The Darkness That Comes Before (The Prince of Nothing, #1)

by R. Scott Bakker

One cannot raise walls against what has been forgotten.

“No soul moves alone through the world, Leweth. Our every thought stems from the thoughts of others. Our every word is but a repetition of words spoken before. Every time we listen, we allow the movements of another soul to carry our own.”

“When one man chases a hare, he finds a hare. But when many men chase a hare, they find a dragon.”

After all, spies were little different from whores. Sorcerers less so.

Avarice, it seemed to him, was the world’s only dimension.

If the world is a game whose rules are written by the God, and sorcerers are those who cheat and cheat, then who has written the rules of sorcery?

He could turn this ship into a shining inferno, then walk unscathed across the surface of the water, and yet he could never be . . . certain.

To be ignorant and to be deceived are two different things. To be ignorant is to be a slave of the world. To be deceived is to be the slave of another man. The question will always be: Why, when all men are ignorant, and therefore already slaves, does this latter slavery sting us so?

Answers are like opium: the more you imbibe, the more you need. Which is why the sober man finds solace in mystery.”

Some events mark us so deeply that they find more force of presence in their aftermath than in their occurrence. They are moments that rankle at becoming past, and so remain contemporaries of our beating hearts. Some events are not remembered—they are relived.

Was this the way the Gods felt when plagued by the inability of men to grasp the grand portent of their designs?

Thinks himself god like

he dreamed of that day when every child was stillborn, that day when the Consult, beaten back to the black ramparts of Golgotterath by the Nonmen and the ancient Norsirai, brought emptiness, absolute and terrible, into the world: Mog-Pharau, the No-God.

Like life, games were governed by rules. But unlike life, games were utterly defined by those rules. The rules were the game, and if one played by different rules, then one simply played a different game. Since a fixed framework of rules determined the meaning of every move as a move, games possessed a clarity that made life seem a drunken brawl by comparison. The proprieties were indubitable, the permutations secure; only the outcome was shrouded.

For a Dûnyain, even degradation was a potent tool—perhaps the most potent.

Only knowing the sources of thought and action allows us to own our thoughts and our actions, to throw off the yoke of circumstance.

It was as if the man’s mere presence betokened intimacy, trust.

Because she was Serwë, and she was nothing. She would always be nothing.

Such a tragic reality of this world. To be so broken I wonder if or how she will rise?

Lies that flatter are rarely disbelieved.”

“There’s faith that knows itself as faith, Proyas, and there’s faith that confuses itself for knowledge. The first embraces uncertainty, acknowledges the mysteriousness of the God. It begets compassion and tolerance. Who can entirely condemn when they’re not entirely certain they’re in the right? But the second, Proyas, the second embraces certainty and only pays lip service to the God’s mystery. It begets intolerance, hatred, violence . . .”

Dûnyain monks might be even more inhuman than he had thought. What if things such as truth and meaning had no meaning for them? What if all they did was move and move, like something reptilian, snaking through circumstance after circumstance, consuming soul after soul for the sake of consumption alone?

What was God but a tyrannical shadow in one’s periphery, the voice that could never fall within one’s field of vision? The voice from nowhere.

“Do you feast, Dûnyain?” Cnaiür asked in bitter Scylvendi. “Grow fat on faces?”

I feel there a connection with the monks and those takinh faces. Is it realted or possibly a eay to combat this power?

A single, indecipherable face among a welter of transparent expressions. Skeaös . . . Are you my father’s work?

Fear has many forms, but it is never so dangerous as when it is combined with power and perpetual uncertainty.

Sweet God of Gods, who walk among us, innumerable are your holy names. May your bread silence our daily hunger, may your rains quicken our undying land, may our submission be answered with dominion, so we may prosper in your name. Judge us not according to our trespasses but according to our temptations, and deliver unto others what others have delivered unto us, for your name is Power, and your name is Glory, for your name is Truth, which endures and endures, for ever and ever.