Ashtadukht slumped and let the nightingale’s song flood her brain. She knew that empty tone, that defeated outlook; she knew it intimately. Even now, it burned in her as limply as snuffed flame. Passion burned with unchecked verve, devoured its fuel, and sputtered out. Despair required no upkeep; it heaped barely-glowing coals in the back of your mind and fuelled itself.

— Darrell Drake

Battle is gruesome, but it is vigorous, alive. The aftermath is the worst of it: adrenaline fades, quiet sweeps in, and there’s nothing to distract you from the mess of bodies and disturbed earth.

— Darrell Drake

♫ Climbed that roost, alighted right there. Made mush of his head for the onlooker bears. A two-pronged her prize, a meat most rare. Do-gooders will pay. Do-gooders will fear. ♫

— Darrell Drake

Deception was an inherent trait of intelligent beings. Even his love, in her ample ardor, would weave him a guilty lie for his own good. And he treasured her just as well for those tales he was sure she'd already spun.

— Darrell Drake

If the years have taught me one thing it's that those who care are always scarce. Those who genuinely care; not the acquaintances, false friends or those with similar aspirations. The few who seek your company, the souls who would plainly step off the world for you. Once you resolve to ignore them, only regret will follow.

— Darrell Drake

I was impregnable once,” Merrill thought to contribute. She remembered how troublesome it made getting around, having a ripe belly. Couldn’t roll properly, couldn’t hop properly, couldn’t romp or flop properly. There were the cravings for roasted cabbage—she loathed cabbage, with its leaves and growing in rows. And labor! Merrill passed out during childbirth. She’d endured burns, lacerations, rips, serrated teeth, nails, hooks and a trove of unmentionable harm-inf lictors. Labor trounced them all and wriggled gleefully in the spray of blood and gore. “Being impregnable is no good. No good at all. Like growing a bitter melon in your belly.

— Darrell Drake

She could have rambled with all the fervor of a woman who had loved one entity for longer than most races live, and with the inviolable, unquestioned certainty found in dementia. There were references dated and sealed with meticulous care which she would have enthusiastically opened with the mirth of one proclaiming a lifetime of honors and awards. But that singular event was freshly disturbed; its pores still drifted on the faint zephyr of remembrance.

— Darrell Drake

She did not belong to the healthy group of widows and widowers who, after mourning, would nurture the seed of their grief into growing from loss—perhaps continuing the dreams of the lost, or learning to cherish alone the things they’d cherished together. She belonged instead to the sad lot who clung to grief, who nurtured it by never moving beyond it. They’d shelter it deep inside where the years padded it in sausage layers like some malignant pearl.

— Darrell Drake

She murdered for her truth, and they had died for theirs.

— Darrell Drake

She set out for revenge, to run them through, to do what an elf, an elf must do.” The next verse was Merrill’s to improvise. “Climbed that roost, alighted right there. Made mush of his head for the onlooker bears.” “A two-pronged her prize, a meat most rare. Do-gooders will pay. Do-gooders will fear.” “Ballad of the loneliest ones,” lamented Merrill. “The loneliest ones,” said Alma. She accepted that title; they were the loneliest. The elf gloomed.

— Darrell Drake