Wooden.boards With Quotes

The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father’s study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.

I found myself thinking of an ocean running beneath the whole universe, like the dark seawater that laps beneath the wooden boards of an old pier: an ocean that stretches from forever to forever and is still small enough to fit inside a bucket, if you have Old Mrs. Hempstock to help you get it in there, and you ask nicely.

Volcano surfing is a sport in which a person rides down an active volcano at speeds up to 50 miles per hour using nothing but a wooden board. When I heard about this activity, I thought to myself, it must be nice to feel so safe, you have to invent new ways to put yourself in danger.

There are times when a man should sleep entwined in the warm flesh of a woman, his flanks plummeting into the perfumed bedding while she lovingly rolls her sweet shoulders into his chest. Whereas, there are times to be stoic and solitary—sleeping alone on a wooden board with twill sheets and splinters that scratch the skin.

Large portraits of Mao on wooden boards several feet high stood at main street corners. Painted to make the old man look extremely youthful, healthy, and fat (a sign of well-being in China), these pictures provided a mocking contrast to the thin, pale-faced pedestrians walking listlessly below them.

Are you smarter than my chicken?” cried a weathered, wild-haired woman holding a nonplussed bird over her head. At her feet was a wooden board covered with numbers and arcane symbols. “Lay your bets! Test your wits against a trained fowl! One coppin a try! Are you smarter than my chicken? You might be in for a surprise!

It was all so meaningless when I looked at it that way. It was meaningless in the same way as when I stood up from a game and then looked down on the scatter of playing pieces, and realized that they all were just bits of polished stone on a wooden board marked with squares. All the meaning they'd had moments before when I'd been trying to win a game were meanings that I'd imbued them with. Of themselves, neither they nor the board had any significance.

She knew them by their thick woven cloaks, their hanging hair and beards, and their Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples spilt over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father’s words, and her mother’s, and her sister’s. Utterly unlike Onnen’s otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish. Hild spoke each to each. Apples to apples, otter to otter, gleam to gleam, though only when her mother wasn’t there.

The house remembered her. Laurel did not consider herself a romantic, but the sense was so strong that for a moment she had no trouble believing that the combination before her of wooden boards and red chimney bricks, or dappled roof tiles and gabled windows at odd angles, was capable of remembrance.

These were colours he'd never ever seen before; ones he couldn't possibly begin to name. Here, to his left, was a wooden clock, and it was painted, well not exactly green, but a colour that green might like to be if it had any imagination at all. And over there, beside the wooden board game whose overriding colour was not red, but something that red might look at enviously, blushing with embarrassment at its own dull appearance. And the wooden letter sets, well, there were those who might have said that they were painted yellow and blue, but they would have said this knowing that such plain words were an outrageous insult to the colouring on the letters themselves.

Potter laughed, a breathless, quiet sound, and Draco shut him up by Conjuring a hovering wooden board, which flew at Potter and smacked him firmly in the chest.

Wraithlike girls with perilous clavicles drifted through the room, their footsteps mere whispers against the dark wooden boards.

Anglisc voices: words drumming like apples split over wooden boards, round, rich, stirring. Like her father's words, and her mother's, and her sister's. Utterly unlike Onnen's otter-swift British or the dark liquid gleam of Irish.

Creamy-looking custards were followed by beautifully decorated slices of cake. Crisp-shelled pastries were set down next to gooey-centered pies. Dainty little goblets featuring ice cream and sorbet came out on a silver tray, and a pungent aroma rose off a long wooden board that was dotted with more kinds of cheese than Gladys had ever seen,

Margherita was not allowed to play in the 'portego,' for one never knew when a customer would come, and the room must always be clean and tidy and respectable. It was only ever used by the family on special occasions, and so Margherita's eyes widened when she saw that her mother had spread the table with a spotless white cloth and the best pewter bowls and mugs. A small bunch of 'margherita' daisies was in a fat blue jug, and three sweet oranges sat in an earthenware bowl. Coarse brown bread stood ready on a wooden board, next to a bowl of soft white cheese floating in golden oil and thyme sprigs. Soup made with fish and clams and fennel and scattered with sprigs of fresh parsley steamed in a big clay pot.

