Favorite Quotes

[Fiction]

"Even on a cloudy day, I'll keep my eyes fixed on the sun." -Cage the Elephant, Shake Me Down

[Gentian]

Beneath the Sinai Peninsula

Through the wound, entrance.

Through the veins, retreat.

His quest was done.

In the nature of true searching, he had found himself. Now his people needed him as they gathered in their desolation. It was his destiny to lead them into a new land, for he was their savior.

Down he sped.

Down from the Egypt eye of the sun, in from the Sinai, away from their skies like a sea inside out, their stars and planets spearing your soul, their cities like insects, all shell and mechanism, their blindness with eyes, their vertiginous plains and mind-crushing mountains. Down from the billions who had made the world in their own human image. Their signature could be a thing of beauty. But it was a thing of death. Their presence had become the world, and their presence was the presence of jackals that strip the muscle from your legs even as you try to outrun them.

The earth closed over him. With each twist and bend, it sealed shut behind him. It resurrected senses long buried. Solitude! Quiet! Darkness was light. Once again he could hear the planet's joints and lifeblood. Stirrings in the stone. Ancient events. Here, time was like water. The tiniest creatures were his fathers and mothers. The fossils were his children. It made him into remembrance itself.

He let his bare palms ricochet upon the walls, drawing in the heat and the cold, the sharp and the smooth. Plunging, galloping, he pawed at the flesh of God. This magnificent rock. This fortress of their being. This was the Word. Earth. Moment by moment, step by step, he felt himself becoming prehistoric. It was a blessed release from human habits. In this vast, capillaried monastery, through these openings and fretted spillways and yawning chthonic fistulae, drinking from pools of water older than mammal life altogether, memory was simply memory. It was not something to be marked on calendars or stored in books or labeled in graphs or drawn on maps. You did not memorize memory any more than you memorized existence.

He remembered his way deeper by the taste of the soil and by the drag of air currents that had no cardinal direction. He left behind the cartography of the Holy Land and its entry caves through Jebel el Lawz in the elusive Midian. He forgot the name of the Indian Ocean as he passed beneath it. He felt gold, soft and serpentine, standing from the walls, but no longer recognized it as gold.

Time passed, but he gave up counting it. Days? Weeks? He lost his memory even as he gained it. He saw himself and did not know it was himself. It was in a sheet of black obsidian. His image rose up as a black silhouette within the blackness. He went to it and laid his hands on the volcanic glass and stared at his face reflecting back.

Something about the eyes seemed familiar.

Onward he hurtled, weary, yet refreshed. The depths gave flesh to his strength. Occasional animals provided him the gift of their meat. More and more, he witnessed life in the darkness, heard its chirps and rustling. He found evidence of his refugees and, long before them, of hadal nomads and religious travelers. Their markings on the walls filled him with grief for the lost glory of his empire. His people had fallen from grace, steeply and deep and for so long they were hardly aware of their own descent. Yet now, even in their emptiness and misery, they were being pursued in the name of God, and that could not be. For they were God's children, and had lived in the wilderness long enough to wash their sins into amnesty. They had paid for their pride or independence or whatever else it was that had offended the natural order, and now, after an exile of a hundred eons, they had been returned to their innocence. For God to continue punishing them was wrong. To allow them to be hunted into extinction was a sacrilege.

But then, from the very beginning, his people had challenged the notion that God ever showed mercy. They were his lie. They were his sin. It had always been a false hope that God might deliver them from His own wrath into love. No, deliverance had to come from some other soul.

[Fiction]

"Microsoft isn't evil. They just make really crappy operating systems." -Linus Torvalds. Invented the Linux kernel, invented the best roast.

[EquestrianPenguin]

"Men are born, and then they are formed. Least, that's the way I see it" - John Marston Red Dead Redemption

[Fiction]

"You're fit to learn the proper meaning of a beatdown, madness, chaos in the brain, let my blood flow, make my blood flow through you, mane ; you've got no business questioning a thing." -Death Grips, No Love

[EquestrianPenguin]

"Sometimes you just get lost in the sauce" Wiz Khalifa

[Fiction]

This guy's a hero. Wish I was gay, black, and a little older now, if you know what I mean

[Gentian]

Statistics are like Bikinis: What they reveal is interesting, but what they conceal is essential...but inaccuracies made in an effort to promote a pet position are pretty ugly no matter what they're dressed in.

