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“Violence is a craft. So is compassion.
“There are benefits to youth,” Rory snapped. “The mettle to break from tradition, for one.”
“You say the river cares not for the rain, but it is the rain that feeds the river. In time, it can even wear away stone.” My words were like the fall of my hammer. Strong. Exact. “I am not afraid of you. Because without me, you would be nothing.”
“You want me to tell you a story?” He placed the helmet on my head, over my shroud. His voice, trapped within the iron, hummed in my ears. “Once, there was a foundling boy who didn’t believe in anything. He grew up, became a worldly knight, and still he struggled to believe. He bore hardly any hope, and a mountain of disdain. And that should have been the end.” He took my hand, squeezed it, tightening my hold on my hammer. “But then he came to a cathedral upon a tor, and met a woman there. And all the tales he’d troubled himself with about cruelty, about unfairness and godlessness… he started
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It is easier, swearing ourselves to someone else’s cause than to sit with who we are without one.”
“It’s hard to see who I am when I am lost in what’s expected of me.”
“When you do the right thing for the wrong reason, no one praises you. When you do the wrong thing for the right reason, everyone does, even though what is right and wrong depends entirely on the story you’re living in. And no one says they need recognition or praise or love, but we all hunger for it. We all want to be special.”
“Losing something is painful. Sometimes, finding what we’ve lost is just as agonizing.”
But is it godly to punish your subjects for questioning you? Is it motherly to demand resolute devotion?”
It’s about what we lose and what we gain, the arduous journey of self-discovery—the painful, beautiful burden of living.
