5 book passages that gave me goosebumps

His father lifted his hands in supplication. “My boy,” he only breathed.

Dorian had nothing to say to him. Hated that this man was here, at the end and beginning.

Yet his father looked to Aelin. “Let me do this. Let me finish this.”

“What?” The word snapped from Dorian.

“You were not chosen,” Aelin said, though the coldness in her voice faltered.

“Nameless is my price,” the king said.

Aelin went still.

“Nameless is my price,” his father repeated. The warning of an ancient witch, the damning words written on the back of the Amulet of Orynth. “For the bastard-born mark you bear, you are Nameless, yet am I not so as well?” He glanced between them, his eyes wide. “What is my name?”

“This is ridiculous,” Dorian said through his teeth. “Your name is—”

But where there should have been a name, only an empty hole existed.

—from Chapter 95

Nameless is my price. That was a phrase that recurred many times throughout this series. I always enjoyed the mystical sound to it, and how it seemed to have many different meanings, but I never guessed at this one. I didn’t see it coming.

I still remember the way I shivered when the King of Adarlan said “What is my name?”. I mean, the character was never given a name on-page, but the revelation that his name was actually taken from him…it shook me. Especially coming at this pivotal moment in the final book!

“Go on, get moving, both of you. Head for the trees.” The smile became an awful grin. “Be right behind you.”

They turned from the lie, the impossible promise in his ruined face, and fled.

The scarred man watched them go. […]

“You!” The first march-master saw him, lifted his torch and peered. He pointed with his sword. “Get down on your fucking knees. Do it now.”

The veteran closed the gap with three swift paces, ignored the sword, got inside its useful reach before the march-master could grasp what was happening. […] “We left them behind,” he said, as if explaining something to a child.

Moth-wing blur of motion – the bolt cutters, slashing in at head height.

[…]

“Orders,” he said to the uncomprehending march-master and hacked him in the head with the cutters, once, twice, until he went down. “They made us leave them.”

For a moment, he stood like a statue between his two felled adversaries. He looked around in the fitful torchlight as if just waking up.

[…]

“We heard them screaming after us for fucking miles,” he told the man’s corpse.

[…]

“Some of them cursed us,” he grunted on the stroke.

[…]

“Some,” he said conversationally, “just wept.”

[…]

The veteran settled his grip on the sword, angled it towards the gathering march-masters and jerked his head for them to come ahead. Torchlight painted him massive and flicker-shadowed behind the blade.

He made them a grin from his scarred and ravaged features.

“Do I look like a fucking slave to you?” he asked them.

And though, finally, they would bring him down with sheer weight of numbers, none who heard him ask that question lived to see the dawn.

—from Chapter 3

Though this is probably the least-known passage I’ll be sharing today, to me, it is one of the most memorable and profound scenes I’ve ever read. No lies. The character here is an unnamed veteran who has been made a slave, helping some fellow slaves escape before he turns on his masters and slaughters them.

It’s a very graphic and violent scene, and I’ve cut out some of the description for brevity more than anything else. Because although it’s horrible, it also sets the mood for the brutality of this book and is a haunting example of someone pushed too far. These lines have stayed with me.

“You reap what you sow!” I scream at him as he fades. All the rage I’ve felt swells in me, blinding me, and fills me with a pulsing, tangible hatred that seeps away only as Apollo’s boots deactivate and he tumbles down through the swirling storm.

I find my Howlers around his body. The snow is red. They stare at me as I descend, my knifeRing wet with the blood of a Peerless Scarred. I had not intended to kill him. But he should not have taken her. And he should not have called me a puppet.

“They took Mustang,” I tell my pack.

They look on silently. The Jackal no longer matters.

“So now we take Olympus.”

The smiles they give one another are as chilling as the snow.

—from Chapter 41, The Jackal

I doubt that I’m the only one who felt a chill when reading this passage – a chill not unlike the Howlers’ grins. A year on, I can still recall with piercing clarity my first thought when I read this: Oh shit. I’m pretty sure I laughed even as I shuddered.

I think it was because Darrow’s matter-of-fact statement that “Now we take Olympus” perfectly captures the boldness and audacity of his character. Here’s another guy who’s reached the end of his rope and now no act is out of the question. I love it.

Kaladin stood with one hand on the wall, one hand on the door, breathing deeply. Wind surged through the window behind, brushing past him, bearing with it two twisting windspren that moved as lines of light.

A hundred objections held him. His father’s arguments. His soul in fragments. The knowledge that he was probably too tired to be making decisions. The fact that the queen had decided it was best to end hostilities.

So many reasons to stay where he was. But one reason to move.

They were going to take Teft.

Kaladin pulled open the door and stepped into the hallway, feeling the inevitable shift of a boulder perched on the top of a slope. Just. Beginning. To tip.

“Kaladin…” Syl said, landing on his shoulder.

“It was a nice dream, wasn’t it, Syl?” he asked. “That we could escape? Find peace at long last?”

“Such a wonderful dream,” she whispered.

—from Chapter 43, Men and Monsters

Okay, so I’m a sucker for any scene that involves Kaladin, and I was forced to choose between a few passages of his in Rhythm of War that seriously gave me goosebumps. But I felt cold when I read this one. And I definitely teared up.

The painful inevitability of this passage is what got to me, I think. Kaladin was just so close to distancing himself from an environment that was only feeding his depression when disaster struck, sending him right back to the start. The whispered conversation between him and Syl was so full of resigned acceptance it broke my heart.

Why? That was Half Tail, passed along and scent-marked.

Perrin hesitated before answering. He had dreaded this. He felt about the wolves as he did about Two Rivers people. They have caged Shadowkiller, he thought at last. That was what the wolves called Rand, but he had no idea whether they considered Rand important.

The shock filling his mind was answer enough, but howls filled the night, near and far, howls filled with anger and fear. In the camp horses whinnied fearfully, stamping their hooves as they shied against the picked ropes. Men ran to calm them, and others to peer into the darkness as if expected a huge pack to come after the mounts.

We come, Half Tail replied at last. Only that, and then others answered, packs Perrin had spoken to and packs that had listened silently to the two-legs who could speak as the wolves did. We come.

—from Chapter 54, The Sending

A 14-book series like The Wheel of Time is full of goosebump-invoking passages, but this was one of the first I can remember really making the hairs on the back of the neck stand up. I always loved how the wolves called Rand, the saviour-figure, “Shadowkiller” – and in this situation it only adds to the horror over him being “caged” (a.k.a. captured).

The real clincher here, however, is the wolves’ response. Perrin, who can speak to the wolves, has learned throughout the series that they rarely care for what humans are up to, and yet when they learn Shadowkiller has been taken, they say We come. And that’s all. No more discussion required.