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The perfect world has no room for uncertainties and edge cases.
He’d heard her and her idiot friends arguing about morals and ethics and other things you couldn’t eat or stab someone with.
They were so real. They were somehow all the more real for being utterly unreal.
Witches and warlocks, poisoners, child-cursers, potion-brewers. In over a decade, since crossing the border, he’d watched that twisted view of his people become more and more true, because if the Ilmari reduced your art to love potions and curses and the venal conjuring of the circle houses, then that was all they offered you money for.
We will be ashamed of what we did here, one day. And at least, if that came true, it would mean things had got better. A better tomorrow bought with a succession of compromised todays.
“Siblingry business,” he agreed, feeling that unique emotion that was guilt and shame and relief and anticipation. The demon that turned the wheels inside him.
“God doesn’t care. God judges those He heals, and nobody else. You can’t control the ripples once you’ve thrown the stone. You can only choose not to throw the stone.”
At his heart, he knew it was because this world, for all its injustices and terrors, was at peace. There was no omnipresent vice of conflict clenched about every aspect of existence here, deforming it all from true.
machinery. He, who had created art, woven straw to gold, raised palaces for emperors, had trodden in circles around this wheel.
Nobody wanted handcrafted or bespoke from the Infernal Realms anymore. Just raw drudgery – most readily available of all services.
