#and I will assign them random quotes from Night Flight or Flight to Arras

[onaperduamedee]

"It is hard to exist. Man is a knot into which relationships are tied, and my ties serve me hardly at all. What is this in me that has broken down? What is the secret of substitutions? Whence comes it that a gesture, a word, can give rise to endless ripples in a human destiny? Whence comes it that in other circumstances I should be overwhelmed by what seems to me now remote and abstract?”

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Flight to Arras (tr. Lewis Galantière)

For a maybe Moiraine meta, I was looking for a completely different quote from Flight to Arras about the expectation of death in battle when I landed on this one and UH.

Ever since I finished FoH, I regularly get hit by waves of sorrow thinking about how desperate and isolated she grew in the two last books. About how frayed her ties to the people who she may have cared about. About how fruitless her legacy must have seemed (her cramming Rand's mind with a lifetime of knowledge because she knew that was the only thing she could give him now). About how uncertain the utility of her sacrifice was.

As she crossed the doorway and burnt, did she experience regret? Relief? Resentment? Even hope?

It's not even her death that hurts. It's witnessing her actions and words up to that moment, and inferring what must have been her true, unveiled state of mind.

Light, my chest feels hollow.