It is an extraordinary act of courage,’ said Tulas Shorn, ‘to come to know a stranger’s pain. To even consider such a thing demands a profound dispensation, a willingness to wear someone else’s chains, to taste their suffering, to see with one’s own eyes the hue cast on all things – the terrible stain that is despair.
It is a fool’s curse, to measure oneself in endless dissatisfaction.
Heed the lesson there, son.” “What lesson?” “Every decision you make can change the world. The best life is the one the gods don’t notice. You want to live free, boy, live quietly.” “I want to be a soldier. A hero.” “You’ll grow out of it.
Oh, what a miserable man you are! If you’re wrong and he tries to bite me, I will be very upset with you, Mok. I will lay waste to your loins. I will make your eyes crossed so that everyone who looks at you and your silly mask will not be able to help but laugh. And I will think of other things, too, I assure you.
And somehow they would be less than human then. The game the mind must play to unleash destruction.
Failure wasn’t a pleasant notion. It stung. It burned like acid.
A celebration of insignificance. Is that all we are in the end?
He’d forgotten how irritating company could be. Uninvited, unwelcome, persistent reminder of his own weaknesses. And.
My God,” Hadrian said. “They finally did it! All those oh-so-cute-my-cuddly-kitten-here’s-a-pic bastard! They finally went and did it!
The trust I have... for some people... comes down to how well I know them, and then it’s a matter of my trusting them to do what I think they’re going to do.
There is something profoundly cynical, my friends, in the notion of paradise after death. The lure is evasion. The promise is excusative. One need not accept responsibility for the world as it is, and by extension, one need do nothing about it.
And it bred caution in the unveiling of its powers. The Crippled God bred caution but not well enough, for the powers of the earth came to it in the end. Chained was the Crippled God, and so Chained was it destroyed. And upon this barren plain that imprisoned the Crippled God many gathered to the deed. Hood, gray wanderer of Death, was among the gathering, as was Dessembrae, then Hood’s Warrior – though it was here and in this time that Dessembrae shattered the bonds Hood held upon him.
The past is a demon that not even death can shake.
Is that all we mortals are? The victims of tortured irony to amuse an insane murder of gods?’ ‘A murder of crows, a murder of gods – I like that, lass. As for tortured irony, more like exquisite irony.
Paran could feel nothing but the white fire of vengeance, filling his mind, coruscating through his body.
False visions of the world were a child’s right, not something to be resented, but neither were they worthy of any adult sense of longing.
The blade slid through the energy. Unaffected, the power swept over, then into Paran. Blinded, he screamed as bitter cold lanced through him, shattering his thoughts, his sense of self. An invisible hand closed around his soul. Mine! The word rang in his head, triumphant and filled with savage glee. You are mine!
His dying shriek rose skyward.
Kulp saw something crumbling into ruins behind the lad’s light-blue eyes.
There would always be, he now understood, those for whom violence was righteous. Sudden.