And are we not guilty of offensive disparagement in calling chess a game? Is it not also a science and an art, hovering between those categories as Muhammad’s coffin hovered between heaven and earth, a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations; constantly developing, yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere; mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance – but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all books and works of art; the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras, although no one knows what god brought it down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind. Where does it begin and where does it end? Every child can learn its basic rules, every bungler can try his luck at it, yet within that immutable little square it is able to bring forth a particular species of masters who cannot be compared to anyone else, people with a gift solely designed for chess, geniuses in their specific field who unite vision, patience and technique in just the same proportions as do mathematicians, poets, musicians, but in different stratifications and combinations. In the old days of the enthusiasm for physiognomy, a physician like Gall might perhaps have dissected a chess champion’s brain to find out whether some particular twist or turn in the grey matter, a kind of chess muscle or chess bump, is more developed in such chess geniuses than in the skulls of other mortals. And how intrigued such a physiognomist would have been by the case of Czentovic, where that specific genius appeared in a setting of absolute intellectual lethargy, like a single vein of gold in a hundredweight of dull stone. In principle, I had always realized that such a unique, brilliant game must create its own matadors, but how difficult and indeed impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active human being whose world is reduced entirely to the narrow one-way traffic between black and white, who seeks the triumphs of his life in the mere movement to and fro, forward and back of thirty-two chessmen, someone to whom a new opening, moving knight rather than pawn, is a great deed, and his little corner of immortality is tucked away in a book about chess – a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!

That day in Chartres they had passed through town and watched women kneeling at the edge of the water, pounding clothes against a flat, wooden board. Yves had watched them for a long time. They had wandered up and down the old crooked streets, in the hot sun; Eric remembered a lizard darting across a wall; and everywhere the cathedral pursued them. It is impossible to be in that town and not be in the shadow of those great towers; impossible to find oneself on those plains and not be troubled by that cruel and elegant, dogmatic and pagan presence. The town was full of tourists, with their cameras, their three-quarter coats, bright flowered dresses and shirts, their children, college insignia, Panama hats, sharp, nasal cries, and automobiles crawling like monstrous gleaming bugs over the laming, cobblestoned streets. Tourist buses, from Holland, from Denmark, from Germany, stood in the square before the cathedral. Tow-haired boys and girls, earnest, carrying knapsacks, wearing khaki-colored shorts, with heavy buttocks and thighs, wandered dully through the town. American soldiers, some in uniform, some in civilian clothes, leaned over bridges, entered bistros in strident, uneasy, smiling packs, circled displays of colored post cards, and picked up meretricious mementos, of a sacred character. All of the beauty of the town, all the energy of the plains, and all the power and dignity of the people seemed to have been sucked out of them by the cathedral. It was as though the cathedral demanded, and received, a perpetual, living sacrifice. It towered over the town, more like an affliction than a blessing, and made everything seem, by comparison with itself, wretched and makeshift indeed. The houses in which the people lived did not suggest shelter, or safety. The great shadow which lay over them revealed them as mere doomed bits of wood and mineral, set down in the path of a hurricane which, presently, would blow them into eternity. And this shadow lay heavy on the people, too. They seemed stunted and misshapen; the only color in their faces suggested too much bad wine and too little sun; even the children seemed to have been hatched in a cellar. It was a town like some towns in the American South, frozen in its history as Lot's wife was trapped in salt, and doomed, therefore, as its history, that overwhelming, omnipresent gift of God, could not be questioned, to be the property of the gray, unquestioning mediocre.

