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[tsvwords]

You ever feel like there’s someone at your shoulder, trying to keep you on the right path, and at a certain point you just stop listening to them? And then they’re banging on the windows, screaming at you, getting more and more furious and yet fainter and fainter, and you know you’re doing the wrong thing, so you start to get a kind of satisfaction from it, savouring every last curse and every last judgement upon you as you bare your back and you carry on doing the wrong damn thing all the same.

— Chapter 27: So I'll Bear It Trembling Onwards.

[tsvwords]

I would have gone south. You know that, don’t you? Given the choice, and nowhere else to turn, I’d have headed south, to a garden on the cliffs and an old friend who’s waiting for me.

But you just kept on leading me north, and there had to be a reason for that, didn’t there? A quick death, a long sleep. That’s what I expected. I told you I was ready for it.

And now you’ve led me to these people, these fucking people. These desperate, foolish people, and one old friend. Lifting their voices in song against the world, setting out in their coracles against a dark and unforgiving tide.

And I like ‘em. I like that they’re making the attempt. I think I’d like to help them, if I can.

There’s work to be done here. There’s good work, and before it’s done, there’ll be corpses to bury, and that’s work for the both of us. There’s a reason here to keep on living for as long as I can, and again, you led me to this place.

So…why are you still watching me, Maiden? Why are you there, lingering in the doorway with your veiled head bowed and your bony fingers dancing upon the frame?

Acantha said in time I wouldn’t be frightened at the sight of you, and that just isn’t true at all.

You’re still frightening me, Maiden, because there’s work to be done and yet you keep on getting closer.

So. Are you going to let me work?

— Chapter 34: Some Day There Shall Be None.

[tsvwords]

I’ve been through an experience. That’s the only way to describe it, an experience. And it’s made me realise that something has to change.  It has to - in me, or in the world, because I can’t bend to it any longer. I can’t pretend I’m happy to go along with it all. So the only solution left is for one of us to break, the world or me, and I’ve had enough of breaking.

— Chapter 20: And Rend Us Both To Dust Below.

[tsvwords]

Once upon the time, there was a roaring trade in personal worship across the Peninsulan police force.

It’s unreliable, but it can be done; you buy a fragment of some old broken-down shrine on the black market, a chipped finger or tendril from the reliquaries of a forgotten or outlawed god.

And you worship it, hanging from your neck or stitched into your chest, day after day, in the hope that you can tease something out of it, generate some kind of grace for yourself.

A god of bullets so you’ll never miss. A bureaucratic god to help get you through the paperwork.

And - formed from the smashed-up statuary and scriptures of the great propaganda deities that helped to turn the tide of the last war - a rhetorical god to help your truth find sympathetic ears. Just in case that witness turns against you, or your evidence might not hold up to the closest of scrutiny.

Not a liar’s god. You can’t call it a liar’s god. The Union were very clear on that. Even when they were banned.

‘We can’t open ourselves up to be counter-sued. Get things wrong and every successful case across the past twenty years could be thrown out! The official line is - we have reconsidered the use of rhetorical worship in courtroom scenarios. Nothing more.’

— Chapter 9: My Song Has Taken Hold Of Me.

[tsvwords]

If we’re going to die down here, I don’t want to die as a weapon of the faith, as his attack dog. I want to die doing some good for other people.

— Chapter 28: To Drift On, To Dream, To Die

[tsvwords]

I knew who you were.

I knew you, and I’d fully accepted that you were someone I could never, ever rely upon, someone I’d have to keep at bay for as long as I lived - and now you’re stealing that certainty from me, too.

That’s the very worst of it, you know. I’m waiting eagerly for you to screw things up again. I’m excited to prove myself right - to feel reassured that I wasn’t wrong to hate you. No matter how much it costs me, no matter how much is on the line.

Doesn’t that make you ashamed, Dad? Because it should.

— Chapter 26: My Song, My Sorrow and I.

[tsvwords]

Follow the sound of my voice. Down the empty lanes, through the ravaged woods, into the corners of this world where they can no longer hear us. We’ll find a place together to lie down in the hollow, and sleep. Our bodies will join together. Our hands will clasp. Until there’s no way of knowing whose dream belongs to whom.

— Chapter 15: For My Song Has No Beginning...

[tsvwords]

A thin, winnowing trail of pilgrims, frail and small against the endless landscape, stumbling and tripping as we make our way higher and higher into the mountains.​

We look absurd and hopeless out here, in our stolen gas masks and suits, dragging sleds packed with stolen supplies. We keep getting smaller, and smaller. And soon we’ll be lost to you.

I’m there at the very back, the first to be left behind - because there’s something dark and hungry inside me that must not be allowed to live on beyond me.

If we get far enough, there’ll be a time when I get to watch them walk away. A time when the god that’s inside me tears an upwards path through organs, bone and skin, sinking its black roots into the poisoned ground.

It will hurt, when I become what I become. But my feet will be planted in the ground, and my face will be turned and smiling through broken teeth towards the ones who come after me.

For now we walk on together, tripping over one another, every footstep its own kind of failure. ​We walk on, with a rough and tarnished hope, and a tangled, ruined love. 

We hope that against all odds, we will find more than just another lonely ending in the darkness.

We hope that those who come after us will make it further than we could.

