Picking up from my last blog, I’m always finding the best fantasy and sci fi authors offer up countless tidbits by which we can see our way through life’s travails, much like their characters do. Fiction/fact…tomáto/tomäto.

While I’m far from claiming myself a “best” anything, they do inspire me. Here are two mantras I gave my characters in Upon A Legacy Sworn to help when dire straits gripped them and prospects for survival looked grim.

~~~~~

I will not fear.
Fear awaits within the dark halls of my death, within my torment and pain, amongst the restless shadows between doubt and the unknown.
What is death that I should so fear? A journey’s pause. This I will not fear. What is pain that I should fear? Pain is my sister. She walks beside me in life. What of the unknown that I should so fear? It is the stone upon which I hone my mind, my will, my purpose.
I will turn and face my fear. Like the wind it will pass over me. I will watch its strength pass through me. Where fear has gone, only I remain.

~~~~~

Pain is my sister. Pain is my pathway. Down her lies my journey. Pain is my destiny. She walks with me in life. She awaits me in death. Pain is my sister. Her, I will always know.

~~~ And a little somethin’ from my upcoming, The Many Shades of Madness ~~~

There is a progression in all things. Fear, with its fevered grip upon mind and bowel; madness, in all its fractured extremes; belief, rising with blind certitude from the trough between despair and hope. And what of truth? Truth stands. Raised immutable and proud. Indurate as stone. Exalted. Godlike. Ah yes, godlike. And in just this singular arrogance, this presumption upon divine immortality, was truth’s ruin first conceived. Truth’s ruin? Impossible, you cry.

Mortal fools. What other end was ever possible? Before the inexorable sweep of time, the sovereign majesty of eternity, how can such an artifact as truth but fail. In epochal dissolution, her final poverty, truth will lie prostrate amidst the rot of her own dust, the exhausted shadow of once sublime dominions of thought, her end to join the bone yard of mortal philosophies strewn like cold ash across the ages of man. Truth? Truth exists like all creation, within but the gods’ many dreams. And some would cry, within the many shades of madness.