They had sought to work with that strangeness so that death, when it came, would be less alien to them. They became fascinated by angles of elevation, by the rays that light could make, by weight and stress, by lines cut into stone. They had loved making carvings on stones that would face inward and would never be seen. They would be studied by the dark itself, as though it were a living thing, and for them, the purpose of life slowly became a way of not being afraid of the dark.
