If the gods do decide to wipe us out, is it such a bad thing? Maybe we've earned a little annihilation.

He was dead again when I got home that day. His corpse was in the kitchen, near the counter, where it appeared he'd been chopping vegetables when the urge to stab himself through the wrist had struck. I slipped on the blood coming in, which annoyed me because that meant it was all over the kitchen floor.

But perhaps that was just the way of power: no such thing as too much.

If the gods do decide to wipe us out, is it such a bad thing? Maybe we've earned a little annihilation.

We can never be gods, after all--but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.

I am not as I once was. They have done this to me, broken me open and torn out my heart. I do not know who I am anymore. I must try to remember.

And in that sliver of time, I felt the power around me coalesce, malice-hard and sharp as crystal. That this analogy occurred to me should have been a warning.