amanda the doll

Maybe you and I do deserve to suffer for our wrongdoing. If that’s so, then it means that when things get painful, when things get difficult, we don’t have the luxury of quitting. We don’t get to end our lives to escape what we did. Whatever form the pain takes, we bear it, we endure it, we welcome it, all while we try to make this world a place where people like us, like how we used to be, have no place, and the people who would be hurt can instead live in peace. The next time you encounter an obstacle you cannot overcome, when you just want to curl up into a ball and quit on the world, remind yourself that you don’t deserve the peace of surrender. You have to keep working, to keep fighting, to keep suffering, until the day when you’ve fully repented.

She knew she needn’t bother as her dad would be sleeping like a log. He had sleep apnea and used a CPAP machine to help him sleep and would also swallow a couple of tablets to help him get a good night’s rest. The whir of the machine sounded like a quiet vacuum, while her dad lay on his back like a hospital patient with the tube rigged up to his nose. She’d gotten a fright when she’d seen it the first time, but she’d gotten used to it by now.

“I can see your treasury. By now, all of the loot from the church raids must be long spent, most likely on the arena, with any remaining money going to repairing damages from the Wassengel battle and the loss of Welindar’s revenue. That pile of gold is going to keep getting smaller and smaller. Either Galvin is going to bankrupt the country, he’ll raise taxes, or he has a new resource to exploit. So which is it?”