Zach Lisabeth

“His cries echoed long after Klaeda’s crew dispersed, returning to the business of manning Tortuga. Those cries would continue for days and maybe weeks, for there was no release lurking in the blue void between the floating islands of Ciel—no sweet ground rising up to meet him. The Long Drop was torment stacked upon torment, and the Jokai stacked it all the way down.

Down, into the infinite sky.”
― Z. Bennett Lorimer, Ardent Wings on Jealous Skies

“The Jokai are tricksters. It takes a special kind to master their ways. To learn the craft, you need to be hard as stone and soft as down. You have to be steadfast and compromising, logical and obtuse. You need to be just and capricious, merciful and cruel. To work the craft, you need to lie truthfully. You need to be honest and false, mysterious and bare. You need to bend in half without breaking. How many men do you know capable of containing so many contradictions?”
― Z. Bennett Lorimer, Ardent Wings on Jealous Skies

“We are artifacts, you and I. Fossils of a murdered deity rendered down to mud and stone. Irreducible reflections of a divine spark, beautiful and terrible. Fallen and pure. It is a lonely condition—containment. To be both blessed and forsaken, haunted and ignored. Our fallen G-d still reaches for us across that infinite gulf, and we are cursed to reach infinitely back. Nature abhors a vacuum, and we are nature and this abhorrence both. This is why the Selki still speak the old hymns and the Huskan Clerics their feral mantras, reduced by time and memory to an insensate blur. It’s why the Lucente poison themselves with lichen, lying wasted in oneiric fog. It’s why the Elan Friars spend their lives painting votive murals only to see them burned. After all this time, The Karochan kantors still sing in trope, and the Celukids hang new ribs from their Abattoir with every passing moon. Prayers by a thousand names, cast in as many tongues into the same deaf void.

My job is to keep it that way.”
― Z. Bennett Lorimer, Seven Days of Mercy for the Apostatic Priest

“It is both strength and weakness that I am not easily saddened—not prone to melancholia nor bouts of general malaise. As I watched these offerings taking their leisure in the Mahak’s garden, I felt nothing but rage. This sacrifice by fire reeked of eldritch sorcery, but it was a familiar stench, for every culture on the face of Hebdomar still carried foul hints of its sordid bouquet. All manner of blood has been spilled in pursuit of divine favor, but an inordinate share belongs to women—to the young and the pure. Men great and small tremble before the mystique of female sexuality. They seek to squeeze it and bridle it—to see it throttled and, yes, destroyed. I do not deny that some mean spark may be released in its destruction, but to see such a power nourished? To cultivate it? To guide it through its fullest bloom? There lies a power to debase every haughty sorcerer and necromage—to bend every monarch and send crass thaumaturges screaming for their middens.”
― Z. Bennett Lorimer, Seven Days of Mercy for the Apostatic Priest