“To peace, Royin... We give our lives seeking it, but it is only in death that we find it.”

“When I was younger, I used to think that loving someone meant being weak. I thought it meant giving yourself up and losing your identity, and becoming just an other to someone else. I thought that only those who weren’t strong enough to stand on their own needed someone to lean on. I never realized that love is as much about giving strength as accepting it, and that love doesn’t mean that you can’t stand on your own, but only that now you can fly.”

“Shut up,” I snapped. “This is not the time. What part of this situation seems like a joke to you?”Lohka pulled up his knees, giving a feeble, half-manic little laugh. “Oh, maybe just the idea that some soul-devouring being of chaos could be waiting anywhere to finish destroying my life,” he said. “That’s kind of hilarious, you know. Have you ever had a soul-devouring being of chaos hunting you down so it could finish eating you?”“No,” I said. “I’m sorry, Lohka.”“That’s nice,” he muttered.“What about the part where this soul-devouring being of chaos seems to have a taste for me at the moment?” Zhabyr asked. “Can we worry about that, now? Because I kind of already am.”

“Sometimes people need to know they could be forgiven to have the strength to change.”

“Men are not angels,” Akhmar affirmed. “And so men have the chance to be noble, in a way that angels cannot.”

“We—all of us—want to feel special. We want to feel the glory that shines on us when we reach beyond our boundaries to grab at something greater, to live a heroic life, if only for a day or a week or a moment. This simple yearning is in us all, hardly recognizable, often only the merest hint that there is something more to us. This is why we seek out new places...we want to remember a somewhere that gave us the space to expand ourselves, to become a little more of who we truly are.”

“It's instinct," he said then. "For centuries, it's been our job to protect our home, our women, and our children. We're emotional cowards. We don't talk about our feelings, we're not comfortable putting our soul into words. So we give of ourselves the only way we know how. We protect. We smother those we love in protection, fight for ways to keep them always safe, even from what we deem as a threat from themselves. It's in our genes, Kira. Right or wrong. Emotions are harder for a man to voice, strength is much easier for us to show. It's not an insult, it's the way men show their emotions for those they love. You can't change it.""I can protect myself.”