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The ugliness of the world does not fade, nor are fear and grief made less by time, nor is any suffering forgotten. We are only made stronger by its blows.
I think of you often, and meant what I said: you are your father’s son. What I have not said, what I should have said, is that you were ever a son to me. The son I always wanted.
She had suffered—not as I had suffered—but in her own way, and suffering is not quantified or measured. It only is.
We have need of heroes, however broken, however terrible, however insufficient they may be. And we have need of more than one hero, for heroes do break, you know.
“Do you not have your answer a hundred times over?” A brief tremor shook her arm, but she hid it behind her back and shook her head again. “Monsters don’t have doubts.”
“Maybe you’re right. But there are women and women, commander. Some ask nothing of us, and so we are nothing to them. But there are those women who ask all of us. Those are the ones worth giving all for.”
One cannot step in the same river twice, and home is not home when you return, for you are not yourself. The man you were yesterday died yesterday, and is only a piece of the man of today, as you will be tomorrow.
But there is little right in all the universe, and none which we do not fight for and make for ourselves.
My dead outnumbered my living—as becomes true for each of us in time. The dead become ever closer companions as we grow old ourselves and nearer eternity. And afterlife or no, they live on in us.
“I read,” I said, and shrugged. “People always accuse me of wasting my time, but they don’t complain when I have their answers.”
“The world’s changed,” I allowed, and glanced back to where Prince Rafael Hatim sat with Garan Peake and the others. “But men have not. Nor will.” I clapped him on the shoulder. “We keep making the same choices. The same mistakes. So the same wisdom will ever serve us.”
“Angels are only demons that kept their oaths . . . and still serve good and truth.”
Some wounds can never be healed, not by the powers of this world.
“These are grievous times. But perhaps so great a darkness calls for even greater light. It is written that no guide is known that can shelter the world from grief, for no man knows what God intends.”
The centuries, it seemed, had worn her down at last, and at the last she had found in the bottom of her soul a wish and want she’d never known was there.
The cosmos is not cold or indifferent because we are not indifferent, and we are a part of that cosmos, of that grand order which has dropped from the hand of He who created it. Every decision creates its ripples, every moment burns its mark on time, every action leads us ever nearer to that last day, that final last battle and the answer to that last question: Darkness? Or light?
For all his power, all his station, his breeding and command, the king could move but one square at a time.
Every cord in me contracted, and my heart collapsed like a dying star.
In the sudden dark that followed, I screamed, and the noise of it tore from me and through me as I fell once more to my knees. It was a scream to rival Valka’s in the dark tower of Ganelon, a scream of triumph and pain both—and of power returning. The lights in the ceiling above my head burst like ripe fruit, plunging the space at hand into darkness total and absolute.
A part of me had died and so remained on Perfugium with Valka, will remain there until its sun swells and swallows that miserable world, but the scars left where she once dwelt are a part of me, too, and worth the price and privilege of knowing her.
Evil occurs because we are insufficient to challenge it. Too weak to stop it at the gates, too blind to see it bubbling within. Were we all angels in our virtue and heroes in our capacity, we might hold all chaos at bay, might stop even the unkindling of the stars.
