In that Malazan Book of the Fallen, the historians will write of our suffering, and they will speak of it as the suffering of those who served the Cr… - Steven Erikson

"The Emperor is dead!
So too his right hand - now cold, now severed!
But mark these dying shadows,
twinned and flowing bloody and beaten,
down and away from mortal sight...
From sceptre's rule dismissed,
from gild candelabra the light now fled,
from a hearth ringed in hard jewels
seven years this warmth has bled...

The Emperor is dead.
So too his master'd companion, the rope cut clean.
But mark this burgeoning return -
faltering dark, the tattered shroud -
embracing children in Empire's dying light.
Hear now the dirge faint reprised,
before the sun's fall, this day spills red
on buckled earth, and in obsidian eyes
vengeance chimes seven times..." — Call to Shadow, Felisin (I.i. 1-18)

You take your natural vices and call them virtues. Of which greed is the most despicable. That and betrayal of commonality. After all, whoever decided that competition is always and without exception a healthy attribute? Why that particular path to self-esteem? Your heel on the hand of the one below. This is worth something? Let me tell you, it’s worth nothing. Nothing lasting. Every monument that exists beyond the moment — no matter which king, emperor or warrior lays claim to it — is actually a testament to the common, to co-operation, to the plural rather than the singular.

long ago, there’d been choices he could have made that would have sent him on a different path. But those days were dead, and the future held only nights, a stretch of darkness that led down to the eternal dark. He would meet Vorcan, eventually, and he’d swear his life to the Guild Master, and that would be that, the closing of the final door. And his sense of outrage at the injustices around him, the corruptions of the world, would wither in the unlit tunnels beneath Darujhistan. In the exactness of the methods of assassination, his final victim would be himself.