Once again, I find myself split right down the middle, like a fine vagina.

[EquestrianPenguin]

Statistics are like Bikinis: What they reveal is interesting, but what they conceal is essential...but inaccuracies made in an effort to promote a pet position are pretty ugly no matter what they're dressed in.

Once again, I find myself split right down the middle, like a fine vagina.

XD

"A wise guy is always beaten by a smartass"

[Gentian]

Beneath the Yap and Palau Trenches

She had been stalking him for two days, gaining insights as long and winding as the trail into the great pit. The human was limping. He had a wound, possibly several. Time and again he exhibited fear.

Was he in true flight or not, though? She didn't know this human well. In the brief moments she'd seen him in action, he'd seemed more adept than the others. But outwardly he appeared to be wearing down. The tortuous path was catching up with her, too.

She licked the wall where he had leaned, and his taste quickened her decision. She still lacked information, but was hungry, and his salt and meat were suddenly too tempting. She gave in to her stomach. It was time to make the kill. She began to close the gap.

It took another day of careful pursuit. She nursed their distance, careful not to startle him. There were too many hunter tales of animals taking fright and bolting into some abyss, never to be retrieved. Also, she didn't want to run him any more than necessary. That wasted the energy in his flesh, and already she considered his flesh hers.

Finally they reached a squeeze, where boulders had all but choked the passage. She saw him puzzling over the jumble of stone, watched him spy the hole near his feet. He got down and wormed into the pass. She darted forward to hamstring him while his legs were still exposed. As if anticipating her, he drew his legs in quickly. She lowered the knife and squatted down, waiting while his sounds diminished as he went deeper.

At last it grew quiet in there, and she knelt and thrust herself into the opening. The stone felt slightly soapy and amphibian from so many bodies, hadal and animal, slithering through. She prided herself for being nearly as quick horizontally as on her feet. In childhood races through such narrow passages, she had usually won.

The squeeze passage was longer than she'd thought, though not as long as some, which could go on for days. There were legends about those, too. And ghost stories, of whole tribes snaking their way into a thin vein, one behind the other, only to reach the feet of a skeleton that bottle-necked the tunnel. She had no qualms about this one: there was too much fresh animal smell for it to be a cul-de-sac.

The passage tightened, and there was an awkward kink sideways and up. It was the kind of bend that took a contortionist shift. Every now and then she'd encountered these puzzles, where your knees or shoulders might pop out of joint if the move wasn't carefully rehearsed. She was limber and small, and even so it took two false starts to decipher the move. She torqued through on her back, surprised that the larger man had made it through with such facility.

She emerged, knife first. She was just clambering to her feet when he stepped from behind. He dropped a rope around her throat and pulled. She slashed backward, but he kneed her in the spine and that flattened her. He was fast and strong, noosing her wrists and elbows and cinching the rope tight.

The capture took ten seconds. It was accomplished in complete silence. Only now did she realize who had been stalking whom. The limp, the awkward visibility, the fear – all a ploy. He'd offered himself as a weakling, and she'd fallen for it. She started to screech her outrage, only to taste the rope across her tongue as he finished gagging and trussing her.

It occurred to her that he might be a hadal disguised with human frailties. Then she saw by the faint light of the stone that he was indeed a human, and was indeed wounded. By his markings she read that he had been a captive once, and immediately knew which one. From their legends, she recognized the renegade who had caused so much destruction to her people. He was renowned. Feared and despised. They considered him a devil, and the story of his deception was taught to children as an example of estrangement and disorder.

He spoke to her in pidgin hadal, his clicks and utterances almost impenetrable. His pronunciation was barbaric, and his question was stupid. If she understood correctly, the traitor wanted to know which way the center lay, and that alarmed her, for the People could scarcely bear more harm. He gestured downward in the direction they were already headed. Thinking he might be lost, and could be made more lost, she calmly indicated the opposite direction. He smiled knowingly and patted her head – an egregious if playful insult – and said something in his flat language. Then he tugged at her leash and started her down the trail.

At no time in the mercenaries' captivity had the girl been very concerned. She had been alone among them, and that was like being a shadow to your own body. Her life was simply a part of the greater sangha, or community, and without the sangha she was essentially dead to herself. That was the way. But now this terrible enemy was bringing her back to life, back into the People's midst, and she knew he meant to use her against the sangha in some way. And that would be worse than a thousand deaths.