“A delicate, inexorable lattice of inferences began to assemble themselves, like a crystal, in the old man's mind, shivering, catching the light in glints and surmises.”

“I began to make some money, but I could never bring myself to leave someone else in charge of the shop; the crystals are delicate things.”

“It took a freaking genius to put this together, Michael."I hefted my staff."Fortunately," I said, and took a two-handed swing at the nearest stand of slender, delicate crystal. It shattered with gratifying ease, and the encasing light around the greater circle began to waver and dissipate. "It only takes a monkey with a big stick to take it apart.”

“A plumped feather bed may have looked divine, but occupants quickly found themselves sinking into a hard, airless fissure between billowy hills. Support was on a lattice of ropes, which could be tightened with a key when they began to sag (hence the expression "sleep tight").”

“She began to feel sacred, scared and the voices came and went and her body became brittle, falling, drying, like cold Annihilation, like blue crystal spectrum light, sinking but white. To Nurture, Mist thought, falling cold white crystals, forming, while dying. Returning, falling sky, dying, and finally, on her cold white body, she felt...Snow.”

“He gives me one of those twinkling stares. His eyes coalesce and fragment color, glinting specks of midnight purple and an electric blue, when the light catches them just right. Straight on they look like indelible pitch, well deep with secrets and primordial darkness.”