Grail

PROLOGUE

Men are such pathetic, lumpen things – so predictable in their appetites, such slaves to their tedious desires and pleasures. Creatures of dull habit and savage compulsion, they waver between one and the other, never perceiving anything of the world beyond their animal passions. Why, the cattle of the field know more of life.

Ah, but it is all too easy. I have long since tired of their trivial ambitions and endeavours. Ignorant brutes, they deserve every misfortune their beast of a god can rain down upon them.

Where is real strength? Where is true courage? Where is genuine discipline harnessed to uncompromising volition, and both allied in total harmony, each subject to the other? Where are such treasures to be found?

On the battlefield, in the heat of the fight? Ha! That is what men think, and as in all else they are vastly mistaken. War is children with dirty faces squabbling over the dungheap. In war, life – that single most precious substance in the universe – is bartered cheap, thrown away, wasted, traded for a prize which will not last beyond the changing of the seasons. Fools, all of them! Blind, ignorant fools – it is pure joy tormenting them.

Only that which endures beyond time is worth having.

Well I know it. I, who have given all for the mastery of time and the elements, know the value of life. Truly, truly, I have spent my life on the things that endure. Not for nothing am I called the Queen of Air and Darkness.