What else is love,” Mathiax had asked her one day, “but taking the pain of another as your own — especially when you are not obliged to?” Thus, pain … - Stephen R. Lawhead

..none of this surprised me; it was as if this meeting between us was foreordained by a force greater than either of us. I know I had the events wheeling swiftly over a well-traveled course to a destination long ago established. I felt as if I was merely saying the words I had been destined to say. If there was no surprise, neither was there fear or alarm. The circumstance seemed both right and natural — as if we had talked this way a thousand times, and knew well what the other would say... This is the only truth we can know in life. Nothing else in the world is certain — only this: that a man and woman should come together in love.

All that winter's day and far into the night the kings twisted and squirmed, but Merlin held them in his iron grasp and would not let go. He became first a rock, and then a mountain in Arthur's defence. Arthur stood equally unmoved. No power on earth could have prevailed against them . . .

You’re changing the course of history. I thought that sort of thing was strictly forbidden.