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But of the great cites of Thagura, and of Pseldona most of all? Only bones remained. Pseldona of the Hundred Gates! Pseldona of Many Towers! Pseldona of the Rock! Only the Rock remained.
Nearly half my life I had quested for peace and for Vorgossos. I had found Vorgossos only.
indeed, and though I bore his name and blood alike, I was not him. With every threshold we cross we become someone new, for every place is new, and every hour, and with every moment we are changed. We may not step in the same river twice, nor with the same feet.
And I had known war, had ventured beneath the surface of Emesh and into the bowels of Vorgossos . . . and into the Howling Dark that awaits us all. But Emesh and Vorgossos had been small battles. Desperate battles, aye, and fierce, but small. Thagura was something else.
“’Tis what you wanted, is it not?” she arched an eyebrow. “A purpose?” What man is a man who wants less? Or more.
There will always be peace. It is only a question of when. War is energy, and energy runs down. The universe returns to rest, and whether that rest comes without any conflict or after it is another matter entirely.
Men are ever more careful with the lives of their loved ones than they are with their own.
Such horrors there are in human history, but they are only shadows. Imitations in our halting human way of the deeper horrors and depredations of the Pale.
Earlier I wrote that justice is punitive. That it must be so to be at all just. Without number are the voices raised throughout time in opposition to this principle, and the ink they have spilled in that opposition might drown the fabled seven seas of Earth. I understand their objections. Those who set their pen against the sword and the gallows and the firing squad did so from an excess of mercy, and mercy is virtuous, if a weaker, higher thing in itself. But justice is a virtue also, and if a man is to rule, it must be with the rod in one hand and the white glove on the other.
Which ancient god was it who said he brought not peace, but the sword? Is it not oft true that peace comes only after the sword is drawn and bloodied? So it has been for me.
