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A knife is a scary thing right enough, held to your throat, sharp and cool. The fire too, and the rack. And an old ghost on the Lichway. All of them might give you pause. Until you realize what they are. They’re just ways to lose the game. You lose the game, and what have you lost? You’ve lost the game.
“What have you got for me, dead thing?” I asked. It’s a game. I will play my pieces. I felt him cold inside me. I saw his death. I saw his despair. And his hunger. And I gave it back. I’d expected more, but he was only dead. I showed him the empty time where my memory won’t go. I let him look there. He ran from me then. He ran, and I chased him. But only to the edge of the marsh. Because it’s a game. And I’m going to win.
Hate will keep you alive where love fails.
You’d think priests would be better liars, what with their job and all.
“You know how to break the cycle of hatred?” I asked. “Love,” said Gomst, all quiet-like. “The way to break the cycle is to kill every single one of the bastards that fucked you over,” I said. “Every last one of them. Kill them all. Kill their mothers, kill their brothers, kill
their children, kill their dog.”
cut from myself all the weakness of care. The love for my dead, I put aside, secure in a casket, an object of study, a dry exhibit, no longer bleeding, cut loose, set free. The capacity for new love, I burned out. I watered it with acid until the ground lay barren and nothing there would sprout, no flower take root.
The perfumes of lords and ladies tickled at my nose: lavender and orange oil. On the road, shit has the decency to stink.
Strange how the deeper a hole the stronger it draws a man. The fascination that lives on the keenest edge, and sparkles on the sharpest point, also gathers in depths of a fall.
She had the eyes of everyone who ever cared.
“Lucifer spoke thus. Pride took him from heaven, though he sat at God’s right hand.” Her voice grew faint, the hint of a whisper. “In the end pride is the only evil, the root of all sins.” “Pride is all I have.” I swallowed the night, and the night swallowed me.
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretence of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.
