The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea Cycle, #2)

by Ursula K. Le Guin

Her boredom rose so strong in her sometimes that it felt like terror: it took her by the throat.

The Earth is beautiful, and bright, and kindly, but that is not all. The Earth is also terrible, and dark, and cruel. The rabbit shrieks dying in the green meadows. The mountains clench their great hands full of hidden fire. There are sharks in the sea, and there is cruelty in men’s eyes.

“To be reborn one must die, Tenar. It is not so hard as it looks from the other side.”

from his staff and hands leapt forth a white radiance that broke as a sea-wave breaks in sunlight, against the thousand diamonds of the roof and walls: a glory of light, through which the two fled, straight across the great cavern, their shadows racing from them into the white traceries and the glittering crevices and the empty, open grave.

Outside them was the sky, paling to dawn. A few white stars lay high and cool within it.

He was one whose power was akin to, and as strong as, the Old Powers of the earth; one who talked with dragons, and held off earthquakes with his word. And there he lay asleep on the dirt, with a little thistle growing by his hand.

Living, being in the world, was a much greater and stranger thing than she had ever dreamed.

There was a joy in her that no thought nor dread could darken, that same sure joy that had risen in her, waking in the golden light.

She watched him, and never could she have said what was in her heart as she watched him, in the firelight, in the mountain dusk.

Wordless, Ged pointed to the west, where the sun was getting low behind a thick cream and roil of clouds. The sun itself was hidden, but there was a glitter on the horizon, almost like the dazzle of the crystal walls of the Undertomb, a kind of joyous shimmering off on the edge of the world. “What is that?” the girl said, and he: “The sea.”

she had left joy up in the mountains, in the twilit valley of the stream. There was a dread in her now that grew and grew. All that lay ahead of her was unknown.

She knew nothing but the desert and the Tombs. What good was that? She knew the turnings of a ruined maze, she knew the dances danced before a fallen altar. She knew nothing of forests, or cities, or the hearts of men.

“Tenar, I go where I am sent. I follow my calling. It has not yet let me stay in any land for long. Do you see that? I do what I must do. Where I go, I must go alone. So long as you need me, I’ll be with you in Havnor. And if you ever need me again, call me. I will come. I would come from my grave if you called me, Tenar! But I cannot stay with you.”

Tenar listened to the sea, a few yards below the cave mouth, crashing and sucking and booming on the rocks, and the thunder of it down the beach eastward for miles. Over and over and over it made the same sounds, yet never quite the same. It never rested. On all the shores of all the lands in all the world, it heaved itself in these unresting waves, and never ceased, and never was still. The desert, the mountains: they stood still. They did not cry out forever in a great, dull voice. The sea spoke forever, but its language was foreign to her. She did not understand.

He did not move. He was still as the rocks themselves. Stillness spread out from him, like rings from a stone dropped in water. His silence became not absence of speech, but a thing in itself, like the silence of the desert.

She looked down at his face. It was as if cast in copper—rigid, the dark eyes not shut, but looking down, the mouth serene. He was as far beyond her as the sea. Where was he now, on what way of the spirit did he walk? She could never follow him.

A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free.

Freedom is a heavy load, a great and strange burden for the spirit to undertake. It is not easy. It is not a gift given, but a choice made, and the choice may be a hard one. The road goes upward toward the light; but the laden traveler may never reach the end of it.

Her heart was very heavy. The sun beat in her eyes like a hammer of gold.

These vanished in a haze that rose up from the ocean, and they were alone in the starless night over deep water.

All her life she had looked into the dark; but this was a vaster darkness, this night on the ocean. There was no end to it. There was no roof. It went on out beyond the stars. No earthly Powers moved it. It had been before light, and would be after. It had been before life, and would be after. It went on beyond evil.

The soft light, greyed by sea mist, glimmered between them.

You were never made for cruelty and darkness; you were made to hold light, as a lamp burning holds and gives its light.

The sea mist drifted grey between their faces. The boat lifted lightly on the long waves. Around them was the night and under them the sea.

fantasy now suffers from endemic trilogitis (or the even more serious form of the disease, incurable seriesism).

The word power has two different meanings. There is power to: strength, gift, skill, art, the mastery of a craft, the authority of knowledge. And there is power over: rule, dominion, supremacy, might, mastery of slaves, authority over others.

Heroic fantasy descends to us from an archaic world.

fantasy isn’t wishful thinking, but a way of reflecting, and reflecting on reality.