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at long last he’d done what he always dreamed of doing. He’d turned into what he already was.
What a great and awful power God had given to men, the power to revoke His divine gift of life, to unlock one another’s chests with the blunt key of a sword and roughly evict the ghost within. A pile of steel and guts,
Was that all, after all that fighting and killing and dying?
right now a ghost king doesn’t sound that bad.”
Mud and blood and murder, drunken bickering in a smoky room. There must be another way to make a king.
“I felt like a god today, like I could do anything and whatever I did was right. But now none of it seems right. People say battle is supposed to show you who you are, and I wanted it to show me. Very badly. But I know less about myself than I did this morning. Except I guess that I’m not a god.”
but I didn’t give up my faith when I took up magic. I practice sorcery, but I still pray to God.”
“But you have to admit God’s been pretty quiet lately.” A desert god. A god of sand and dust. “God doesn’t come when you snap your fingers, He comes when you’re ready for Him.”
This world was worn out and cold, its future was uncertain at best, but it could still play host to wonders.
But even when you were dead it seemed that you had to drag yourself to the afterlife.
Grails and spirits, marvels and quests. Time to let it all go. Camelot and all that.
Kings rise and fall, but the world was wide, and from this distance the kings looked very small. Even Arthur looked small.
How false and foolish life is,
And how easily one life is changed for another.
caught in an eddy, spinning in place, but how to get out?
Life was but a dream, till one and all awakened on Judgment Day.
hearing the truth spoken aloud, dragged into the daylight, was a relief.
keeping secrets cost too much.
He’d been going round and round for so long he didn’t know who he was anymore. But that wasn’t true. He knew, if he wasn’t too much of a coward to admit it. It was time for him to wake up and start his life again, this time for real, and be who he was meant to be.
The earth was always so hungry to pull things down to it!
He’d fallen too far to ever climb out.
the question isn’t so much about whether you’re lying to us, it’s whether you’re lying to yourself.”
There was a way forward now, and it was the way back, the old way: grails, spirits, quests, angels. The Old World was shattered but all the pieces had been saved, and it was only a matter of gathering them back up and sticking them back together. It was a second Grail Quest, this one for the future of Britain itself.
Only God could wholly grasp the system of the world.
the worst disasters come dressed as miracles,
His mind sloshed around inside his skull, always off-kilter.
Often he wished to die, but he lacked the courage.
Sometimes he wondered if he wasn’t mad at all, if he was the only sane one, because when other people looked at the world they seemed to see a paradise of ease and order and meaning. But when Dagonet looked he found only a wasteland of empty signs, transient and meaningless as the shapes in clouds. The worthless currency of a vanished empire.
The sword in the stone had made a fool a king, and the king had made a fool a knight. But the Grail would make fools of them all.
If he’d only shown some ambition in life he could’ve been a fool.
Christ’s crutches, it’s a holy adventure and the will of our liege lord, so let’s fucking get it over with.
I don’t know why people even bother having legitimate children anymore,”
“Bastards are clearly the superior product.”
On the Grail Quest it was nakedly apparent that victory really did go to the pure of heart, no matter how disgraceful their swordsmanship, and whose bright idea was that? Questing’s a hunt for glory, sir! The great game! The whole enterprise stank of the seminary. This one was for the kneelers, the cross-kissers. Any knight with red blood in his veins ought to quit while he still could.
wear a crown of bone and sit on a throne of blood.
He didn’t know whether to be terrified of the coming disaster or relieved that it was all going to be over soon.
You see this world as it truly is: a vale of tears, empty of meaning. But if you honor God in this world, you will have your reward in the next.
The vile black toxins of his thoughts sloshed in his head, soiling his brain. He was remembering who he was.
“That’s right. Fuck that angel.”
“Nice a-ankles, though.”
The world was wrapped in mist, the sun and sky smothered and buried in it miles deep.
“We’re hunting God, not Saxons.”
It was hard to believe such things had ever been possible, or ever could be again.
“Should we ask permission before we fart?” Scipio said. “No farting,” Dinadan said.
“At this point there aren’t really any choices left at all. We’re taking our cues directly from God now.
A purple popinjay.
I expect you all had rather lonely childhoods, too, to have grown up into the heroes you are now.”
People thought I wanted to be a perfect knight, and I told myself that, too, but I see now that what I was really trying to do was to control God. I knew that if I was perfect then God could deny me nothing, not even if He wanted to. He would have to love me. I would force His hand.
“Maybe man isn’t meant to feel what I did. Like King Midas, God should never touch His children.”
After you’d known a happiness beyond what the human soul was ever meant to feel, what could possibly disconcert or distract you?
