C. S. Friedman

I sold my soul for knowledge of the future, only to have that very pact render me forever ignorant.

What is a child?" he asks her.
The diamond gaze does not flinch. "Creatures that are sold on the street by their parents, to get the coin to make more children." She paused. "Adults sell themselves.

Civilized man longs for the illusion of barbarism. Either his culture fulfills this need by adopting its outer trappings, or he will be seduced by his first contact with a culture that does.

The Tyr had tried. It had really tried. It must have gone over every element of human psychology, tried desperately to understand the nature of human aesthetic sense … and then failed, miserably, in every regard.

My identity is without root.

We share need, not-human. Yours is straightforward.” … “Mine is less so, but you will serve it. Come.

The gods, he knows now, will not help mankind. If they even exist—which he is no longer certain of—it is clear they do not care what happens. Perhaps they will even applaud when the last monuments of the Second Age of Kings crumble to dust, and the men who once worshiped them are reduced to the level of beasts. Perhaps that is what they intended all along.

All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let myself in for?