They didn’t shelter their own, didn’t feed their own, didn’t heal their own, and yet, in the midst of all this inhumanity, they held themselves as the pinnacle of human civilization.

We have witnessed life’s myriad struggles. From the lone creature suffering its last moments to thousands dying in a bleak season. And what have we learned? Only that life is its own purpose. And that, where there is life, there shall be suffering. Has it any meaning? Is existence reason enough?

Hands were such extraordinary tools, she mused. Tools, weapons, clumsy and deft, numb and tactile. Among tribal hunters, they could speak, a flurry of gestures eloquent in silence. But they could not taste. Could not hear. Could not weep. For all that, they killed so easily.

We are not born innocent, simply unmeasured... Until the outside is inflicted on the inside, then the brutal war begins. We are not born to compassion either – large wide eyes and sweet demeanor notwithstanding.

There exists an exchange of trust between the ruler and the ruled. Abuse that from either direction and all mutual agreements are nullified.

Everything worth fighting for is gained without fighting.

Rigga, Riggalai the Seer, the wax-witch who trapped souls in candles and burned them. Souls devoured in flame –.

The son, after all, is but an extension of the mother – at least so the mother believed, there in some inarticulate part of her soul, unseen yet solid as an iron chain. Assail the child and so too the mother is assailed, for what is challenged is her life as a mother, the lessons she taught or didn’t teach, the things she chose not to see, to explain away, to pretend were otherwise than what they were.

Indolence takes many forms, but it comes to every civilization that has outlived its will. You know that as well as I. In this case it was an indolence characterized by a pursuit of knowledge, a frenzied search for answers to everything, no matter the value of such answers. A civilization can as easily drown in what it knows as in what it doesn’t know.

Anarchists live in fear and long for death, because they despair of seeing in others the very virtues they lack in themselves. In this manner, they take pleasure in sowing destruction, if only to match their inner landscape of ruin.