I was around her age when I began. The beautiful wooden board on a stand in my father’s study. The gleaming ivory pieces. The stern king. The haughty queen. The noble knight. The pious bishop. And the game itself, the way each piece contributed its individual power to the whole. It was simple. It was complex. It was savage; it was elegant. It was a dance; it was a war. It was finite and eternal. It was life.

Children there rowed boats, climbed trees, picked mussels, ending every summer day cleaned up and carrying the ice in the silver bucket, the Goldfish crackers, and the Scotch, down to the dock at six, where they’d stand ranged along the splintering wooden boards looking down at the white bodies of the flashing fish, while the grown-ups behind them drank as the sun fell into the sea. The Miltons of Crockett’s Island.

He didn’t want to think; thinking was worse than physical pain, but everything flooded back, everything went round and round in his head endlessly: being called back from leave on 15 May, those four days in Angers, no trains running any more, soldiers lying on wooden boards, being bitten by insects, then the air raids, the bombings, the battle of Rethel, the retreat, the battle of the Somme, another retreat, days when they had fled from city to city, without officers, without orders, without weapons, and finally the train compartment in flames.

The same solution--that Easter Island was once part of a much larger landmass--would also explain another, very different puzzle, namely the so-called Rongo Rongo script. It is unprecedented in human history for a sophisticated fully developed writing system to be invented and put into use by a small, isolated island community. Yet Easter Island does have its own script, examples of which, mostly incised on wooden boards, copies of copies of copies of much older lost originals, were collected in the nineteenth century and have found their way into a number of museums around the world. None remain on Easter Island itself and even in the period when they were collected no native Easter Islanders were able to read them.

They stood around a bleeding stump of a man lying on the ground. His right arm and left leg had been chopped off. It was inconceivable how, with his remaining arm and leg, he had crawled to the camp. The chopped-off arm and leg were tied in terrible bleeding chunks onto his back with a small wooden board attached to them; a long inscription on it said, with many words of abuse, that the atrocity was in reprisal for similar atrocities perpetrated by such and such a Red unit—a unit that had no connection with the Forest Brotherhood. It also said that the same treatment would be meted out to all the partisans unless, by a given date, they submitted and gave up their arms to the representatives of General Vitsyn’s army corps. Fainting repeatedly from loss of blood, the dying man told them in a faltering voice of the tortures and atrocities perpetrated by Vitsyn’s investigating and punitive squads. His own sentence of death had been allegedly commuted; instead of hanging him, they had cut off his arm and leg in order to send him into the camp and strike terror among the partisans. They had carried him as far as the outposts of the camp, where they had put him down and ordered him to crawl, urging him on by shooting into the air. He could barely move his lips. To make out his almost unintelligible stammering, the crowd around him bent low. He was saying: “Be on your guard, comrades. He has broken through.” “Patrols have gone out in strength. There’s a big battle going on. We’ll hold him.” “There’s a gap. He wants to surprise you. I know. ... I can’t go on, men. I am spitting blood. I’ll die in a moment.” “Rest a bit. Keep quiet.—Can’t you see it’s bad for him, you heartless beasts!” The man started again: “He went to work on me, the devil. He said: You will bathe in your own blood until you tell me who you are. And how was I to tell him, a deserter is just what I am? I was running from him to you.” “You keep saying ‘he.’ Who was it that got to work on you?” “Let me just get my breath. ... I’ll tell you. Hetman, Bekeshin. Colonel, Strese. Vitsyn’s men. You don’t know out here what it’s like. The whole town is groaning. They boil people alive. They cut strips out of them. They take you by the scruff of the neck and push you inside, you don’t know where you are, it’s pitch black. You grope about—you are in a cage, inside a freight car. There are more than forty people in the cage, all in their underclothes. From time to time they open the door and grab whoever comes first—out he goes. As you grab a chicken to cut its throat. I swear to God. Some they hang, some they shoot, some they question. They beat you to shreds, they put salt on the wounds, they pour boiling water on you. When you vomit or relieve yourself they make you eat it. As for children and women—O God!” The unfortunate was at his last gasp. He cried out and died without finishing the sentence. Somehow they all knew it at once and took off their caps and crossed themselves. That night, the news of a far more terrible incident flew around the camp. Pamphil had been in the crowd surrounding the dying man. He had seen him, heard his words, and read the threatening inscription on the board. His constant fear for his family in the event of his own death rose to a new climax. In his imagination he saw them handed over to slow torture, watched their faces distorted by pain, and heard their groans and cries for help. In his desperate anguish—to forestall their future sufferings and to end his own—he killed them himself, felling his wife and three children with that same, razor-sharp ax that he had used to carve toys for the two small girls and the boy, who had been his favorite. The astonishing thing was that he did not kill himself immediately afterward.

