Red Rising 3-Book Bundle: Red Rising, Golden Son, Morning Star, and an exclusive extended excerpt of Iron Gold

by Pierce Brown

Maybe that’s just the nature of us, ever wishing for things that were and could be rather than things that are and will be. It takes more to hope than to remember.

When my uncle gave me my slingBlade, he said it would save my life for the price of a limb. Every miner is told that so that he knows from the first day he steps in the mine, the sacrifice is worth it. I make one now for which I may never be forgiven.

All this to reach the bridge. All this to reach a man who I could have reached out and touched the day before. If this is the cost of honor, give me a shameful murder.

“I’m tired of this war, Darrow.” “So am I. And if I could bring Julian back to you, I would. But this war is for him, or men like him. The decent. It’s for the quiet and gentle who know how the world should be, but can’t shout louder than the bastards.”

She sniffs me. “Are you drunk?” She looks back at the flushed Howlers and teetering Telemanuses. “Are they all drunk?” “Shhh,” I say and hand her a flask. “You’re too sober.”

I was going to say something important. Something memorable. But I’ve forgotten it in her eyes. That gulf that divided us is still there, filled with questions and recrimination and guilt, but that’s only part of love, part of being human. Everything is cracked, everything is stained except the fragile moments that hang crystalline in time and make life worth living.

That is the peril of a solar empire: all the power in all the worlds means nothing if it is in the wrong place.

Once I thought that writing this book would be impossible. It was a skyscraper, massive and complete and unbearably far off. It taunted me from the horizon. But do we ever look at such buildings and assume they sprung up overnight? No. We’ve seen the traffic congestion that attends them. The skeleton of beams and girders. The swarm of builders and the rattle of cranes… Everything grand is made from a series of ugly little moments. Everything worthwhile by hours of self-doubt and days of drudgery. All the works by people you and I admire sit atop a foundation of failures. So whatever your project, whatever your struggle, whatever your dream, keep toiling, because the world needs your skyscraper. Per aspera, ad astra!