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And were betrayed

You left us, Mother to eternal silence

Yet

Mother Dark, with this unveiling, I feel you close Was it grief that sent you away, sent you so far fro way -- our appalling insensitivity -- we cursed you Added another layer to your pain

These steps you walked them once

How can you help but sash of her wound She halted, looked up, to see Moon’s Spawn directly overhead … weeping down upon her …

… and upon the field of corpses surrounding her, and, beyond and to the right, upon thousands of kneeling T’lan I colours, as if in the rain the scene, so softly saturated, was growing er the faded tableau of a Tiste Andii’s regard Life, drawn short, to sharpen every detail, flush every colour, to er Whiskeyjack My love

Mo down her face

In the gate’s glooe, over the led plain to where Korlat stood halfway to the hill, surrounded by corpses and shattered K’Chain Che’Malle Watched as her head tilted back, face slowly lifting to the grey shroud of the rain The blackedifice, seemed to pause directly over her A heart, once of stone, e -- what he no -- he kneith bleak certainty, would never leave hi time, heedless of direction, insensate to all that surrounded her, until distant ht her attention She now stood on the barren tundra, beneath solid white overcast, and watched the approach of the Rhivi spirits

A snificant in the distance, almost sed by the i chill that had settled into her bones like the blood of failure

Events had occurred Elsewhere in this nascent reale of h they had struck her with the saround on all sides, she had felt but the faintest hint of all that they had contained

If a gift, then a bitter one

If a curse, then so too is life itself a curse For there were lives within that frozen rain Entire lives, sent down to strike the flesh of this world, to seep down, to thaw the soil with its fecundity

But it has nothing to do with ht to fashion destroyed This dreamworld was itself a memory Ghostworld of Tellann, reo Remembrances, taken fro, taken from the Rhivi spirits, the First Clan, taken fro land itself -- Burn’s own flesh

II simply stole

To fashion a world foronceold through the norive back