The truth was, Azoth hated Azoth. Azoth was a coward, passive, weak, afraid, disloyal. Azoth had hesitated. Master Blint didn’t know it, but the poisons on the needle had killed Azoth. He was Kylar now, and Kylar would be everything Azoth hadn’t dared to be.
Maybe when you were born on the top of the mountain you could pretend the mountain didn’t matter, but those who climbed it and those born at its base who could never climb at all knew differently.
The duke sounded like he was trying to convince himself. “Have you ever done this before?” “Set up someone by pretending to be someone else? Sure. Pretended to get killed? Not so much.
Why is it, my shadow-striding friend, that we don’t fear dreams? We lose consciousness, lose control, things happen with no apparent logic and abiding by no apparent rules…. We don’t fear dreams, but we do fear madness, and death terrifies us.
There’s no guarantee that justice will win out or that a noble sacrifice will make any difference. But when it does, there’s something that still swells my chest. There’s magic in that…. It tells me that’s the way things are supposed to be.
