I’ve got a couple of quotes here that are really part of the same piece with some extra dialogue etc. in between. The idea (if not the details) of this stuck with me from the first time I read the book. I love the concept that free will derives from the presence of the Wild Hunt in the world. While I certainly don’t believe it literally, I love the metaphor and find a kind of fundamental truth in it.
“But this much I had from Cernan of the Beasts: the Hunt was placed in the Tapestry to be wild in the truest sense, to lay down an uncontrolled thread for the freedom of the Children who came after. And so did the Weaver lay a constraint upon himself, that not even he, shuttling at the Loom of Worlds, may preordain and shape exactly what is to be. We who came after, the andain who are the children of the gods, the lios alfar, the Dwarves, and all the races of men, we have such choices as we have, some freedom to shape our own destinies, because of that wild thread of Owein and the Hunt slipping across the Loom, warp and then weft, in turn and at times. They are there, Cernan told me one night long ago, precisely to be wild, to cut across the Weaver’s measured will. To be random, and so enable us to be.”
[ . . . ]
“The Weaver wove the Hunt and set them free on the Loom, that we, in our turn, might have a freedom of our own because of them. Good and evil, Light and Dark, they are in all the worlds of the Tapestry because Owein and the kings are here, following the child on Iselen, threading across the sky.”
—The Darkest Road by Guy Gavriel Kay, Chapter 5
Saving My Sanity... 