The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur

People love stories, I love them, but stories are like gods, they care little for the human beings in their care. They don’t care if they’re true or not.

The past was a cursed wound. No perfect knight would ever come to heal it as if it never happened. The best you could hope for was forgiveness. And even that was cold comfort. It was the future that required attention.

we can’t go back, Lance. Even God can’t go back, only onward. That is the adventure.”

They were in dream time now, the timeless time of adventures, which had a different texture from ordinary time.

They had told him he was nothing and nobody, and before he died he needed to know if that was true.

Maybe terrible things would happen in the future, maybe it was empty, a waste land. But there could be seeds buried there, too, deep down below the dry dust, where hidden springs still flowed. It was deep winter, but there was still hope for renewal.

What he wanted was to live in a timeless castle, a world wrought of old gold, where everything was noble and glorious and nothing ever changed. He wanted the battle to be over, he wanted to win and have won and be done with fighting forever and ever. But of course it wasn’t over. Why would the future be simpler than the past? Stories never really e

Time was always stealing away bits of your future and replacing them with memories, and then the memories faded.

“One day you will see that it is a mistake to love an empire, or a throne, or a crown, because those things cannot love. They can only die.”