The girl was staring at the muddy river as if it were sweeping away her memories. Corso saw her smile, thoughtfully, absently. "I never knew an impartial god. Or devil." She turned to him suddenly - her earlier thoughts seemed to have washed downstream. "Do you believe in the Devil, Corso?" He looked at her intently, but the river had also swept away the images that had filled her eyes seconds before. All he could see there now was liquid green, and light. “I believe in stupidity and ignorance.” He smiled wearily at the girl. They had continued walking and were now on the wooden boards of the Pont des Arts. The girl stopped and leaned on the metal rail, by a street artist selling tiny water colours.” "I like this bridge," she said. "No cars. Only lovers, and old ladies in hats. People with nothing to do. This bridge has absolutely no common sense.

I select the right practice gun, the one about the size of a pistol, but bulkier, and offer it to Caleb. Tris’s fingers slide between mine. Everything comes easily this morning, every smile and every laugh, every word and every motion. If we succeed in what we attempt tonight, tomorrow Chicago will be safe, the Bureau will be forever changed, and Tris and I will be able to build a new life for ourselves somewhere. Maybe it will even be a place where I trade my guns and knives for more productive tools, screwdrivers and nails and shovels. This morning I feel like I could be so fortunate. I could. “It doesn’t shoot real bullets,” I say, “but it seems like they designed it so it would be as close as possible to one of the guns you’ll be using. It feels real, anyway.” Caleb holds the gun with just his fingertips, like he’s afraid it will shatter in his hands. I laugh. “First lesson: Don’t be afraid of it. Grab it. You’ve held one before, remember? You got us out of the Amity compound with that shot.” “That was just lucky,” Caleb says, turning the gun over and over to see it from every angle. His tongue pushes into his cheek like he’s solving a problem. “Not the result of skill.” “Lucky is better than unlucky,” I say. “We can work on skill now.” I glance at Tris. She grins at me, then leans in to whisper something to Christina. “Are you here to help or what, Stiff?” I say. I hear myself speaking in the voice I cultivated as an initiation instructor, but this time I use it in jest. “You could use some practice with that right arm, if I recall correctly. You too, Christina.” Tris makes a face at me, then she and Christina cross the room to get their own weapons. “Okay, now face the target and turn the safety off,” I say. There is a target across the room, more sophisticated, than the wooden-board target in the Dauntless training rooms. It has three rings in three different colors, green, yellow, and red, so it’s easier to tell where the bullets it. “Let me see how you would naturally shoot.” He lifts up the gun with one hand, squares off his feet and shoulders to the target like he’s about to lift something heavy, and fires. The gun jerks back and up, firing the bullet near the ceiling. I cover my mouth with my hand to disguise my smile. “There’s no need to giggle,” Caleb says irritably. “Book learning doesn’t teach you everything, does it?” Christina says. “You have to hold it with both hands. It doesn’t look as cool, but neither does attacking the ceiling.” “I wasn’t trying to look cool!” Christina stands, her legs slightly uneven, and lifts both arms. She stares the target for a moment, then fires. The training bullet hits the outer circle of the target and bounces off, rolling on the floor. It leaves a circle of light on the target, marking the impact site. I wish I’d had this technology during initiation training. “Oh, good,” I say. “You hit the air around your target’s body. How useful.” “I’m a little rusty,” Christina admits, grinning.

