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[headlesssamurai]

‘‘A goddess of death. Not causing it, nor relishing in its frequency, but overseeing that inevitable and necessary facet of reality, facilitating its place in the great Balance of all things, shepherding the transition of souls from our side into the unknowable other. She has many names, Matron of Death, Mistress of Winter, yet most know her as The Queen of Ravens, and she is commonly named The Raven Queen. Her first name, her secret name is not known, not even to the other gods. Her ascension to godhood is a tale lost to the mists of eternity. Yet in her ascent she struck forever from the annals of memory the name of the god who preceded her so that even the fabric of time and space now know it not, and within that powerful change was her own name also lost. It is known she was once a mortal woman of some learned renown, a practitioner of the wizardly arts many lifetimes ago, in the Age of Arcanum...’’

[headlesssamurai]

“And this, she saw, her dream had done. She had built against that fear a vision of power not wholly selfish—power to protect not only herself, but others. And that vision—however partial it had been in those days—was worth following. For it led not away from the fear, as a dream of rule might do, but back into it. The pattern of her life—as she saw it then, clear and far away and painted in bright colors—the pattern of her life was like an intricate song, or the way the Kuakgan talked of the grove's interlacing trees. There below were the dream's roots, tangled in fear and despair, nourished in the death of friends, the bones of the strong, the blood of the living, and there high above were the dream's images, bright in the sun like banners or the flowering trees of spring. And to be that banner, or that flowering branch, meant being nourished by the same fears: meant encompassing them, not rejecting them.”         ―   Elizabeth Moon