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March 12 - March 22, 2018
Children from a dark house choose shadowed paths.
Karsa Orlong lived and breathed his grandfather’s tales.
Blinked awake, and looked down upon a glade where no gods dwelt. Where no gods had ever dwelt.
The twenty-three Found who stood witness to the beginning of the warriors’ journey, hidden among the trees of the valley side, were by blood the brothers and sisters of Karsa, Bairoth and Delum, yet they were strangers as well, though at that moment that detail seemed to matter little.
‘Remind me to tell you one day, Karsa Orlong.’ ‘Tell me of what?’ ‘What life is like, for those of us in your shadow.’
‘Pahlk told me of countless beasts that had been frozen within the ice for numberless centuries, becoming visible amidst the shattered blocks.
I proclaimed the Laws of Isolation, as given us by Icarium whom we had once sheltered
‘Baryd, Sanyd, Phalyd, Urad, Gelad, Manyd, Rathyd and Lanyd. These, then, shall be the new tribes…’
Too many fingers and toes, mouths with no palates, faces with no eyes. We’ve seen the same among our dogs and horses, Warleader. Defects come of inbreeding.
Icarium gave the Teblor the Laws that ensured our survival.’
Bairoth Gild was indulging himself, making regret and pity and castigation into sweet nectars, leaving him to wander like a tortured drunk.
low altar caught Karsa’s attention. Some lowlander god, signified by a small clay statue—a boar, standing on its hind legs. The Teblor knocked it to the earthen floor, then shattered it with a single stomp of his heel.
The one in the captain’s chair was a mage?’ ‘Yes. I do not understand such warriors. Why not use swords or spears? Their magic is pitiful, yet they seem so sure of it.
Subtlety had been a venomed serpent slithering unseen through his life. Its fangs had sunk deep many times, yet not once had he become aware of their origin; not once had he even understood the source of the pain. The poison itself had coursed deep within him, and the only answer he gave—when he gave one at all—was of violence, often misdirected, a lashing out on all sides.
‘Karsa, neither Silgar nor Damisk possesses a shred of decency. I, however, do. A small shred, granted, but one none the less. Thus: thank you.’ ‘We have saved each other’s lives, Torvald Nom, and so I am pleased to call you friend, and to think of you as a warrior. Not a Teblor warrior, of course, but a warrior even so.’
Urugal’s power over me lies in what I do not know, in secrets—secrets my own god would keep from me. I have ceased fighting this war within my soul.
On the ship, when I hung in chains from the mast, you were my only hold on this world. Without you and your endless words, Torvald Nom, the madness I had feigned would have become a madness in truth. I was a Teblor warleader. I was needed, but I myself did not need. I had followers, but not allies, and only now do I understand the difference. And it is vast. And from this, I have come to understand what it is to possess regrets. Bairoth Gild. Delum Thord. Even the Rathyd, whom I have greatly weakened. When I return on my old path, back into the lands of the Teblor, there are wounds that I
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Hatred is a most pernicious weed, finding root in any kind of soil. It feeds on itself.’
Form an opinion, say it often enough and pretty soon everyone’s saying it right back at you, and then it becomes a conviction, fed by unreasoning anger and defended with weapons of fear. At which point, words become useless and you’re left with a fight to the death.’
‘Oh look,’ another soldier said, ‘you’ve confused the poor ox. Bet he doesn’t even know his entire face is one big tattoo. Scrawl did good work, though. Best I’ve seen in a long while.’
‘Shattered,’ the other prisoner said as he walked over to the door, which the first guard unlocked and swung open. ‘The brand makes your face look like it’s been shattered.’
The lowlanders seemed so obsessed with their differences that they had no comprehension of what unified them.
Your kind walked this earth when the T’lan Imass were still flesh. From your blood came the Barghast and the Trell. You are Thelomen Toblakai.’
‘Where’d you get the name “Strings”, anyway?’ the young woman asked after a moment. Fiddler smiled. ‘That tale’s too long to tell, lass.’
