A Stranger in Olondria

Once you have built something - something that takes all your passion and will - it becomes more precious to you than your own happiness. You don't realise that, while you are building it. That you are creating a martyrdom - something which, later, will make you suffer.

The silence. End of all poetry, all romances. Earlier, frightened, you began to have some intimation of it: so many pages had been turned, the book was so heavy in one hand, so light in the other, thinning toward the end. Still, you consoled yourself. You were not quite at the end of the story, at that terrible flyleaf, blank like a shuttered window: there were still a few pages under your thumb, still to be sought and treasured. Oh, was it possible to read more slowly? - No. The end approached, inexorable, at the same measured pace. The last page, the last of the shining words! And there - the end of the books. The hard cover which, when you turn it, gives you only this leather stamped with old roses and shields. Then the silence comes, like the absence of sound at the end of the world. You look up. It's a room in an old house. Or perhaps it's a seat in a garden, or even a square; perhaps you've been reading outside and you suddenly see the carriages going by. Life comes back, the shadows of leaves. Someone comes to ask what you will have for dinner, or two small boys run past you, wildly shouting; or else it's merely a breeze blowing a curtain, the white unfurling into a room, brushing the papers on a desk. It is the sound of the world. But to you, the reader, it is only a silence, untenanted and desolate.

But preserve your mistrust of the page, for a book is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.

I sat enchanted, far from my gods, adrift in the boat of spices, in the sigh of the South, in the net of the wheeling stars, in the country of dolphins.

These were the rains that drove people close to the walls, under the balconies, or sent them dashing madly through the squares, and drenched the fluttering ribbons and bright trappings of the horses so that their flanks were streaked with delicate watercolors. The storms washed the streets so that little streams of brown water went roaring along the gutters toward the sea, and thundered on the roofs of the cafés where people were crowded together laughing in the steam and half darkness. I loved those rains; they were of the sort that is welcomed by everyone, preceded by hot, oppressive hours of stillness; they came the way storms come in the islands but did not last as long, and often the sun came out when they had passed. I was happy whenever the rain caught me walking about in the streets, for then I would rush into the nearest café, along with all the others who were escaping from the weather, all of us crushing laughing through the doors. The rain allowed me to go anywhere, to form quick, casual friendships, forced to share one of the overcrowded tables, among the beaming waiters who pushed good-naturedly through the throngs carrying cups of steaming apple cider.

I sat down in the wilderness with my books, and wept for joy.

The night sky was distended in my dreams, sinking to earth with the weight of destructive glory behind it. In one of those dreams I reached up and touched it gently with a fingertip, and it burst like a yolk, releasing a deluge of light.

All through my journey his stories had fallen like snow. He was as full of them as a library with unmarked shelves. He was a talking book.

Long is the journey homeward, Weary and worn are we. Oh, if I fall behind, my love, Will you look back for?

The word for 'book' in all the known languages of the earth is vallon, 'chamber of words'...

As I was a stranger in Olondria, I knew nothing of the splendour of its coasts, nor of Bain, the Harbour City, whose lights and colours spill into the ocean like a cataract of roses. I did not know the vastness of the spice markets of Bain, where the merchants are delirious with scents, I had never seen the morning mists adrift above the surface of the green Illoun, of which the poets sing; I had never seen a woman with gems in her hair, nor observed the copper glinting of the domes, nor stood upon the melancholy beaches of the south while the wind brought in the sadness from the sea. Deep within the Fayaleith, the Country of the Wines, the clarity of light can stop the heart: it is the light the local people call 'the breath of angels'...

The truth has its own virtue, which is separate from its content.

This is the grief that comes when we are abandoned by the angels: silence, in every direction, irrevocable.

Her small mouth opens and closes, a cave of light. And night falls down around me like a temple of broken glass.

The silence had a depth to it, like the stillness after a bell has been struck and the echoes have died away, and one waits for what has been summoned.

It is ... courage to choose not what will make us happy, but what is precious.

those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward.

she ignited her heart by touching it to his; and after that there was no peace for either of them.

Words are sublime, and in books we may commune with the dead. Beyond this there is nothing true, no voices we can hear.

Ravhathos called the life of the poet “the fair and fatal road, of which even the dust and stones are dear to my heart,” and cautioned that those who spend long hours engaged in reading or writing should not be spoken to for seven hours afterward.

A book,” says Vandos of Ur-Amakir, “is a fortress, a place of weeping, the key to a desert, a river that has no bridge, a garden of spears.

The word for “book” in all the known languages of the earth is vallon, “chamber of words,” the Olondrian name for that tool of enchantment and art.

The tunneling entrance curves before it opens into this space and there is absolute, waiting, coiled, and sentient blackness.

It was “a shape to make men weep,” wrote Firdred of Bain when he first saw it: “exactly the shape of a desecrated sea.

His exaltation left no room for the human.

Our two worlds scrape together like the two halves of a broken bone. My world has changed forever, tainted by that touch.

He looked at me with delight, as if I were something he had created himself: a beautiful portrait or gem-encrusted ring. His exaltation left no room for the human. I saw in his shining, ecstatic, ruthless eyes that he would not be moved no matter how I suffered.

the souls of the dead disguised as immense fruit bats