ZThemes

per aspera ad astra

Queen Anne's Revenge

Réka - a 23 year old hopeless romantic with a voracious appetite for the written word, aesthetic beauty, the color red, archers, Byronic heroes, and medieval fantasy.

Art, fashion, mythology, history, video games, movies, and TV shows. For a list of my fandoms & co., please click here.

My dears: Shannon | M. | Aza | Maz | Luthien

On Board

‘How do you think he got to be so vicious?’ I asked. ‘He wasn’t like this when I knew him.’

‘Yes, he was,’ Mr Crepsley disagreed. ‘He just had not grown into his true evil self yet. He was born bad, as certain people are. Humans will tell you that everybody can be helped, that everyone has a choice. In my experience, that is not so. Good people can sometimes choose badness, but bad people cannot choose good.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ Harkat said softly. ‘I think good and evil exists … in all of us. We might be born leaning more towards … one than the other, but the choice is there. It has to be. Otherwise, we’re mere … puppets of fate.’

‘Perhaps,’ Mr Crepsley grunted. ‘Many see it as you do. But I do not think so. Most are born with the freedom of choice. But there are those who defy the rules, who are wicked from the beginning. Maybe they are puppets of fate, born that way for a reason, to test the rest of us. I do not know. But natural monsters do exist. On that point, nothing you say can shake me. And Steve Leonard is one of them.’

‘But then it isn’t his fault,’ I said, frowning. ‘If he was born bad, he isn’t to blame for growing up evil.’

‘No more than a lion is to blame for being a predator,’ Mr Crepsley agreed.

I thought about that. ‘If that’s the case, we shouldn’t hate him - we should pity him.’

Mr Crepsley shook his head. ‘No, Darren. You should neither hate nor pity a monster - merely fear it, and do all in your power to make an end of it before it destroys you.’

Darren Shan, (from Killers of the Dawn by Darren Shan)