" Lying jammed in a crack between two stones a third of the way down the slope, half buried beneath Kalansii corpses, and feeling the blood draining from the deep, mortal wounds in his chest, he (character name removed to avoid spoiler) heard that laughter.
And in his mind he went back. Childhood. The battles they fought, the towering redoubts they defended, the sunny days of dust and sticks for swords and running this way and that, where time was nothing but a world without horizons - and the days never closed, and every stone felt perfect in the palm of the hand, and when a bruise arrived, or a cut opened red, why he need only run to his ma or da, and they would take his shock and indignation and make it all seem less important - and then that disturbance would be gone, drifting into the time before, and ahead there was only the sun and the brightness of never growing up.
To the stones and the sweat and the blood here in his last resting place, he smiled, and then he whispered to them in his mind, 'You should have seen our last stands. They were something. They were something'
Darkness, and then brightness - brightness like a summer day without end. He went there, without a single look back "

― Steven Erikson , The Crippled God (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #10)