The Hand Of Oberon

“How serious is this, Corwin?”
“It could be the end of everything,” I said. “I have to go now.”

“Mind if I ask why you put it there?”
“I’d be dead now if I hadn’t.”
“Pretty good reason.”

“Thanks, Julian. I — You are a difficult man to understand.”
“Not so. I think the Corwin I hated must have died centuries ago. Ride now, man! If Brand shows up around here, I’ll nail his hide to a tree!”

This thing with my moods, my thoughts — it comes and it goes. Even now, I feel some of my control slipping away.

The enemy of the moment is not as important as our own inner weakness.

“How did you know?” I asked him.

I wish that some time, long ago, something had not been said that was said, or something done that was not done. Something, had we known, which might have let him grow differently, something which would have seen him become another man than the bitter, bent thing I saw up there. It is best now if he is dead. But it is a waste of something that might have been.

Like most such questions, the benefit of these was in the asking, not the answering

what did I want? A chance to find out what was right and a chance to act on it! I laughed. Who is ever granted the first, let alone the second of these? A workable approximation of truth, then. That would be enough… And a chance to swing my blade a few times in the right direction: The highest compensation I could receive from a one o’clock world for the changes wrought since noon.

It was as if the entire celestial mandala were rotating about a point directly overhead. As to the light source of the brighter half, it simply could not be determined. Standing there, I looked down upon what at first seemed a valley filled with countless explosions of color; but when the advancing darkness faced this display away the stars danced and burned within its depths as well as above, giving them the impression of a bottomless chasm. It was as if I stood at the end of the world, the end of the universe, the end of everything.