They were not opposites or enemies but all part of the same continuum. I thought of the dead communities that surrounded the House; somehow before they had just been a sign of the nebulous Bad that our destiny would correct, but now I considered them all over again. They were failed villages, early experiments of the ancestors as they sought to find a stable way of life in this hostile land. I thought of wise men and women getting older and worrying about how their children would survive. And they did survive. We have survived, even though the nature of this place, this planet, is to poison us
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