Wolves of the Calla

When it came to pulling coals out of a hot fire, he'd put two dollars on Roland of Gilead for every one he put on God and the Man Jesus, those heavenly gunslingers.

Thankee-sai, long days, kiss my ass and go to heaven.

5 minutes of worth of blood and stupidity

First come smiles, then comes lies. Last is gunfire.

They burst up and out of the earth like dragons teeth

The gunslinger's initial feelings for Eddie had wavered between caution and contempt for what Roland saw as his weakness of character. Respect had come more slowly. It had begun in Balazar's office, when Eddie had fought naked. Very few men Roland had known could have done that. It had grown with his realization of how much Eddie was like Cuthbert. Then, on the mono, Eddie had acted with a kind of desperate creativity that Roland could admire but never equal. Eddie Dean was possessed of Cuthbert Allgood's always puzzling and sometimes annoying sense of ridiculous; he was also possessed Alain John's deep flashes of intuition. Yet in the end, Eddie was like neither of Roland's old friends. He was sometimes weak and self-centered, but possessed of deep reservoirs of courage and courage's good sister, what Eddie himself sometimes called 'heart'.

When everything's a surprise, experience takes on a dreamlike quality.

When the shooting starts, we kill what moves.

Roland was as much a prisoner of his rules and traditions as Eddie had ever been of heroin.

It's the Way of the Eld. We are of that an-tet, khef and ka, watch and warrant. Gunslingers, do ya.

All of your lies will cross your eyes.

Definition of a wanderer: a guy who's always looking beyond.

Now there was a fourth woman. She had been born out of the third in yet another time of stress and change. She cared nothing for Odetta, Detta, or Susannah; she cared for nothing save the new chap who was on his way. The new chap needed to be fed. The banqueting hall was near. That was what mattered and all that mattered.This new woman, every bit as dangerous in her own way as Detta Walker had been, was Mia. She bore the name of no man's father, only the word that in the High Speech means mother.

Here comes Mia, daughter of none!

It was the possibility of darkness that made the day seem so bright.

Time is a face on the water.Roland felt gooseflesh run up his arms. Somewhere - perhaps in a glaring, blood-colored field of roses still far from here—a rustie had just walked over his grave.

There was a part of her—a spiteful Detta Walker part—that would always resent Roland's ascendancy in her heart and mind, but for the most part she recognized him for what he was: the last of his kind. Maybe even a hero.

No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.

Dreaming. But not just dreaming. This was todash, the passing between two worlds. Supposedly the Manni could do it. And supposedly some pieces of the Wizard's Rainbow could make you do it, whether you wanted to or not. One piece of it in particular."They could get caught between and fall", Roland thought. "Vannay said that, too. He said that going todash was full of peril."

"Do'ee say the world will end in fire or in ice, gunslinger?" Roland considered this. "Neither",he said at last. "I think in darkness"

I have an object of great power.

Do people in your world always want only one story flavor at a time? Only one taste in their mouths?

The whole world was losing its shit, going nineteen.

And really, what could be so special about the number nineteen? Mystery Number, indeed.

A tear spilled down Callahan's right cheek, then another. He wiped them away absently. "I've never dared handle it, but I've seen it. Felt its power. Christ the Man Jesus help me, I have Black Thirteen under the floorboards of my church. And it's come alive. Do you understand me?" He looked at them with his wet eyes. "It's come alive."

"Do you know you come to the line of Eld?" Roland asked in that same curiously gentle voice. He stretched a hand towards Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. Even toward Oy. "For these are mine, sure. As I am theirs. We are round, and roll as we do. And you know what we are.""Are you?" Callahan asked. "Are you all?"

We're bound to do as you ask, if we judge your Calla in the White and those you call Wolves as agents of the outer dark: Beam-breakers, if you ken.

Near them, stuck on the branch of a tree, had been a note from the being Roland had just missed killing in Palace: 'Renounce the Tower. This is your last warning.' Ridiculous, really. Roland would no more renounce the Tower than he'd kill Jake's pet billy-bumbler and then roast him on a spit for dinner. None of them would renounce Roland's Dark Tower. God help them, they were in it all the way to the end.

Who's this Claudia y Inez Bachman?

Your imagination is a poor thing, Roland.

"Water if God wills it", he reminded himself. "About the great matters, Roland, you have no say".Not a comfortable truth, especially for a man on a quest such as his, but one he's learned to live with.

"Thunderclap," she said in a voice Eddie could barely hear. "None go there.""Why?""It's dark there," she said, still not looking up from her lap. Then she raised an arm. This time she pointed in the direction from which Roland and his friends had come. Back toward Mid-World. "There," she said, "the world is ending. Or so we're told. And there..." She pointed east and now raised her face to Eddie's. "There, in Thunderclap, it's already ended. In the middle are we, who only want go our own way in peace."

Three is a number of power.

"You said there were other worlds than these," Roland said, "and there are. New York in all its multiple whens is only one of many. That we are drawn there again and again has to do with the rose. I have no doubt of that, nor do I doubt that in some way I do not understand the rose is the Dark Tower. Either that or—""Or it's another door," Susannah murmured. "One that opens on the Dark Tower itself."

Eddie had known who they were since River Crossing, when the old people had knelt in the street to Roland. Hell, he'd known since the woods (what he still thought of as Shardik's woods), where Roland had taught them to aim with the eye, shoot with the mind, kill with the heart. Not three, not four. One. That Roland should finish them so, complete them so, was horrible. He was filled with poison and had kissed them with his poisoned lips. He had made them gunslingers, and had Eddie really thought there was no work left for the line of Arthur Eld in the mostly empty and husked-out world? That they would simply be allowed to toddle along the Path of the Beam until they got to Roland's Dark Tower and fixed whatever was wrong there? Well, guess again.

Because of changes in time - a softening of time which I know you all have felt—I've quested after the Dark Tower for over a thousand years, sometimes skipping over whole generations the way a sea-bird may cruise from one wave-top to the next, only wetting its feet in the foam. Never in all this time did I come across one of these doors between the worlds until I came to the ones on the beach at the edge of the Western Sea. I had an idea what they were, although I could have told you something of todash and the bends o' the rainbow.