The Darkness That Comes Before (The Prince of Nothing, #1)

by R. Scott Bakker

One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.

Vast landscapes, histories, contests of faith and culture, all glimpsed in cataracts of detail. Horses skidding to earth. Fists clenching mud. Dead strewn on the shore of a warm sea. And as always, an ancient city, chalk dry in the sun, rising against dun hills. A holy city called Shimeh.

“No soul moves alone through the world, Leweth. Our every thought stems from the thoughts of others. Our every word is but a repetition of words spoken before. Every time we listen, we allow the movements of another soul to carry our own.”

And he now knew with certainty that the world was hollowed of its wonder by knowledge and travel, that when one stripped away the mysteries, its dimensions collapsed rather than bloomed.

There was nothing the ignorant prized more than the ignorance of others.

Ink might be immortal, but meaning was not.

The more crowded the concerns of the present, the more difficult it became to see the ways in which the past portended the future.

Was the pulse of a good man worth rolling the dice of Apocalypse?

She led a submerged life, a life catacombed by poverty and ignorance. Then this soft-hearted, portly man would arrive, a man who looked even less like a spy than he did a sorcerer, and for a time the roof of her life would be torn away, and sun and world would come pouring in.

What a beautiful description

Hatred needed no reasons, if only because they were so many and so easily had.

Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.”

Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurrence. They are moments that rankle at becoming past, and so remain contemporaries of our beating hearts. Some events are not remembered—they are relived.

The world is a circle that possesses as many centres as it does men.

No, what gives life depth is the future. Without a future, without a horizon of promise or threat, our lives have no meaning. Only the future is real, Conphas,

But at some point, he’d come to know the woman apart from her spread legs. What was it he’d learned? With whom had he fallen in love? Esmenet, the Whore of Sumna. Often, in his soul’s eye, she was inexplicably thin and wild, buffeted by rain and winds, obscured by the swaying of forest branches. This woman who had once lifted her hand to the sun, holding it so that for him its light lay cupped in her palm, and telling him that truth was air, was sky, and could only be claimed, never touched by the limbs and fingers of a man.

The road would be kind. Eventually, she would find the Holy War. And in the Holy War she would find Achamian. She would clutch his cheek and kiss him, at long last a fellow traveller. Then she would tell him what had happened, of the danger. Deep breath. She tasted dust and cold. She began walking, her limbs so light they might have danced. It would be dark soon.

That's definitely ominous

Like life, games were governed by rules. But unlike life, games were utterly defined by those rules. The rules were the game, and if one played by different rules, then one simply played a different game. Since a fixed framework of rules determined the meaning of every move as a move, games possessed a clarity that made life seem a drunken brawl by comparison. The proprieties were indubitable, the permutations secure; only the outcome was shrouded.

One could never force another to love. The more one grasped for it, the more elusive it became.

Politics, he thought sourly. It was not, as the philosopher Ajencis had written, the negotiation of advantage within communities of men; it was more an absurd auction than an exercise in oratory. One bartered principle and piety to accomplish what principle and piety demanded. One sullied himself in order to be cleansed.

“The Dûnyain,” Kellhus said after a time, “have surrendered themselves to the Logos, to what you would call reason and intellect. We seek absolute awareness, the self-moving thought. The thoughts of all men arise from the darkness. If you are the movement of your soul, and the cause of that movement precedes you, then how could you ever call your thoughts your own? How could you be anything other than a slave to the darkness that comes before? Only the Logos allows one to mitigate that slavery. Only knowing the sources of thought and action allows us to own our thoughts and our actions, to throw off the yoke of circumstance. And only the Dûnyain possess this knowledge, plainsman. The world slumbers, enslaved by its ignorance. Only the Dûnyain are awake. Moënghus, my father, threatens this.”

“What comes before determines what comes after,” Kellhus continued. “For the Dûnyain, there’s no higher principle.” “And just what comes before?” Cnaiür asked, trying to force a sneer. “For Men? History. Language. Passion. Custom. All these things determine what men say, think, and do. These are the hidden puppet-strings from which all men hang.”

“You have killed him,” he said, his accent thick. “You know this?” “Y-yes,” she said numbly, trying to compose herself. God, what now? With the knife, he cut a lateral line across her forearm. The pain was sharp and quick, but she bit her lip rather than cry out. “Swazond,” he said in harsh Scylvendi tones. “The man you have killed is gone from the world, Serwë. He exists only here, a scar upon your arm. It is the mark of his absence, of all the ways his soul will not move, and of all the acts he will not commit. A mark of the weight you now bear.”

Nice

Faith is the truth of passion. Since no passion is more true than another, faith is the truth of nothing.