Death cannot be struggled against, brother. It ever arrives, defiant of every hiding place, of every frantic attempt to escape. Death is every mortal's shadow, his true shadow, and time is its servant, spinning that shadow slowly round, until what stretched behind one now stretches before him.

Any reasonable ruler would have the expectation and the demand the other way round.

What matter the colour of the collar around a man's neck, if the chains linked to them were identical?

He was not a modest man. Contemplating suicide, he summoned a dragon.' Gothos' Folly

Kallor said: "I walked this land when the T'lan Imass were but children. I have commanded armies a hundred thousand strong. I have spread the fire of my wrath across entire continents, and sat alone upon tall thrones. Do you grasp the meaning of this?" "Yes," said Caladan Brood, "you never learn."

Oh yes, I have learned much from Tremorlor, and so assume a like strategy. Silence, a faint mocking smile suggesting I know more than I do, an air of mystery, yes, and fell knowledge. None could guess my confusion, my host of deluded illusions and elusive delusions!

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.