- Ysabell, Duchess of Sto Helit (Wikipedia)
Lady Ysabell is the adopted daughter of Death. He saved her life after her parents died in the Great Nef desert when she was a baby. Why he did so is uncertain. “He didn’t feel sorry for me, he never feels anything … He probably thought sorry for me” Ysabell says. A sixteen-year-old girl with silver hair and silver eyes, she has been sixteen for thirty-five years; no time passes in Death’s Domain. Her encounter with Rincewind is flamboyant enough to make him believe she is ‘bonkers’.
- And, in point of fact, the accurate observance of these few precepts gave me, I take the liberty of saying, such ease in unravelling all the questions embraced in these two sciences, that in the two or three months I devoted to their examination, not only did I reach solutions of questions I had formerly deemed exceedingly difficult, but even as regards questions of the solution of which I continued ignorant, I was enabled, as it appeared to me, to determine the means whereby, and the extent to which, a solution was possible; results attributable to the circumstance that I commenced with the simplest and most general truths, and that thus each truth discovered was a rule available in the discovery of subsequent ones.
- Perceiving further, that in order to understand these relations I should sometimes have to consider them one by one, and sometimes only to bear them in mind, or embrace them in the aggregate, I thought that, in order the better to consider them individually, I should view them as subsisting between straight lines, than which I could find no objects more simple, or capable of being more distinctly represented to my imagination and senses; and on the other hand, that in order to retain them in the memory, or embrace an aggregate of many, I should express them by certain characters the briefest possible.