And then the queen wept with all her heart. Not for the cruel and greedy man who had warred and killed and savaged everywhere he could. But for the boy who had somehow turned into that man, the boy whose gentle hand had comforted her childhood hurts, the boy whose frightened voice had cried out to her at the end of his life, as if he wondered why he had gotten lost inside himself, as if he realized that it was too, too late to get out again.
Orson Scott Card, Maps in a Mirror: The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card
cruelty, death, greed, grief, growing-up, lost, lost-innocence, regret, saddest-thing, the-end, the-princess-and-the-bear, too-late