Shaman's Crossing

How different would our perception of reality be if... we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?

Your future. It awaits only you, to live it and to write it.

My blood will only buy you that fool's regard. I will pay a high price for you to be respected by a churl. Nothing bought with blood is worth having, young man.

A terrible premonition washed over me. This was how the whole world would end.... They would devour the forest and excrete piles of buildings made of stone wrenched from the earth or from dead trees. They would hammer paths of bare stone between their dwellings, and dirty the rivers and subdue the land until it could recall only the will of man. They could not stop themselves from doing what they did. They did not see what they did, and even if they saw, they did not know how to stop. They no longer knew what was enough.

The truth doesn’t need you to recognize it, young man, for it to be so. You need the truth to recognize you.

He is very concerned with his dignity, and I think that prevents him from having an interesting life. If I were a boy, and permitted to have an interesting life, I would have no dignity at all.

Only a crazy man could have made any sense of the events. I did not want to be crazy, and so I could not think seriously about these things or permit them to have meaning in my life.

I think that the ones who speak cruelly or taunt are the ones who should be pressured to change. I have no delusions about myself. In a physical fight, Trist would best me easily. And, having won it, he would then use that superiority to justify however he treated me afterward. He is saying that my physical condition should determine how he treats me. And you think that because you have bested him in a physical struggle, you have proved something to him. But you haven’t. All you have done is shown that you agree with him, that the man who can physically defeat another is the man who should make the rules. I don’t agree with that. If I attempt to live by those rules, I will be beaten, and I do not intend to be beaten. So I will not be goaded into a physical confrontation with Trist or anyone else. I will win another way.

I suppose I cannot blame you for doubting me. I could scarcely believe it myself at first. I found all sorts of ways to deny it and explain it away. But it wouldn’t stay gone.

I perceived then that my father had already known these things, but that by asking about them in front of us, he had given Spink the opportunity to share his family’s straitened circumstances without making it seem that he sought our pity.