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“We know no fear. It was cut from our souls at birth. We can feel it only as an absence, as an empty shadow cast by the light of annihilation. In the face of a future of atrocity I stand mute, numb to the only feeling that would make me human. But I remember what fear was: its cold pulse in my veins; its echo in my ears. I remember fear, and remember that I was once human. I look towards what must come to pass and I wish that I could meet it as my ancestors did, with fear. The future deserves that, it deserves fear.”

“At the root of your lies, is there any truth, father?’ The darkness becomes a forest, dark trunks reaching to an untouchable sky, roots crawling out and down into the abyss beneath. The man on the chair is sitting on the snow-covered ground, a fire burning before Him. A shadow moves out of the dark between the trees. It is huge, sable-furred and silver-eyed. It drags its shadow with it as it comes forwards. It pauses on the edge of the light. ‘You claim to be a man,’says the wolf, ‘but that is a lie revealed to any that can see you here. You deny you wish godhood, but you raise up an empire to praise you. You call yourself the Master of Mankind, and perhaps that is the only truth you ever spoke – that you wish to make your children slaves.”

“Now you see,’ said Yesugei. ‘We are made to be greater than the humanity we serve. The weight of the blade is nothing to us. To ride and fight and bleed for days is nothing to us. Nothing to us… We are made higher and so we lose that part that a child and an old man and a father looking into his child’s eyes knows – that the next step is not a promise. That to live is to fight. We forget that. We forget that life is weakness in the face of eternity. To take the next step only matters if you must fight for it, for the last fraction of ourselves. And taking it you see yourself, true and clear – not a warrior, not a hero, not a story of glory and wonder… Just a lightning flash, a descent from Heaven to Earth, a step taken, bright and fleeting and then gone.”

“Here in the realm beyond sight, there is nothing that is not brought by those that come here. Once, long ago, but aldo a moment past and in a moment to come, this realm was void, without even the idea of dimensions or duration so that it could be called empty. Long ago... Long, long ago... Now it is the place filled with the refuse of its travellers: the husks of grand ambitions and dreams, the shadows of atrocity, and the secrets of the countless dead and the yet to be born. It is both a lie and the truest thing to ever be.”

“People die. Times end. Suffering and war circle into being like the rains of autumn and the winds of spring. You know this. We did not, and do not, bring evil into these realms. It is already here. How many cities had you burned before you took this penitent path? How much blood have you seen our enemies spill? How much suffering fills life without the True Gods ever lifting a finger?”

“The past is not ours to own. We think, because we can remember it, that it belongs to us, that we can go back to it, that we are the same person who lived those moments, breathed that air, and made those choices. We are not the same. We are a stranger living with memories that belong to someone else. And the past belongs to itself.’ – Kallista Eris, from manuscript notes on the development of history, suppressed”