Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 27 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.
Today's book is White Gold Wielder by Stephen R. Donaldson. This is the final book in The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.
"Therefore we chose a harder path -- to share with you the burden of redemption and the risk of doom. The ring-wielder we silenced, not to harm him, but to spare the Earth the ill of power without sight. As that silence preserved him from the malice of Kasreyn of the Gyre, so also would it have preserved him from the Despiser's intent at the One Tree. Thus the choice would have fallen to you in the end. His ring you might have taken unto yourself, thereby healing the breach between sight and power. Or perhaps you might have ceded the ring to me, empowering the Elohim to save the Earth after their fashion. Then would we have had no need to fear ourselves, for a power given is altogether different than one wrested away. But whatever your choice, there would have been hope. To accomplish such hope, the price of the ring-wielder's silence -- and of my Appointment -- appeared to be neither too great nor too ill.
"That you took from us. In the dungeon of the Sandhold, you chose the wrong which you name possession above the responsibility of sight and the hope we strove to nurture was lost.
"Now I say to you that he must be persuaded to surrender his ring. If he does not, it is certain that he will destroy the Earth."
Put today's excerpt in a baseball context.
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