Except when I get to the spot where the wooden boards meet the green grass, I stop. There’s a small sign. A plain slab of wood with light blue paint slashed across it. It reads Rosie’s Dock.

I read and reread these pages all day long as I sat next to the cast-iron stove. In the absence of coal, we burned wooden boards pilfered from the rubble of destroyed houses in order to keep warm in these chilly early days of spring. In times of plenty my appetite had always been small, but now I often went hungry.

Indeed, the door before us was nearly identical in shape and style--- it blended into the Greek countryside perfectly, its wooden boards painted with a scene of pale, pebbly stone and sun-dried vegetation. A little patch of rock roses to the left continued into the painting, and these two-dimensional blooms tossed their heads in the breeze in time with their tangible brethren. Even more impossible, to my mortal eyes, was the doorknob, a square of glass enclosing a splash of turquoise sea. This nexus is truly the most peculiar variety of faerie door I have encountered in my career.

Grunting, I pulled my claws out of the wooden board they had called “home” last night, flexing my stiff fingers, and willed the right side of my body to return to its man form.

(1) The Mindset of Strategy and Positioning (心持ちの事　付　座之次第) ◎ With regards to mindset as you engage in a contest, be calmer than normal and try to see into your opponent’s mind. The enemy whose voice becomes higher in pitch, eyes widen, face reddens, muscles bulge and face grimaces is basically incompetent and will [clumsily] hit through to the ground. When faced with a [second-rate] adversary such as this, maintain serenity of mind and observe his face dispassionately so as not to provoke him. Then, taking hold of your sword, smile and assume a position lower than the upper stance (jōdan). Coolly evade his blow as he tries to attack you. When the enemy appears somewhat perturbed by your unusual attitude, this is the time to strike. Also, if your opponent is quiet, eyes narrowed, body at ease, and he is holding his sword in a relaxed manner as if his fingers are floating on the hilt, assume that he is an expert. Do not saunter carelessly into his range. You must seize the initiative and assail him skillfully, driving him back and striking in quick succession. If you are nonchalant with such a competent opponent, he will force you back. It is crucial to ascertain how capable your enemy is. In terms of where you should position yourself, the same conditions apply in both spacious or cramped locations. Step in so that walls will not impede your sword swings from either side. Take an approximate stance with the long sword and nimbly close in on your foe. If your sword should collide with some barrier, the enemy will become emboldened and will hem you in. If your sword looks as if it might scrape the ceiling, determine the actual height with the tip and be mindful thereafter. You can employ either sword for this, as long as it is the one that cannot be used [in attack while you do this]. Keep the light behind you. With your usual training, be prepared to freely apply any kind of technique with a relaxed mind, but always execute with urgency. It is important to adapt according to the circumstances. (2) About Gaze (目付之事) ◎ Direct your eyes on the enemy’s face. Do not focus on anything else. Since the mind is projected in [facial] expressions, there is no place more revealing than the face to fix one’s gaze. The way of observing the enemy’s face is the same as looking through the mist at trees and rocks on an island two and a half miles [4 km] in the distance. It is the same as peering at [and identifying] birds perched atop a shanty 100 yards [91 meters] away through the falling sleet. It is also akin to beholding a decorative wooden board used to cover the ridge and purlin ends of a roof gable or the tiles on a hut. Calmly focus your gaze [to take everything in].

