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It was a good story. It made him feel better. Stories were useful that way, they smoothed over the gaps and sharp edges of the world.
in the Otherworld of the night things had a way of meaning things they shouldn’t.
he was a lazy Cassandra.
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.
They’d thought to bring home a new spiritual heart for Britain, but in their unseemly haste to grab at grace they’d fumbled away what little they had to begin with. The worst disasters come dressed as miracles.
“One day you will see that it is a mistake to love an empire, or a throne, or a crown, because those things cannot love. They can only die.”
But of course it wasn’t over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really ended, they just rolled one into the next. The past was never wholly lost, and the future was never quite found. We wander forever in a pathless forest, dropping with weariness, as home draws us back, and the grail draws us on, and we never arrive, and the quest never ends.
He looked up at the empty clouds, and as he died he wondered, not for the first time but for the very last, why it should be that we are made for a bright world, but live in a dark one.
