The survivor spoke to us though, or tried to. Mumbling through that matted brown beard of his, pale as death itself. I can__ say now if it was weakness from his wounds or what it was _ but we struggled to understand him. In fact we got nothing intelligible from him at all then. He seemed afraid, like any dying man probably would be, but he did seem more terrified than any dying man I__e seen before _ and I__e seen a few in my time. Let me tell you, Corsair or not, he grabbed whatever hand would hold his, and clenched it so tight his knuckles turned white! He kept fading out as we carried him on the stretcher board the medics brought with them. Looking back, I think he tried to warn us, poor bastard. He tried to tell us to leave him behind and go, but we wouldn__ listen. We thought we were better than the Corsairs, remember? We thought we would be all moral and upright and try to help him. __on__ say I didn__ warn you._ were the last words he said before losing consciousness. At least, those that we could make out. At the end of it all, he was right _ as it turned out, we couldn__ even help ourselves.

When the devil wants to punish his worshippers, he uses the trick of karma.

Without haters, you can't see the level of your progress, that shows you that haters are necessary evil.

Books allow us to escape from the pressures of modern life. By far, the best vehicles of escape are Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy genre allowing us to lose ourselves in worlds far away from the reality we know. This escapism works because we totally immerse ourselves and:-We become the hero or heroine. We are the ones who thwart evil. We laugh as we socialise with characters we have never met but feel they are as close as our family. We cry when we lose a good friend.

And one day when you wake up, you happen to realise that your battle isn__ with the man you had got into a brawl with the other day, it isn__ with a friend turned foe, it isn__ with those parents who chose to give up on you, it isn__ with the bus driver for not having waited until you got in, it isn__ with the employer who cancelled the application to your leave, it isn__ with the examiner who resolved into failing you, it isn__ with the woman who did not reciprocate your feelings, it isn__ with child who dropped his ice-cream cone on you, it isn__ with your ill fate and it isn__ with that superior being above you. Your battle, your fight isn__ against the world but against yourself and the only way to come through all of it and beyond, to win, is improvement, self-improvement which needs to be gradual and progressive with the transverse of each day.

A tractor beam from the Imperial ship locked onto the shuttle and in seconds it became apparent they were being hauled in. The tractor was inescapable, and they knew it. The shuttle__ small yet potent engines struggled vainly against the irresistible pull. Inside, the Hammer and his men prepared to meet their fate.