He dusted the dough with cumin and coriander and salt before he slid the loaves into the oven on flat wooden boards. Perhaps most important,

Shara met me at the airport in London, dressed in her old familiar blue woolen overcoat that I loved so much. She was bouncing like a little girl with excitement. Everest was nothing compared to seeing her. I was skinny, long-haired, and wearing some very suspect flowery Nepalese trousers. I short, I looked a mess, but I was so happy. I had been warned by Henry at base camp not to rush into anything “silly” when I saw Shara again. He had told me it was a classic mountaineers’ error to propose as soon as you get home. High altitude apparently clouds people’s good judgment, he had said. In the end, I waited twelve months. But during this time I knew that this was the girl I wanted to marry. We had so much fun together that year. I persuaded Shara, almost daily, to skip off work early from her publishing job (she needed little persuading, mind), and we would go on endless, fun adventures. I remember taking her roller-skating through a park in central London and going too fast down a hill. I ended up headfirst in the lake, fully clothed. She thought it funny. Another time, I lost a wheel while roller-skating down a steep busy London street. (Cursed skates!) I found myself screeching along at breakneck speed on only one skate. She thought that one scary. We drank tea, had afternoon snoozes, and drove around in “Dolly,” my old London black cab that I had bought for a song. Shara was the only girl I knew who would be willing to sit with me for hours on the motorway--broken down--waiting for roadside recovery to tow me to yet another garage to fix Dolly. Again. We were (are!) in love. I put a wooden board and mattress in the backseat so I could sleep in the taxi, and Charlie Mackesy painted funny cartoons inside. (Ironically, these are now the most valuable part of Dolly, which sits majestically outside our home.) Our boys love playing in Dolly nowadays. Shara says I should get rid of her, as the taxi is rusting away, but Dolly was the car that I will forever associate with our early days together. How could I send her to the scrapyard? In fact, this spring, we are going to paint Dolly in the colors of the rainbow, put decent seat belts in the backseat, and go on a road trip as a family. Heaven. We must never stop doing these sorts of things. They are what brought us together, and what will keep us having fun. Spontaneity has to be exercised every day, or we lose it. Shara, lovingly, rolls her eyes.

Aliena was concentrating. Their painted wooden board was shaped like a cross and divided into squares of different colours. The counters appeared to be made of ivory, white and black. The game was obviously a variant of merrels, or nine-men’s-morris, and probably a gift brought back from Normandy by Aliena’s father.

I think I hear someone on the stairs. The old wooden boards creak like crazy, and I hear the tell-tale sound of someone walking up the stairs. My heart is practically in my throat now. Then I hear the familiar sound of my old mahogany bedroom door swinging slowly open on squeaky hinges.

Brötchen There’s nothing more German than this recipe. A staple for all true Schmidt bakers. These are best hot out of the oven with butter or cherry jam. That’s the way Mom did it. Here, I’ll give you Oma’s cherry jam recipe too. 2½ to 3 cups all-purpose flour 1 packet active dry yeast (rapid) 1 teaspoon sugar 1 cup warm water 1 tablespoon oil 1 teaspoon salt 1 egg white Put 2½ cups flour into a large bowl and make a well in the middle. Pour yeast, sugar, and two tablespoons of warm water (the water comes from the 1 cup) into the well. Mix yeast, sugar, and water in the well, but don’t mix in the flour yet. Cover the bowl with a cloth and set it in a warm place for 15 minutes until it proofs. Add the rest of the water and oil, and beat in the salt and flour good. Turn out the dough on a floured wooden board, and knead. Add the remaining ½ cup flour as needed to make it smooth. Put dough in a greased bowl, cover, and let it rise until it doubles in size. About an hour in that same warm spot. Punch down, then split it into 12 pieces. Shape into rolls and place 3 inches apart on a greased and floured baking tray. Cover and let rise one more time until they double again. Cut a cross on top of each. Beat egg white and 1 teaspoon water with a fork until frothy and brush the rolls. (Oh, I forgot—should have preheated the oven to 450°F already.) Then you bake for 15 to 20 minutes until the tops are golden.

