Beguilement

But though you’d never starve your body to wasting and still expect to go on, you starve your heart, yet act as though you can still draw on it forever without the debt ever coming due. If you fall—when you fall, you’re going to fall like a starving man.

Lakewalker legends say the gods abandoned the world when the first malice came. And that they will return when the earth is entirely cleansed of its spawn. If you believe in gods." "Do you?" "I believe they are not here, yes. It's a faith of sorts.

It’s never too late to save something,” he said sternly. “Might not be what you wanted, is all.

(Watching her) was a little like watching water lilies; rather more like smelling a dinner he was not allowed to eat. Was it possible to be starved for so long as to forget the taste of food, for the pangs of hunger to burn out like ash? It seemed so. But both the pleasure and the pain were his heart’s secret, here. He was put in mind, suddenly, of the soil at the edge of a recovering blight; the weedy bedraggled look of it, unlovely yet hopeful. Blight was a numb gray thing, without sensation. Did the return of green life hurt? Odd thought.

There are a lot of senseless things in the world, but not all of them are sorrows. Everybody knows some light, even if they forget when they’re down in the dark. Something everyone else thinks is stupid, but you know is wonderful.

She would do her marriage then, hour by hour and day by day with the work of her hands, and let the wishing fall where it would.