Crag the Crow

Loving is essence and essential. Yet who can maintain it for their mortal dash? To love is to give  And to give is to sacrifice. Love and life will require it all. Your essence dashed upon the rocks. Your life scrubbed raw.  All that is built, All that is gained, All that serves, Shall be required of you at the dread tribunal Stripping you of pride and glory. O man, it is not yours to take to your cave. To give and to love for the dash is the command. And life’s failure is assured - As much as the yearly cracking of crooked manacles Maniacally parades through the shortened days. To love is to die. To die is to be stripped. To be stripped is to be freed so Janus may return. O man, O people, can you love? Can you love for your narrowly chiseled moment? The granite void upon which we hang It is failure. To fail in gain is to sacrifice to love.

Mock Up Cover, Obvs A phenomenal thing happened yesterday:   I finished the first of three parts for, what I hope, will be my first novel.   It is a fantasy about a young man and his rite of passage, and the war that happens for his soul between the holy Colluchians and the evil Aenocyons.   Gordie is a young man sent on the Ramble, the generations-old journey to adulthood for the Colluchians.   The wisefolk imparted tremendous wisdom to him before his journey, hoping that this would keep him from straying away.   They have hope that he will be the leader who would bring peace and joy to the Commonwealth.   He was on a path to gain mastery of great power, as willed for him by the deity Colluch.   But Gordie swears off his god and places himself at the center of his own world. During his subsequent exile, he is pursued by the evil Ayersi, the ugliest man from the distant city of Aenocyon.   As he escapes, he is taken under the protect...