Written on the Dark

by Guy Gavriel Kay

Justice, the provost of Orane kept thinking through a challenging day, was not always obvious. You could pursue it dutifully and lead a country to ruin. Or you could consider terrible consequences and…leave this alone?

The blue moon, rising above the city, was behind them. But every moment of the rest of their lives, long or short, brightly lit or dark-ensnared, lay ahead of them.

Sometimes we retain the quiet moments that come in the midst of chaos, or after it. The city, my city, in the night. Our lives, written on the dark.

They walked on. One moon, winter stars. The life you chose, or were given.

He lived in a fierce pursuit of beauty, in a world that resisted that.

“Indeed, power and justice can sit uneasily together, your grace.”

The stories told—and heard—are shaped by what we need to, or want to, believe.

Good men, bad men. The sea does not care.

you can die at the margins of a story as easily as at the centre of it. Or just be a glancing comment in another tale.

We regard our own memories as truths, when they are often just the stories we have told ourselves over time. They become the truth we live by, or with. They become our lives.

But the words one chose were a way of seeing, of understanding the world. And the sound of them mattered. It did!

And so, finally, at this leaving and this end, is truth, among all the interwoven tales: I knew love, had true friends, may have done good in the world in a time that threatened war. And I wrote some poems. I did that. I did that.