Deimilė’s Reviews > Ashes of Man > Status Update

"I would sooner relive every hour on the walls of the Dhar-lagon, every night in the pit, blood dripping from my ear, would sooner stomach the blood and screaming of the Prophet's coronation feast than endure that terrible silence.
And yet it is ever by my side.
I can hear it even now. It is with me always. If I but set down my pen and call her name she will never answer me.
Not ever again"

"I thought I would be ready, thought that after all these yeas and centuries, after so many false starts, that I could write of her. Of her end. I thought that now, perhaps, I could say something of that bleak silence, that total silence in the Ascalon then. But there is nothing. Nothing No words can enclose that silence, or capture the blackness on the holograph where she had been."

"Nothing endures, nor lasts forever. Not stone, not empires, not life itself. Even the stars will one day burn down. Even the darkness that comes after all will one day pass away to new light. The stones here on Colchis shall fall into the sea, and the sea dissolve to foam. The stars shall burn the worlds to ash, and cool themselves to cinders. All things fade. Fall. Shatter."

"A gulf had grown between me and the men and women in that bunker, a difference of category. They hardly seemed real, not men at all to me in that moment, but shades, shadows on the wall of the cave that was the world. Or it was as if they were all actors, holographs - and I alone was real. Still they moved, not realizing the light had gone out, not knowing the crowds were gone."

"An abyss vast and empty as all the plains of Eue howled dark through my soul. Bring her back... This time the words would not leave my throat. They have never left me. Lorian could not bring her back. Nothing could. All my denials could avail nothing. Change nothing.
Only the past is written.
Time runs down, and what once was never comes again.
Never, never, never, never.
Never."

"The boy I'd been was gone, replaced-renewed-by that thought and promise of a new tomorrow. A new future. A new life. Gone too was the woman I had met on Emesh, cold, cruel, and quick to judgment. Not her wounds-invisible to many, if not to me-but as I had grown beyond my frame, so had she, abandoning her demarchist prejudices, if not the iron in her spine and jaw. I loved her then, as well and truly as I ever had."

"Whole drafts I have written and abandoned - or burned - before this point. So much easier to begin again than go on. I have but to start over to have my people-my friends-alive again. Once more I find I wish to throw my work into the sea-so inadequate document it seems! So feeble and blinkered by my merely human hand and eye, so poor a testament to the people I have known. To my people."

"The world's changed. But men have not. Nor will. We keep making the same choices. The same mistakes. So the same wisdom will ever serve us."

"There is little right in the universe, and none which we do not fight for and make for ourselves."

"One cannot step in the same river twice, and home is not home when you return, for you are not yourself. The man you were yesterday died yesterday, and is only a piece of the man of today, as you will be tomorrow."