Shadow Scale

However strenuously the world pulls us apart, however long the absence, we are not changed for being dashed upon the rocks. I knew you then, I know you now, I shall know you again when you come home.

The twin gods, Necessity and Chance, walked among the stars. What needed to be, was; what might be, sometimes was.

The thing about reason is that there's a geometry to it. It travels in a straight line, so that slightly different beginnings can lead you to wildly divergent endpoints.

But are you finding monastic history a very compelling reason to live?" "I'm not human," he said. "I don't require a reason to live. Living is my default condition." I couldn't help it; I laughed, and teas weleld in my eyes. That answer was quintessentially Orma, distilled to his elemental Orma-ness.

How did you stand lying about yourself for years? You must have felt cut off from the whole world." I fought down the lump in my throat. "I did indeed. And then I met this prince who seemed able to see through me, to the truth behind the lies. He was terrifying and fascinating, but to my amazement, it was an immeasurable relief to be seen.

These human eyes seemed weak to me at first," said Eskar, still staring away from me, scratching her short black hair. "They detect fewer colors and have terrible resolution, but they see things dragon eyes cannot. They can see beyond surfaces. I don't understand how that's possible, but it happened incrementally as I traveled with Orma: I began to see the inside of him. His questioning and gentle nature. His conviction. I'd glimpse it in something as incongruous as his hand holding a teacup, or his eyes when he spoke of you.

Camba had bent her long neck down to Ingar's level and was muttering in his ear. "Do you feel the breeze on your face?" I heard her say. "That's yours, and worth feeling. Look at those orange clouds. All the trials of a day may be endured if you know there's such a sky at the end of it. Some days I told my heart to wait, just wait, because the sunset would teach me again that my pain was nothing compared with the eternal, circling sky.

Haven't you always been more than yourself? Haven't we all? We are none of us just one thing.

The world is seldom so simple that it hinges on us alone.

Nothing was just one thing; there were worlds within worlds. Those of us who trod the line between were blessed and burdened with both.

I do what I have always done. I reach across and bring the worlds together.

I will see you both in Goredd, then, when I clasp your hands across the smoking ashes of my enemies." "Isn't that what you were trying to avoid by sneaking up the Omiga?" Kiggs said. The Comonot considered. "Yes, but I like the sound of those words. Interesting.

More insomniacs!' cried the doctor. 'Come in, come in".

Are we irretrievably broken? Never beyond repair, good heart.

Bend like a willow. You made it sound so simple." "It was simple." "Indeed. I bent and changed everything. This is going to have consequences.

If you followed logic all the way back to its origin, did you inevitable end up at a point of illogic, an article of faith? Even an indisputable fact must be chosen as the place to start reasoning, given weight by a mind that believed in its worth.

It is permissible to be the god of your own metaphors.

He smiled sadly, then placed his hand around mine so we were holding the book together. "I believe that - with everything I have," he said, holding my gaze. He kissed the edge of the book because he could not kiss me.

The beauty of the place moved me; I loved how the clean air felt in my lungs, how far I was from everything I had ever known. People I'd hurt, people I'd failed, people who thought me a monster. Here there was no monster greater than the ragged mountains.

A single action could derive from many motivations. I should never assume.

The Saint—for I was convinced he was a Saint, indeed, whatever the rest of us might have been—now had a fistful of dangling mind-fire threads. "She is broken, this one, in her mind and heart," he said, carefully scooping up the blazing filaments and packing them back into Jannoula. "You must learn to fill yourself with yourself, Blessed." "D-don’t break her any further," I pleaded, feeling responsible. He gave me a sidelong look, and for a moment I thought he was angry. But he said, "Would you break a mirror, Seraphina, because you fear to look into it?

It looked like our gods, to me--not literally, no the way they are depicted in statues, but the vibrant space between them, where Necessity is Chance and Chance flows into Necessity. The world is as it must be, and as it happens to be, and those are the same thing, connected and right, and you understand and love all of it, because you are all of it and all of it is you.

How did you merit so much devotion so quickly?' I asked, making no attempt to keep the sarcasm from my voice. 'I show them Heaven', said she, without a trace of irony. 'People are so desperate for light'.

Was it probably true that reasoning beings were equal? It seemed more like a belief than a fact, even if I agreed with it. If you followed logic all the way back to its origin, did you inevitably end up at point of illogic, an article of faith?

Oh, you humans may prefer empathy and mercy, but that's like intuiting the answer to an equation: you still have to go back and work the problem to be certain you were right. We can come to genuinely moral conclusions by our own paths.

We shall have long meetings where Kiggs agonizes and Glisselda teases him. That's the pattern so far.

The Ninysh might have resisted a bit harder. I don't mean to imply that they were cowards...," Maurizio said shrugging, clearly implying that the Ninysh were cowards.

All is well--or could be, if we worked to make it so. We were the fingers of the world, putting itself to rights.

I experienced every wing beat as a terrifying drop followed by a stomach-lurching heave. I was sick over a glacier. Brisi watched with interest and screeched, "A thousand years from now, that will still be there, frozen in the ice. Unless a quig eats it.