Practice (The Heretic's Guide to Homecoming #2)

by Sienna Tristen

Now that he was here, feeling the pain of the rainforest in his own bones, it was amazing that there was a version of him only a few weeks younger that hadn’t cared at all.

“New knowledge of old power can feel like new power entirely,”

Fear-beyond-fear was an opportunistic feeder. It devoured whatever was within reach, transfigured any mild concern into calamity. Anxiety cast all your mundane worries like bones and read from them the ruin of your life.

The wisewomen of Yacchatzul are an unbroken chain of mothers and daughters—we don’t sully ourselves with romantic attachments.” When she saw Ronoah’s confused expression, she raised an eyebrow. “We take lovers, of course we do. But if a boy hands you some flour in the kitchen, would you say he baked the bread—?”

Even forces of nature needed, once every hundred or thousand years, to tell a story.

So went the playful disdain of the millennium toward the century.

As it turned out, landscapes were the best storytellers in all the world.

It is the nature of a journey that you will meet friends and fellow strangers along the way. You will share campsites and swap stories and learn from each other how to weather your futures just a little more wisely. Then the sun will rise, or the signpost arrive, and you will go your separate ways. This, too, is the way of things: most of the souls you encounter will not go with you to the end. You have the time you have with them, and if you are skilled enough in pilgrimage, bittersweetened by your travels, you will learn to let that be enough.