There is a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from a fantasy novel that never stops moving.

There is a question that every epic fantasy eventually gets around to asking, even when it doesn't announce itself as a question, even when it arrives disguised as plot. The question is this: when everything falls apart, who stays?

There's a particular kind of discomfort that comes from a character who does something terrible for a reason you understand.

There's a particular kind of dread that doesn't come from a villain with a name.

It doesn't have a face, or a throne, or a monologue. It doesn't want anything in the way that characters want things. It doesn't scheme, or lie, or betray. And yet it stops characters dead in their tracks, turns them back, breaks them down, kills them slowly, and sometimes kills them fast. It is the land itself. The cold. The dark. The distance. The swamp that swallows your horse and then your hope. The desert that gives you nothing for a hundred miles and then gives you a mirage.