...in going to sleep he had learned to vanquish light, and now the light could not rewake him.

I had failed him; I knew it. But I could do no more. It was beyond my strength.
That night, I think, he explored the uttermost depths of his loneliness.

The crippled old man in leggings and white ceremonial trousers shuffled out into the late afternoon. He dried his eyes on his sleeve and whimpered one last time in his throat. He was grown too old, he thought. He could not understand what had happened. But even his sorrow was feeble now; it had withered, like his leg, over the years, and only once in a while, when something unusual happened to remind him of it, did it take on the edge and point of pain.

One who, alone, would be unconquerable. But he weakens himself with allegiances.

He’d calloused his mind plenty, but because his foundation was cracked, when shit got real he lost control of his mindset and became a slave to his self doubt.

Insomnia is his mind's revenge for all the tricky thoughts he has carefully avoided during the daylight hours.

He rolled in his bed, twisting the sheets, grappling with a problem years too big for him, awake in the night like a single sentinel on picket. And sometime after midnight, he slept, too, and then only the wind was awake, prying at the hotel and hooting in its gables under the bright gimlet gaze of the stars.

He forgot his wounds, his hunger and thirst, and became fear; hopeless fear

“I have not slept well since I first entered my brother’s dungeons. While my comfort has improved since then, worry has taken the place of hanging in chains as a denier of rest.”
“There are many kinds of imprisonment,” Jarnauga nodded.

This love was a torment, and he resented bitterly the subjugation in which it held him; he was a prisoner and he longed for freedom.

Sometimes he awoke in the morning and felt nothing; his soul leaped, for he thought he was free; he loved no longer; but in a little while, as he grew wide awake, the pain settled in his heart, and he knew that he was not cured yet.

I was beaten till the dogs woke up. I forgave him and then he started making it a habit.'

Der Abend wechselt langsam die Gewänder, die ihm ein Rand von alten Bäumen hält.

2445. He's a Slave, that cannot command himself.

What he could bear in the waking world he could not by night and he sat awake for fear the dream would return.