At this point, I felt a sudden pang. A yearning to climb up into the tree house again. To lie down on the smooth wooden boards, gaze up at the sky through the open windows and just... remember. But I chose to ignore it. If you listened to every pang, you wouldn't get anywhere in life.

This was originally a large wooden board, almost three meters long,

He watched her pace the floor in her bare feet---the floor she'd scrubbed clean seven times now from the mess and afterbirth of new babies. She'd gotten out the stains [...] in the floor she was pacing now, walking up and down the ordinary wooden boards with bare feet like Moses at the burning bush. Like something sacred had happened there; holy ground.

Avel and his cousin Benito welded iron bars over the windows. Pearla began doing housework in the mornings to avoid the afternoon shadows that fell upon her home like a cage... Pearla asked Avel to nail wooden boards over the bedroom window, blocking from the room both thieves and sunlight. It took some getting used to, but the darkness grew on Pearla.

I will quietly in the churchyard Sleep on wooden boards in the sun, On the Sunday as guest to mother You will come, my dear one -- Through the river over the mountain Can't catch up to grown ones From afar, the sharp-eyed fellow, This my cross you'll recognize. I know, dear one, very little Can you now recall of me: Did not scold you, did not fawn you, Did not hold the cup to thee.

However, the Lord still provided for us. Of course, at that time everything was simple and crude. Our living quarters were simple and crude; so were the meeting hall and its restrooms. The doors were wooden boards nailed together, and sometimes they were hard to open. However, they were acceptable as long as the rain did not get in, the wind did not blow in, and the sun did not shine in. Even though the [90] situation was such, when we preached the gospel, people were still saved and baptized. It seemed that the more difficult the situation was, the greater the number of people who were baptized. One time we preached the gospel for two consecutive days on Saturday and the Lord’s Day, and more than seven hundred people were baptized. It really illustrated the saying, “The lighter the material things, the weightier the spiritual life; the heavier the material things, the lighter the spiritual life.” Now Taiwan is too materialistic. We should indeed take this as a warning.

taking a small piece of the Parmesan that I have broken into craggy shards on the small wooden board I've laid out, with a wedge of triple-crème Délice de Bourgogne Brie, some nuts and dried fruits, a homemade quince and plum membrillo paste, and some tiny little German wild boar sausages that I've been hoarding since my trip to Berlin last year.

We took a short ride on the Oedo line and surfaced near a sashimi-oriented izakaya called Uoshin. The upstairs counter snaked through the room so everyone could have a seat at the bar, and tucked into nooks at various parts of the arrangement were white-coated chefs, each with a knife and a wooden board full of freshly sliced sashimi. We ordered a few selections from the board, and then Mark, who is apparently one of those wiry guys with a boundless appetite, started calling for cooked food; gesoyaki (grilled squid tentacles, one of my favorites), tamagoyaki (seasoned rolled omelet, and yellow-tail teriyaki, all of which were exceptionally good, especially the meaty broiled yellowtail with its sweet and salty glaze.

When she had left the room, the nurse told Kostoglotov to turn over onto his back again and laid sheets around the first quadrant. Then she brought up heavy mats of rubber impregnated with lead, which she used to cover all the surrounding areas which were not for the moment to receive the direct force of the X-rays. The pressure of the pliable mats, moulded to his body, was pleasantly heavy. Then the nurse too went out and shut the door. Now she could see him only through a little window in the thick wall. A quiet humming began, the auxiliary lamps lit up, the main tube started to glow. Through the square of skin that had been left clear on his stomach, through the layers of flesh and organs whose names their owner himself did not know, through the mass of the toad-like tumour, through the stomach and entrails, through the blood that flowed along his arteries and veins, through lymph and cells, through the spine and lesser bones and again through more layers of flesh, vessels and skin on his back, then through the hard wooden board of the couch, through the four-centimetre-thick floor-boards, down, down, until they disappeared into the very stone foundations of the building or into the earth, poured the harsh X-rays, the trembling vectors of electric and magnetic fields, unimaginable to the human mind, or else the more comprehensible quanta that like shells out of guns pounded and riddle everything in their path. And this barbarous bombardment of heavy quanta, soundless and unnoticed by the assaulted tissues, had after twelve sessions given Kostoglotov back his desire and taste for life, his appetite, even his good spirits. After the second and third bombardments he was free of the pain that had made his existence intolerable, and eager to understand how these penetrating little shells could bomb a tumour without touching the rest of the body.

