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Verily do I tell you that whoever believes in dreams is as one trying to catch the wind or seize a shadow. He is deluded by a beguiling picture, a warped looking glass, which lies or utters absurdities in the manner of a woman in labour. Foolish indeed is he who lends credence to dreams and treads the path of delusion. Nonetheless, whoever disdains and does not believe them at all also acts unwisely. For if dreams had no import whatsoever why, then, would the Gods, in creating us, give us the ability to dream?
She smelled of ambergris, roses, library dust, decayed paper, minium and printing ink, oak gall ink, and strychnine, which was being used to poison the library mice. The smell had little in common with an aphrodisiac. So it was all the stranger that it worked on him. ‘Don’t you believe,’ she said in a changed voice, ‘in sudden impulses? In unforeseen attractions? In the impacts of fireballs flying along collision trajectories? In cataclysms?’
We found a bed in the alcove in her chambers. We made love like mad things, voraciously, greedily, ravenously, as though following years of celibacy, as though storing it up for later, as though at risk of celibacy again. We told each other many things. We told each other very trivial truths. We told each other very beautiful lies. But those lies, although they were lies, weren’t calculated to deceive.
‘But for me – please forgive me – destiny isn’t a scroll written on by a Great Demiurge, nor the will of heaven, nor the inevitable verdict of some providence or other, but the result of many apparently unconnected facts, events and occurrences. I would be inclined to agree with you that destiny catches up with people . . . and not just people. But the view that it can’t be the other way around doesn’t convince me. For such a view is facile fatalism, a paean praising torpor and indolence, a warm eiderdown and the beguiling warmth of a woman’s loins. In short, life in a dream.
The dream that the Witcher is dreaming, I humbly submit with respect, is an enchanting and beautiful one. But every dream, if dreamed too long, turns into a nightmare. And we awake from such dreams screaming.’
They observe the principle, Master Witcher, that since the end is justified, the means must be found.’
Use delaying tactics, she thought. As Vesemir said in Kaer Morhen when they’re about to hang you, ask for a glass of water. You never know what might happen before they bring it.
‘Time is like the ancient Ouroboros. Time is fleeting moments, grains of sand passing through an hourglass. Time is the moments and events we so readily try to measure. But the ancient Ouroboros reminds us that in every moment, in every instant, in every event, is hidden the past, the present and the future. Eternity is hidden in every moment. Every departure is at once a return, every farewell is a greeting, every return is a parting. Everything is simultaneously a beginning and an end.
You’re a tiny clothes moth that can be crushed in the fingers into shining dust, but which, perhaps, if it’s allowed, can cut out a hole in a precious fabric. You’re a grain of pepper, despicably small, but which when inadvertently chewed spoils the most exquisite food, forces one to spit it out, when one wanted to savour it. That is what you are. Nothing. An irritating nothing.’
Great misfortune will fall on the people! Great defeats on the armies! Thousands of folk will die from fire and sword. So consider, gentlemen, that this comet, which can be seen in the sky every night, trails a fiery red tail behind it. If a comet’s tail is blue or pale, it heralds cold ailments: chills, pleurisy, phlegm and catarrh, and such aquatic misfortunes as floods, downpours or long periods of rainy weather. While a red colour indicates that it’s a comet of fevers, blood and fire, and also of the iron which springs from the fire. Dreadful, dreadful defeats will befall the people! Great
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Something creaked, just like canvas being torn. The terns rose with a cry and a fluttering, for a moment covering everything in a white cloud. The air above the cliff suddenly vibrated and became blurred like glass with water spilled over it. And then it shattered like glass. And darkness poured out of the rupture, while riders spilled out of the darkness. Around their shoulders fluttered cloaks whose vermilion-amaranth-crimson colour brought to mind the glow of a fire in a sky lit up by the blaze of the setting sun. Dearg Ruadhri. The Red Horsemen.
wanderer, a permanent vagabond, a sailor lost on the boundless sea among the archipelago of places and times.
‘Time,’ said Nimue, ‘has neither a beginning nor an end. Time is like the serpent Ouroboros, which bites its own tail with its teeth. Eternity is hidden in every moment. And eternity consists of the moments that create it. Eternity is an archipelago of moments. You may sail through that archipelago, although navigation is very difficult, and it is dangerous to get lost. It’s good to have a lighthouse whose light can guide you. It’s good to be able to hear someone calling among the fog . . .’
‘They talked me out of it all,’ Triss repeated. ‘So wise, so sensible, so logical . . . How not to believe them when they explained that there are more and less important matters, that one ought to give up the less important ones without a second thought, sacrifice them for the important ones without a trace of regret. That there’s no point saving people you know and love, because they’re individuals, and the fate of individuals is meaningless against the fate of the world. That there’s no point fighting in the defence of virtue, honour and ideals, because they are empty notions. That the real
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The plateau, extending almost all the way to the distant mountain peaks, greyish-blue in the fog, was like an actual stone sea, here undulating in a hump or a ridge, there bristling with the sharp fangs of reefs. The impression was enhanced by shipwrecks. Dozens of wrecks. Of galleys, galeases, cogs, caravels, brigs, holks and longships. Some of them looked as though they had ended up there not long before, others were piles of barely recognisable planks and ribs, clearly having lain there for decades – if not centuries.
Cliff of shipwrecks with tower embedded in cliffside - anciet port cut in half ad left high abov sea level
you invariably desire to row upstream and piss into the wind. It had to end badly. Know that today, here, in Stygga Castle, you have pissed into a hurricane.’
War demands casualties. Peace, it turns out, does too.’
