright in the midst of pathos, the subject of pity and contempt, it blazed with brilliant stupidity all the same.
It is the horror of war that, with each newly arrived generation, the nightmare is reprised by innocents.
Witch, goodwill is not something that needs an apology. You were betrayed. Your trust was abused. If there are strangers who thrive on such things, they will ever remain strangers – because they have no other choice. Pity Tulas Shorn and those like it.
Betrayal was the greatest of all crimes in Rallick’s mind, for it took all that was human within a person and made it a thing of pain.
Planning to reach this point was one thing; having now reached it was another. He hadn’t considered how he’d feel. Justice got in the way of that, a white fire he’d had no reason to look behind, or push aside. Justice had seduced him and he wondered what he had just lost, he wondered at the death he felt spreading within him. The regret following in that death’s wake, so unanswerable it was, threatened to overwhelm him.
Friend, I have remembered something.
Kuru Qan once told me that grieving had nothing to do with the ones gone, and everything to do with the ones left behind. We feel the absences in our life like open wounds, and they never really close, no matter how many years pass.