Ceedres was her god. To be happy, she must worship him, and let him destroy her, and take pleasure in it. — Tanith Lee

For, though sometimes worshipping gods, the Yunea did not permit itself to stray too far onto the abstract path of sheer faith. An ambience of security was all the aristocrats required, a guarantee that fate loved them.

“I can’t guess,” said Olvia, “why he accepted my invitation. If I had realized he would, I would never have sent it.”

But among the aristocrats whose existence could be lengthily prolonged into three or four hundred spans, boredom came to be the killer, a bizarre running down, a sort of decline and decay, nonphysical but fatal.