We hope you find the missives that have been left for you. We hope you can make sense of them. We hope you find them flawed, inadequate, yearning.

We hope someday you’ll find a way to follow us.

— Chapter 45: Of Love, And Gods' Defeat.

[tsvwords]

Words, like flesh, are food for worms. Today I offer them a feast.

— Chapter 2: And Next of Dark Deceit.

[tsvwords]

Yes, I am culpable. I am dreadful. I have been responsible for great atrocities and I will commit a great many more before I’m done.

And still - I am growing furious, as I walk through the devastation of this town. Because the wound of Sutler’s Weald is not like any wound I would make.

It’s clumsy, it’s crude. It’s thoughtless.

I begin to tell myself, as I walk - I wouldn’t have murdered them like this. I would have been kinder. I would have killed them quickly or gracefully, and there would have been beauty and strangeness in the manner of it.

And even that’s all deception, even if I had been cruel and slow and lingering in the massacre of these innocent people, upon my whim - I would at least have looked them in the eyes, and I would have borne the weight of my cruelty. 

If they’d asked me to, I could have killed this town beautifully. And I’d have borne witness to the horror, and I’d have rejoiced in it - and it would have been considerably less vile and ugly than this.

— Chapter 37: And Even The Kings In Their Bowers Of Steel.

[tsvwords]

Faulkner leans heavily on his driftwood staff, as he wades forward towards us, emerging from the mists. He’s taken a moment to paint himself in the only materials he had to hand. His skin has been daubed in thick mud. The marks of faith, crude and dripping as they are, descend across his arms and his face. In his free hand, he’s carrying my revolver. I have to admit it, he looks the part. Like a prophet of the river.

— Chapter 13: So Let Me Dwell Eternal.

[tsvwords]

I grew up on soup. When I was young. Every single day of the week, we ate soup.

Soup, and whatever scraps of crabmeat we had needed to last a week in the broth, because we lived close to the Saint Electric’s dam, and if the patrols saw Dad out in his boat they might recognise him as a wanted man.

So sitting there last night, with flakes of potted crab on my damn face, I couldn’t stop the anger from rising in me.

How long have they lived like this down here, the High Katabasian’s folk, Roemont, the inner circle - and yet they never once thought to share all that comfort?

— Chapter 30: Something Dreadful Shall Arise.

[tsvwords]

We live in a world of noise, and all this talking, it’s more angles and perspectives and commentary and outright propaganda, and if we’re very lucky our talking can lift us to a place of individual prominence and power, and then we’ll feel like we’ve won because we have an audience now, and this is when we get to really make a difference.

— Chapter 43: One Last Song of Revelations.

[tsvwords]

I propose we find ourselves a lightning-rod.

It’s simple, really. It’s something we’ve done in the past to great effect, when there was a divisive issue being stirred up by some troublemakers.

We find a spokesperson who’s been rather too outspoken on the wrong side of the argument, and we shift the focus entirely onto them.

“Was Adjudicator Shrue breaking impartiality laws when they spoke out in favour of anti-sacrificial reform?”

I’m just using you as an example, Shrue.

“Adjudicator Shrue on the defence as impartiality row escalates..”

Again, hm, just an example.

“Adjudicator Shrue found guilty and sentenced, after Legislatures impartiality investigation and a full trial.”

And then we can go on the offensive with the lightning-rod’s fellow travellers: 

“Oh, so you’re an anti-sacrificial activist, aren’t you? Well, let me ask you this right off the bat: will you condemn Adjudicator Shrue’s alarming and illegal acts?”

​And after a while, people who might have once been swayed are getting exhausted from having to hold too many opinions at once.

“Why is Adjudicator Shrue in the papers so much anyway?” 

“Maybe Adjudicator Shrue needs to shut their mouth and then all this fuss and nonsense can go away.”

Maybe the lightning-rod dies, with our intervention or without. Maybe they live on in squalor and contempt. But either way, the stink is on the movement, and the movement belongs to them.

— Chapter 39: This Rotten World Shall Wheeze Its Last.

[tsvwords]

In our rebirth, we shrug off death. We outlast decay. And it’s a wonderful thing, seeing the rebirth of a great man in our prophet Faulkner. It’s also, inevitably, a little sad - because all rebirth is a kind of sacrifice, a hallowing in its own right. The original person departs from us. He fades. And all we’re left with is footnotes, and mysteries, and conjecture. A paper man, a hollow statue, an impression. Our loss, not his.

— Chapter 35: The Wise Man Knows The Taste Of Rot.

[tsvwords]

When the winds gather, the thunder drums, and the lightning strikes, out over the hungering territories, it almost looks like something else; figures, beasts, great tableaus of light. Appearing for an instant, and then vanishing again before you can be certain of anything.

It’s so beautiful, yet so unsure, that you almost want to walk out into the storm to get a closer look.

Sometimes I get a cup of coffee, and I sit at the window and I watch the storm dancing in the emptiness, so I can see what’s coming for us.

— Chapter 41: But As My Last Breath Splits My Throat.

[tsvwords]

I’m a living miracle, sergeant. A hallowed relic, a saint and a sacrifice. I bear my god’s black and delicate marks of ink upon my flesh; I carry its fiery embrace in my wracked and ruined heart. Lo. Marvel at me.

— Chapter 31: Its Gaze Shall Fall O’er Trembling Plains.