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The doorways of our lives take many shapes, and the arrivals that change us are not always announced by thunderous pounding or horns at the gates. We may be walking a known laneway, at prayer in a familiar chapel, entering a new one and simply looking up, or we may be deep in quiet talk late of a summer’s night, and a door will open behind us.
You stood by kin in this world because there was no one else to stand by, or who might ever stand by you. A rule of the northlands. You died if you were too much alone.
What lingers, or comes back unsummoned, is not always what we would expect, or desire to keep with us.
What he felt was fury, endlessly, from first awareness of himself, a bent child in a warrior world.
“I know that. Of course I know. Is it . . . unworthy to feel their absence?” This was not the conversation he’d been expecting to have. Ceinion thought about it. “I think . . . it is necessary to feel that. Or we will not desire a world that lets us have them.”
We celebrate our losses, knowing how they are woven into the gift of our being here.
“I believe that what doctrine tells us, is . . . becoming truth. That by teaching it we help it become the nature of Jad’s world. If there are spirits, powers, a half-world beside ours, it is . . . coming to an end. What we teach will be true, partly because we teach it.”
What if it was fear that made men believe the Jormsvik mercenaries were deadly? They could be beaten, after all; they had just been beaten.
The Cyngael, it was said, were never far from sadness. Rain and mist, dark valleys, music in their voices.
A story finishes—or does for some, not for others—and there are other tales, intersecting, parallel, or sharing nothing but the time. There is always something more.