Stories inside, each one nested within all the others; as though all the stories we had ever been inside of lay still nested inside of us, back to th… - John Crowley

Like a sun: but a small sun, which she had within her, warming her from the inside out. She was conscious of a feeling she had had before, a sense that she was looking at him, and at all of them, from some far way off, or from a great height. There had been a time when she seemed to herself to be snug, and small, within the large house of Smokey, a safe inhabitant, room to run in yet never leave his encompassment. Now she oftener felt otherwise: over time it was he who seemed to have become a mouse within the house of her.

A foreign nation to which the witch and the sorcerer gave their whole allegiance, where every common human act and feeling was reversed and made into its opposite: where the Savior of mankind was despised and His Cross trampled and shat upon, and the Devil’s fundament worshipped; where persons surrendered their natural dominion over the animals and instead took on animal form themselves; where coupling was done openly in groups and not in the dark alone; where children were not nurtured but aborted and slain, not fed but eaten. Children killed and eaten: not in fable, not to be released unharmed from the wolf’s belly or resurrected from their own boiled bones, but truly killed and eaten like fowl by our neighbors in secret. The ultimate crime, the crime the Roman magistrates once charged the first Christians with, and the Christians their Gnostic rivals and later the Jews who lived among them. When we hear of children killed and eaten we have entered the counterworld, Hell on earth, and it is usual for some, or many, to be hunted down and slain before it is closed and forgotten again.

There wasn't any answer to that. So he tried harder, and the question got more circumstantial and tentative, and at the same time more precise and exact; and still there were no answers, only the fuller and fuller form of the question, evolving as Auberon had described to her all life evolving, reaching out limbs and inventing organs, reticulating joints, doing and being in more and more complex yet more and more compact and individuated ways, until the question, perfectly asked, understood its own answerlessness.