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___It all has fallen apart.
___Again.
___Sometimes at night I see the glow of another village burning.
___Behind closed eyes, at night, I see that glow again: of coals that shouldn’t burn.
___I don’t have tears enough, to wash away those fires.
___Why does this always happen?
___Where are the Agents?
___Where is the Eye??
___I don’t even know why such a war is called a Culling…
___Matron Cami might have known. But she is gone—the woman who tried so hard to teach us juacuara something other than how to hurl a javelin fifty paces or to knock out a brain with a blade.
___She tried to give us poetry for our souls; to help express and judge the events of our lives; to make some sense of the hidden world behind the obvious.
___My Matron is gone.
___She vanished one day.
___. . . perhaps that was best. Her heart would have broken, in bearing the tragedies afterward.
___No . . .
___No, not that. She would have led us, and we would have followed her, putting our faith in her wisdom and strength.
___Was that why she was taken?
___Was that why she went away?
___Other klerosa than Cami have vanished: the indisputable sign of a Culling. All klerosa—the ones allotted true power, true healing—always go, and never are seen again.
___Leaving us alone to put our trust in…
___. . . what?
___My weapon? My body? My peer? My commander? These shall all fail me. I know this distinctly.
___Trust in the magi? They surely did not disappear all at once! They chose their sides and disbanded the Cadre, and scoured the skies and the lakes and the trees with their wrath!
___A year they did this; then, within the slopes of a season, they also fell silent—leaving the wounds they had made.
___I remember Qarfax, who claimed four faces guarded him, so that he would never be caught by surprise. He had hired a garrison for his private tower: I and some troops from the city of Wye.
___His fear drenched the air of his tower.
___Whenever a man—moreover a magus—invests his soul within a place, his presence seeps into the stones.
___But when we awoke one night for our watch, I knew with some others: the feel was gone. We wouldn’t find Qarfax alive.
___We found some ash on the floor of his room instead, where he had watched and waited.
___We never learned for what he had waited. We left his service that very moment.
___We also left his regalia, on the floor, within the ash—no one would touch the remains of a magus.
___The students of magic—the dabblers and the apprentices—will soon recover their masters’ work. I serve one now: Portunista.
___But, I don’t trust her either…
___No, nothing mortal remains to trust. Not even my brethren, destroyed by the wars of the Culling.
___I have no home. No family.
___No hope.
___Some men say they only trust themselves.
___I am not so foolish. I know my strengths; and I know my weaknesses. I might as well lift myself into the air by pulling my arms…!
___No answers. No hope.
___No justice.
___These thoughts all dart behind my eyes, after the middle of the night, in front of the glow of villages burning, until I spill them onto paper.
___I am a soldier. My words are my tears.
___They don’t wash away the fires.
) In the printed version of CoJ, the subauthor text is simply one size smaller font, although hopefully on any new edition or reprint I can get my typesetters to adjust to a different font instead of changing the size per se. (Or else just do the typesetting myself and save some money.)