Into the Narrowdark (Last King of Osten Ard #3)

by Tad Williams

We make marks on maps to separate one country from the next, then write treaties to make law of those separations, she thought. But in truth, unless people contest the borders, the differences mean little. Most folk who live on the edges speak the language of both sides, and there is little else to separate one nation’s people from another’s. So is there something wrong in the way men rule each other? she wondered. Animals walk and birds fly freely from one land to the next and no one thinks to stop them doing it. And God makes no lines across His Heavens—the sky is blue from one horizon to the other with scarcely a difference to be seen, let alone a boundary. And yet His children fight each other to the death over lines they can only imagine.

All hail the truth-teller! For only truth can chase the shadows. Only truth can cleanse the stain. Truth and a love that knows no distinction Between worthy or unworthy, mortal or immortal, even between fallen and raised. We cannot flee what has been. We can only turn our faces to what might still be.

His brother’s crazed mask melted into nothingness, but more shapes followed it, one after another, like mourners in a funeral procession. Some he dimly thought he recognized, but others were utterly strange to him—a slender Hikeda’ya female carrying a long witchwood blade, a shaggy giant pursued by a scarred, pale-haired mortal man, and a child-sized figure standing alone on an empty beach. But these visions were only billows of rotting gossamer, faint as shadows or streaming mist, and he sensed they were not truth but only possibility. And over them all, above and behind them, and even somehow in them, loomed a great, pale shape, a pillar of stone that towered above the world like a gigantic pointing finger, and around it he could sense the swirling winds of countless destinies.