People usually take for granted that the way things are is the way things must be. - Poul Anderson

Don’t get me wrong. These people are mine. I like and in many ways admire them. They’re the salt of the earth. It’s simply that I want other condiments too.

The air was cold and smelled of earth. Birds twittered. “Beyond one or two hundred years back,” Havig once said to me, “the daytime sky is always full of wings.”

That is forgotten, their wars and their deeds and their very speech. Wisdom lasts. It is what I have sought across the world.