Last First Snow

We cannot save our clients from themselves. Someday in your career, Elayne, you will represent a man—almost certainly a man—who wants you to help him barter his soul to a demon for three wishes. When that day comes you may refuse his business, you may try to change his mind, but in the end if hell he wants, hell he will achieve.

Your son," she said, "needs a father." "He needs a world less broken than this. All the sons need that. And the daughters, too." "Is there such a world?" "There must be.

It is easy, fast, to fight and die beside your brothers in the sun. It is harder to build, to teach, to live, and to remember.

Life is a debt, of which death is our repayment.

The conversation they were not having filled the room. Branching vines of unsaid words tangled and knotted and rotted between them.

But then, war always had been a chance for great powers to play with their most exquisite toys.

Pain was a form of art, after all: a concentration of the soul, an extension of time.

When I was a young woman, I thought myself an actor, someone who moved the world. And I was. But the older I grow, the more I feel like everything I thought I willed, I willed because of forces beyond my control. The closer I stand to the center of history’s river, the more I’m swept in the current. In my youth, I broke gods, and my power has grown since. But power is time’s tool, not mine.

The people don’t care about theology. They are passion and fear and anger and they need gods to fuel that passion, soothe that fear, stoke that anger.

A death may be a death, or early warning of existential threat or out-of-context problem. Nothing occurs in isolation. The world’s doom ripples back and forth through time.

How was it to see in cold heartless relief, to abandon the soft colors filtered through—created by?—jelly globe eyes for pure harsh wavelengths, to throw wide and close perception’s doors at once?

Their house, their son, her arms, were fortress walls against the desert night. Their bed was a sacred and secret space guarded by dark arts from history.

Compromise is possible. But possibility is a vast empire, and likelihood its smallest province. Still, the province is rich, and so we work to seize it.

For false gods, they cast long shadows.

Even fear faded, incipient mortality giving way to the kind of drawn-out academic detachment that rendered “certain death” as “incipient mortality.

There’s no shame in general peace. Each specific peace holds its own.

You don’t get a free pass on atrocities just because they hit first.

I couldn’t handle a million husbands. One is my limit. So don’t go getting any ideas.

Threat is another word for change. Status quo ante is not preferable to all change. Consider the Iskari boy stopping the leaking dam with his finger—romantic image, but futile. If one is to play any other role, one must be open to drastic change. The world some large-scale changes would bring about may be preferable to the one we currently inhabit.

fear and dread are not the same. Because to say I’m scared suggests that something has scared me, that I know the shape of the beast that chases me down dream corridors. That my fear has an object, and that object has a name, and this name is known or at least knowable to me.