Arseny has the gift of healing, and the elder tells him bluntly: 'I won't spare you: you are guilty of her bodily death.' His gift saved everyone around him — the plague-stricken, the wounded, the dying — and it could not save the one person it was for. The mechanism: you become great at the thing precisely because it is useless for your one real wound. Competence as penance. The gift strengthens the more he sacrifices, but it is aimed at everyone except the one loss that matters. Ripped from the novel (translated from the Russian by the cutter): «Не буду тебя жалеть: ты виноват в ее смерти телесной.» — "I won't spare you: you are guilty of her bodily death."

— In our words · Source: Laurus (Eugene Vodolazkin)