The Madness Season

anger of any kind is a dangerous emotion, it eats at the nerves and eventually makes you careless

Look," she told me. "A good kreda is very hard to find. I invested a lot of time and memory in you. I had no intention of giving all that up, just because you were going to be in a bad mood for a decade or two.

The Tyr had tried. It had really tried. It must have gone over every element of human psychology, tried desperately to understand the nature of human aesthetic sense … and then failed, miserably, in every regard.

All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let myself in for?

We share need, not-human. Yours is straightforward.” … “Mine is less so, but you will serve it. Come.

Only in summer-phase is it carnivorous.” If there was an award for understatement, I thought, the Tyr would trounce all competition.

My identity is without root.

I dreamed of a beast in human form, that hunted men for pleasure. When they brought it down—at last, after many deaths—they cut it open. Only to find a wormlike thing coiled in a bed of slime at the center of it, where the heart should be, and a webwork of puppeteer’s strings leading outward through the flesh. I screamed.

I stood balanced on the brink of madness. Insanity and longevity are a truly terrifying combination; if I gave in now, I might pay the price for centuries to come.

Amazing, is it not, that in the face of death we hunger for distraction, and are wont to focus on other things, trivial things, as a means of not acknowledging our danger....

Sometimes the decision is placed in your hands and you just have to go with it, right or wrong, according to what you think is best.

The more I think about it, the more it frightens me." "So why are you getting involved?" He shut his eyes. "So I can look at myself in the mirror again. And know that I did my best.