Daughter of Crows

All you ever see is a part of someone’s life

-"You told him to fuck off!" -"I know what i did." -"But he's the ferryman! He's Death with his scythe! He's the winged ones who take the warriors straight from the battlefield. He's-" -"He's propably used to it. Dying's enough to give most people an attitude.

I'm not her - I carry around the imprint of that child. Her hurts and truths are my foundations, but I am not her. I was the castle built upon that hill and now the ruin. I am haunted by the ghost of myself.

Although mercenaries are paid to fight, they spend only a tiny fraction of their time actually fighting. The average life expectancy of a mercenary is lower than in most professions, but if they were to go into battle every day, few would be expected to last more than a week or two, The great majority of a mercenary's tie is spent waiting. Travelling comes a distant second. Fighting a very distant third. And all that waiting needs filling with distraction. Which in part accounts for how good mercenaries are at taking prisoners. A prisoner who can be ransomed provides money, and money is the reason most mercenaries claim to do what they do. A prisoner who can't be ransomed provides entertainment, filling those empty days when there would otherwise be nothing else to do but sharpen blades and think about the battles to come.

Sometimes fate delivers a better choice than anything we can come up with ourselves.

Rue had seen cultures where the old were respected, but the larger the groups into which humanity clumped itself, the smaller the circle of old men still afforded that respect became. Most of the elderly were seen merely as useless eaters. The wisdom of age, it turned out, had an increasingly short period in which it held value. In the modern era, experience was viewed more like fruit, quick to soften and rot.

Rue had observed that real lives were complicated and therefore delicate. Tendrils of obligation