I remove my fingers from her, and smack her pussy with the wooden board.

Who knows how mage lights are powered?” Professor Trissa asks, ignoring his question and reaching into her pack. She removes eight small wooden boards, no bigger than a plate. She puts them in the center of our little stand-off. “Well?” “Lesser magic,” Maren answers. “The ones you create yourself.” Professor Trissa nods. “What about the ones that run continuously in, say, the first-year dorms. The ones that work before you can channel?” Every rider looks at me. “They’re powered by the excess magic both we and our dragons channel,” I answer. “It comes off us naturally, like…waves of body heat, but it’s such a small amount that we don’t even notice it.” “Exactly,” the professor agrees. “And what is it that makes that kind of magic possible? Magic tied to objects instead of a wielder?” She looks us over with expectant, dark-brown eyes, then rubs the bridge of her nose. “Gods, I thought Felix was joking. Sorrengail, you’re practically covered in them.” I glance down, glimpsing the shimmer of my dragon-scale armor beneath the V-neck of my uniform top, then lock onto the daggers Xaden gave me. “Runes?” “Runes,” Professor Trissa confirms. “Runes aren’t just decorative. They’re strands of magic pulled from our power, woven into geometric patterns for specific uses, then placed into an object, either for immediate work or usage at a later date. We call the process ‘tempering.’” “That’s not possible.” Maren shakes her head. “Magic is only wielded.” “It’s still wielded.” Professor Trissa all but sighs in disappointment at our ignorance. “But just like we store food for winter, a wielder can temper a rune using as much or as little power as they choose, then place it into something.” She bends down and picks up one of the boards and waves it in our general directions. “Like wood, or metal, or whatever object the wielder chooses. That rune will activate when triggered and perform whatever action it was tempered for. Unlike alloy, which houses power, runes are tempered with power for specific actions.

Power can be shaped.” Her hands move quickly, pulling at pieces of air, then using her fingers to form invisible shapes. Circles? Squares? Was that a triangle? It’s hard to tell when we can’t see. “Every shape has meaning. The points where we tie the power change that meaning. All of which you will need to memorize.” She reaches into the air again, then creates…a rhombus? “The shapes we combine layer the meanings, changing the rune. Will it activate immediately? Sit in suspended state? How many times can it activate before the rune depletes? It’s all decided here.” She seems to flip whatever she’s working on, then pulls another string and does…something. “Fucking weird,” Ridoc mumbles under his breath. “It’s like when you’re little and you ask your parents to drink from the teacup, knowing there’s no actual tea in it.” Rhiannon shushes him. “Once it’s ready”—Professor Trissa bends and grabs the board, then stands—“we place the rune. Until it’s placed, it has no meaning, no purpose, and will fade quickly. It’s tempering the rune that makes it an active magic.” She grabs what I assume is the rune she’s been tempering with her right hand, then pushes her palm into the wooden board. “This particular one is a simple heating rune.” “That was simple?” Sawyer asks. The board smokes, and I lean forward, my eyes widening. “And there you have it.” She turns the front of the board toward the fliers, then shows us. “Once you understand which shapes combine to make what symbols, the combinations are nearly limitless.” My jaw hangs open for a moment. The shapes have been burned into what I would have said was a decorative rune about ten minutes ago. I glance down at the illustration in my hands and wonder what the hell the dagger on my hip is supposed to do.