Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower, #4)

by Stephen King

And now, all these years later, it seemed to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended.

“Some things don’t rest easy even when they’re dead. Their bones cry out from the ground.”

Fools are the only folk on the earth who can absolutely count on getting what they deserve.

But his eyes never left hers, and in them she saw some of Roland’s truth: the deep romance of his nature, buried like a fabulous streak of alien metal in the granite of his practicality. He accepted love as a fact rather than a flower, and it rendered her genial contempt powerless over both of them.

“If you love me, then love me.”

So do we pass the ghosts that haunt us later in our lives; they sit undramatically by the roadside like poor beggars, and we see them only from the corners of our eyes, if we see them at all. The idea that they have been waiting there for us rarely if ever crosses our minds. Yet they do wait, and when we have passed, they gather up their bundles of memory and fall in behind, treading in our footsteps and catching up, little by little.

“No more talking,” she said. “Talking’s done. If you love me, then love me.” And for the last time, Roland did. They rocked together, skin to skin and breath to breath, and outside the wind roared into the west like a tidal wave.

“No! It will not stand!” he cried in a voice that made gooseflesh ripple the skin of the other two boys; that was not Roland’s voice at all, at least not as he was now; that was the voice of a man. “No,” Alain said much later, when Roland slept and he and Cuthbert sat up before the campfire. “That was the voice of a king.”

He’s using every ounce of his will to keep from going back, anyway, Cuthbert thought. He found the realization comforting—sometimes Roland scared him. There was something in him that went beyond steel. Something like madness. If it was there, you were glad to have it on your side . . . but often enough you wished it wasn’t there at all. On anybody’s side.

“You saw all that in the glass?” Alain asked in an awe-hushed voice. “I saw much.” “But not Susan Delgado,” Cuthbert said. “No. When we finish with yonder men and she finishes with Mejis, her part in our ka-tet ends. Inside the ball, I was given a choice: Susan, and my life as her husband and father of the child she now carries . . . or the Tower.” Roland wiped his face with a shaking hand. “I would choose Susan in an instant, if not for one thing: the Tower is crumbling, and if it falls, everything we know will be swept away. There will be chaos beyond our imagining. We must go . . . and we will go.” Above his young and unlined cheeks, below his young and unlined brow, were the ancient killer’s eyes that Eddie Dean would first glimpse in the mirror of an airliner’s bathroom. But now they swam with childish tears. There was nothing childish in his voice, however. “I choose the Tower. I must. Let her live a good life and long with someone else—she will, in time. As for me, I choose the Tower.”

How infinite was love, twining in and out of hope and memory like a braid with three strong strands, so much the Bright Tower of every human’s life and soul.