The Nethergrim

Edmund felt despair eating away at his victory. "Why is the world like this?" He shivered. "Why does it feel so cold, so hard?" A smile flickered on John’s face, one that was neither happy nor sad. "What would be the worth of goodness, in a world that always rewarded it?

Every spell is something special, fit for the moment when it's done." Edmund pushed his bowl across to Tom. "It's not just the words you say, but the way they make you feel, the meaning and the rhythm, the connection you make with them. It's not just the things you think, but how the place and time you're in can change them.

I am happy to say that there is nothing to report." The guard's voice grew muffled as he bent to shrug off his armor. "Save that I now know every path and stream in this village as though I were born here and had never set foot outside it, and have counted all the leaves on all the trees and found them in good health and order, and have taken the liberty of naming all the frogs down by the creek, placing them into clans by the markings on their back and taking for myself the title King and Overlord of all Frog-Kind.

The wind rushed up the lanes of the village and through the tops of the trees all around, one note of joy, of gift, of hard things done. It would have been as near to perfect as anyone could ask, were it not for the whisper he heard beneath.

They conquered and ordered things, tried to make their world in the image of their thoughts - and now it's rubble, bits of pictures and words that no one really understands." Edmund gave up trying to read them. "Doesn't it sometimes make you think that building things is no use?" "What I think is that I love my daughter, and I will save her if I can. What I think is that things like love and hope are the substance of life, and that what gets carved on the side of a tower amounts to very little of importance.

Fourteen, your eminence." "Fourteen." The wizard spat a laugh, though the sound was too flat to be seriously taken as mirth. "By the time I was twelve, I had written a summation of commentaries upon each of the Seven Roads. By fourteen I could call and command forces that you could not even name, spoken words that you could not in a year perceive the meaning, pressed my mind through realms of thought whose merest shadow will be forever unknown to you. You aspire beyond your station.

Their men I took captive...of some I cut off their feet and hands, others their noses and lips, still others I blinded. I made a trophy of their chieftains' heads, in tribute to That-of-Goddness...their women I took to make my wives...their city I leveled to the ground, their fields I sowed with salt, in service to That-of-Goodness...

Gray he is, and where he steps, the cold lingers. Tall he is, tall as houses, black of eye as deep as the end of the world! His fur is daggers, his teeth are knives, his hands blood red with a thousand crimes, and not time nor love nor bravery can stop their grasping. He cannot be slain, for he is the voice of the world when it says, 'I love you not.

Here in the north the Nethergrim has many names," said Vithric. "The Old Man of the Mountains, they name him, the Thief at the Cradle, Mother's Bane. They say the flesh of children is the only thing he truly prizes.