…he was one of those rare individuals who are totally focused in time. Like most people since the dawn of time, he assumed it all somehow worked out all right in the end.Īnd like most people since the dawn of time, he was now dead. Like most people – most people, at any rate, below the age of sixty or so – Verence hadn’t exercised his mind much about what happened to you when you died. Granny Weatherwax was the most highly-regarded of the leaders they didn’t have.

Witches are not by nature gregarious, at least with other witches, and they certainly don’t have leaders. It’s up to each individual witch to take on a girl to hand the area over to when she dies.

Unlike wizards, who like nothing better than a complicated hierarchy, witches don’t go in much for the structured approach to career progression. They don’t like the food and you can’t trust the water and the shamans always hog the deckchairs. On nights such as this, witches are abroad. On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god’s idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs. Possibly the Creator of the universe got bored with all the usual business of axial inclination, albedos and rotational velocities, and decided to have a bit of fun for once. A tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it sometimes necessary for an elephant to cock a leg to allow the sun to go past.Įxactly why this should be may never be known. Through the fathomless deeps of space swims the star turtle Great A’Tuin, bearing on its back the four giant elephants who carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: ‘When shall we three meet again?’įinally another voice said in far more ordinary tones: ‘Well I can do next Tuesday.’ (WS) In the middle of the elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel’s eye.

It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which the gods moved men as though they were pawns on the chessboard of fate. The night was as black as the inside of a cat.

The wyrd sisters terry pratchett