fiction

justice is punitive. That it must be so to be at all just. Without number are the voices raised throughout time in opposition to this principle, and the ink they have spilled in that opposition might drown the fabled seven seas of Earth. I understand their objections. Those who set their pen against the sword and the gallows and the firing squad

We have both been alive long enough to know that evil only wins when it spreads. It can cause destruction, it can cause death—but those are consequences of its nature, not its victory. Not its goal. The danger of evil, the

Caeden bowed low. Servants were venerated here, in their position because of their willingness to put others above themselves. It was not easy to become a servant in Kharshan; there were only a few dozen of the official positions, and those were vied for constantly.

“It is an honor to be served,” he said formally, carefully pronouncing the words in

When you came to this time, you momentarily stepped outside of time. A place where time doesn’t exist. Nothing to separate events from one another, or to give them length. They happen simultaneously and for eternity.” He shrugged. “In short, all that will happen, has already happened. It’s just that we are experiencing it through the lens of time.

There are things stronger than our words for them. Have I not said so? Or perhaps I will have said so when all is done. In some other place. But it is so, regardless. Time and space. Death. Stone. Sea. Things that are and would be even without us. Things that are in nature and belong to it.

But there are things weaker than our words. Many things.

that a man needs to know what he believes before he can really know who he is.