The Stone of Farewell (Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, #2)

by Tad Williams

“We know you and the High King are close, Benigaris. And we know that you yourself rule Nabban. But you are at our table now, in God’s house—my table—and we bid you to remain silent until Mother Church’s highest priest finishes speaking.”

Is this what Francis said to Vance??

“This world—your world, the world you preach to us with your sly words—is not the world of Mother Church. We have long known of a dark angel who strides the earth, whose bleak hand reaches out to trouble all the hearts of Osten Ard—but our scourge is the Arch-fiend himself, the implacable foe of God’s light. Whether your ally is truly our Enemy of countless millennia or just another vicious minion of darkness, Mother Church has always stood against his like . . . and always shall.”

“Lies, hatred, and greed,” the lector said softly. “They are familiar, age-old enemies. It matters not beneath whose banner they march.”

“You have opened doors that should have remained closed for all time, Pryrates,” the lector proclaimed. “In your pride and folly, you and the High King have brought a ponderous evil into a world which already groaned beneath a mighty burden of suffering. Our church—my church—will fight you for every soul, until the very Day of Weighing-Out dawns. I declare you excommunicate, and King Elias with you, and also banish from the arms of Mother Church any who follow you into darkness and error.”

Pop off pope!

Thus, we shall flee. Cowards always survive.”

we must speak out when evil shows itself, whether there is any hope of changing it or not.”

The bulging basket, Simon now saw, was full of skulls.

AMBIANCE

pulpy breasts

I think we have finally found boobs I don't like

Sunlight brought evil: the daystar was a beacon for disaster, a lamp that the enemies of Hernystir could use to seek out and destroy her people. Only in the deeps did safety lie, down among the roots of the earth where the heroes and gods of elder days still lived, where the cruel winter could not go.

“Ruyan’s Folk! I beg you, forget our old strife, the wrongs that were done! A greater enemy now threatens us both!”

A Sithi queen?

“Long ago did we refuse to bend any longer to their will, to their overweening injustice, and so we escaped. We thought they had forgotten us, but they have not. Now that we are weary and few, they seek to capture us once more.”

A thin dark arm and long-nailed hand lifted from the agitated soil,

Oh no.

what you call ‘magic’ has its cost. If it could be easily used to defeat a dozen armed men, the armies of princes would be full of hired wizards. Secondly, we have not been harmed yet. I am no Pryrates: I do not waste my strength in puppet plays for the bored and curious. I have a greater enemy to occupy my thoughts, more dangerous by far than anyone in this encampment.”

If things are fated, then perhaps I am merely a sorry strand in God the Highest’s tapestry. But some say that one chooses everything, even the bad.”

“None but fathering . . .” he broke off, forehead wrinkling in a sudden thought. “A child?”

KNEW IT

“We have been too long without music, anyway. If we die tomorrow, we should live tonight.”

“Death is no enemy. God has prepared a place for us all,

“Beloved Hakatri, my beautiful son,” the woman’s voice said, “how I miss you. I know you are beyond hearing or beyond replying, but I cannot help speaking as though you were before me. Too many times have the People danced the year’s end since you went into the West. Hearts grow cold, and the world grows colder still.”

“Our new land has become as shadowed as the old one, Hakatri, and that is our fault. But now your brother, who was ruined by that shadow, has himself become an even more terrible darkness. He casts a pall over all he once loved.

“Why, they are coming south, Earl Guthwulf,” the castellain said, surprised. “They are leaving their nest in Naglimund’s ruins. People who must sleep in the open have seen them walking the hills by darkness, like ghosts. They travel at night, a few at a time, and always moving southward—heading for the Hayholt.” He looked around nervously, as if only now realizing what he had said. “Coming here.”

I fear that Rachel will be having none of this.

Whatever the case, with the names of his Scrollbearer friends to offer as currency, he was certain that he would find a bed and a sympathetic ear at Pelippa’s Bowl!

I have bad news.

It could be that somewhere . . . or somewhen . . . you will hear these words and know of your family and your people.

If Tad is bringing Reincarnation to the party then mans was truly cooking in the late 80s

They would say that even those born here in our new land—like you, my son—came into the world with that shadow already staining their innermost selves, so that there has been no innocence anywhere since the world was young.

Oh. We're gonna grapple with Original Sin, are we?