Ascendancy was but one of the countless mysteries of the world, a world where uncertainty ruled all—god and mortal alike—and its rules were impenetrable.
A natural born tyrant, she was, both in public and in private amidst the bedrolls in the half-ruined hovel they shared. And oddly enough, he’d found he was not averse to tyranny.
One day, perhaps, you will see for yourself that regrets are as nothing. The value lies in how they are answered.’
This fragment of the long-fractured Tiste Edur warren was by far the largest he had come across, larger even than the one that surrounded Tremorlor, the Azath Odhanhouse. And this one had known a period of stability, sufficient for civilizations to arise, for savants of sorcery to begin unravelling the powers of Kurald Emurlahn, although those inhabitants had not been Tiste Edur.
The hills were not hills at all. They were edifices, massive and hulking, constructed from a smooth black stone, seemingly each a single piece. Twenty or more man-lengths high. Dog-like beasts, broad-skulled and small-eared, thickly muscled, heads lowered towards the two travellers and the distant wall behind them, the vast pits of their eyes faintly gleaming a deep, translucent amber.
The Teblor were long fallen from Thelomen Toblakai. Mirrored reflections in flesh only. Kneeling like fools before seven blunt-featured faces carved into a cliffside.
And she had seen truths in Karsa’s soul, had warned him of the horrors to come—not in specific terms, for like all seers she had been cursed with ambiguity—but sufficient to awaken within Karsa a certain…watchfulness.
a mass of roots stretching out for leagues, from which the ironwood of Karsa’s new sword had been carved—his bloodsword having cracked long ago.
‘As you say. It is far too easy to see you as a knot-browed barbarian, Toblakai. No, the drive to create is something other, isn’t it? Have you an answer?’ He shrugged. ‘If one exists, it will only be found in the search—and searching is at creation’s heart, Chosen One.’
The giant of jade, Heboric now believed, was an intruder, sent here from another realm for some hidden purpose.
The child in his arms—for child she was, once more—cried in nothing other than the throes of salvation. She was no longer alone, no longer alone with only her hated sister to taint the family’s blood. For that—for the need his presence answered—his own grief would wait.
Women who take women for lovers—the only crime is the loss to men, and so it has always been.’
There is one danger that plagues ascendants in particular, and that is the tendency to wait too long.
At the foot of a nearby pile lay two dogs, both asleep, one huge and terribly scarred, the other tiny—a snarl of hair and a pug nose.
At night ghosts come In rivers of grief, To claw away the sand Beneath a man’s feet
‘Death is not an unkind fate,’ Darist said above him. ‘If she was a friend, you will miss her company, and that is the true source of your grief—your sorrow is for yourself. My words may displease you, but I speak from experience. I have felt the deaths of many of my kin, and I mourn the spaces in my life where they once stood. But such losses serve only to ease my own impending demise.’
‘There is the unpleasant ring of truth to your words, Onrack.’ ‘I am generally unpleasant, Trull Sengar.’
It is very difficult for us mortals to make sense of Tiste histories, for they are such a long-lived people.
He has given them a song, Heboric. A Tanno song, and, curiously, it begins here. In Raraku. Raraku, friend, is the birthplace of the Bridgeburners.
The giants are…intruders to our world. From some other realm.’
It is the very passage—the portal through which each giant comes—that creates the otataral.’
‘Words need not be spoken aloud, friend, to prove unwelcome.
As if Tavore and Sha’ik—the two armies, the forces in opposition—are in some way mirrored reflections of the other.
‘My nose has been broke so many times it does it on instinct,’ the sergeant replied.
Like Dujek, like Whiskeyjack, his outlawry was nothing but a deception. There had been no dishonour. Thus, the sacrifice of young Felisin might have, in the end, proved…unnecessary.
‘As you like, Demon. Alas, I’m no longer much of a plaything. You broke my back.’ ‘Your error was in landing head first, mortal.’ ‘My apologies.’
