Квентин и его друзья теперь короли и королевы волшебной страны Филлори. Но богатства, роскошь и праздный образ жизни начинают понемногу утомлять неугомонного Квентина, он жаждет приключений. Когда привычная утренняя охота принимает неожиданный зловещий оборот, Квентин и Джулия садятся на корабль, чтобы совершить путешествие по просторам своего королевства. Однако невероятным образом друзья оказываются в последнем месте, в котором хотели бы, — в реальном мире, недалеко от родного дома Квентина. И...
“There is Deeper Magic at work here, my child. Even the gods must bow to it. That is the way.”
“Oh, right. The Deeper Magic. I forgot about that.”
The Deeper Magic always seemed to come up when Ember didn’t feel like doing something, or needed to close a plot hole.
Страшновато жить, когда тебя не любят и ты никого не любишь...
"I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit," Eliot said. "Though that would explain a lot."
The higher you get the more you realize how much bigger than you everything is.
They gave him a lot of freedom and never asked him for much. Though the funny thing about never being asked for anything is that after a while you start to feel like maybe you don't have anything worth giving.
In the Order we call it 'inverse profundity'. We've observed it in any number of cases. The deeper you go into the cosmic mysteries, the less interesting everything gets.
"I don't think they can change their minds. When you get to that level of power and knowledge and perfection, the question of what you should do next gets increasingly obvious. Everything is very rule-governed. All you can ever do in any given situation is the most gloriously perfect thing, and there's only one of them. Finally there aren't any choices left to make at all."
"You're saying the gods don't have free will."
"The power to make mistakes," Penny said. "Only we have that. Mortals."
There was some murmuring among the upper servants that such a spartan chamber was not entirely suitable for a king of Fillory, but Quentin had decided that one of the good things about being a king of Fillory was that you got to decide what’s suitable for a king of Fillory.
In all honesty Quentin had only a very vague idea of how tournaments worked, or even what they were, except that they were something kings used to do at some point between when Jesus was alive and when Shakespeare was alive, which was as close as Quentin could get to placing when the Middle Ages had actually happened.
“Pardon me, Your Highness,” Eliot said, “but what the hell are you doing?”
“Sorry. It’s the only room that was big enough for the matches.”
“This is the part where I’m supposed to say, ‘Matches, what matches?’”
Time, that dull mechanism that usually reliably stamped out one second after another, like parts on a conveyor belt, erupted into a glorious melody.
He kicked open the first door he saw and almost died when a massive fireball rolled over him.
It was a colossally powerful casting. Someone had spent a long time setting it up and pumping energy into it. It enveloped him completely, and he felt the flames licking him, icy through the fireproofing spell. But the spell held. When the fire had dissipated his limbs were smoking but undamaged.
He was standing in the doorway of a darkened library. Inside, sitting at a desk with two lanterns on it, was a skeleton in a nice brown suit. Or not quite a skeleton, a man, but an obviously dead one. He still had flesh on him, but it had shrunk and turned leathery.
It was very still in the library. Bookshelves smoldered and crackled quietly on either side of Quentin, from the fireball. The corpse watched him with eyes like hard dry nuts.
“No?” it said finally. Its voice buzzed and flapped, a blown-out speaker. It obviously didn’t have much left in the way of vocal cords. Some unnatural force was keeping it alive, long after its sell-by date. “Well. That was my only spell.”
Дичь надо выбирать с осторожностью - вдруг поймаешь.
Вот что такое настоящее приключение, осознал он со жгучей ясностью. Синоним боли.
- Ты хочешь сказать, что боги не обладают свободой воли.
- То есть способностью совершать ошибки? Ею обладаем только мы, смертные.
Закладка основ - всегда самое трудное, поэтому охотников постигать какое-либо искусство никогда не бывает много. Так уж устроен мир: любая наука оказывается не просто труднее, чем ты ожидал, а выходит за рамки всех твоих ожиданий.
Welcome to Facelessbook: an antisocial network.
That's the thing about those tricksters, isn't it: they're never all that fucking funny.
Когда с тебя ничего не требуют, тебе начинает казаться, что ты ни на что путное в общем и не способен - странно, да?
- Отбей им телеграмму, - предложил Квентин. - «Дорогие дальнеостровитяне тчк пришлите денег тчк если у вас их нет присылать не надо тчк».