Crowfall (Raven's Mark, #3)

by Ed McDonald

It is testament to the human spirit that people can not only learn to live with anything, they can usually work out a way to profit from it.

I took pride in making sure that if anything went wrong when the crunch came, it was because I’d made a bad decision in the heat of the moment, not a bad or idle decision days or weeks before. You tended to win more often in life when you stacked the odds in your favour.

There is nothing that a determined human being cannot come to cope with in time. It doesn’t mean that the pain of the loss is gone, or that its embers cease to burn, deep in your core. It just changes. It changes from the incapacitating agony of a gut punch to the solid, deep aching of a broken bone. It becomes familiar. You carry it with you, accepted, never to leave.

Survive the world long enough and inevitably you will be replaced, cast down and despised.

None of us get to be what we wanted. We are, in the end, what the world makes of us. It would have to be enough.

now there are three of us

Power isn’t about forcing people into your control. It comes when people choose to follow.’

There is a moment when you see your enemy defeated and feel a surge of loss against the triumph.

Fate is a spinning coin, balanced on an edge so fine that the slightest breath of wind can set it spiralling away from you. But sometimes, in a moment of utter certainty, you have to slam your hand down upon it and make the call.

But our reality is shaped by our minds. There’s more than sand and water, skin and bone, iron and starlight. Without that which exists in our minds, there’s nothing at all, just an empty, desolate tangle of tiny particles that claim to be separate things, but in truth, are all one and the same. If the Misery had taught me anything, it was that our reality is not fixed.