The Warm Hands of Ghosts

by Katherine Arden

Armageddon was a fire in the harbor, a box delivered on a cold day. It wasn’t one great tragedy, but ten million tiny ones, and everyone faced theirs alone.

“Second: He will not come back to you. You must go to him. Third: To save him, you must let him go.” “I don’t understand.” “You will,” said Lucretia. “And I will give you some advice,” said Agatha. “Wars are stark things, are they not? Black and white. Allies and enemies. Not this time. You will not know who your enemies are, nor will they reveal themselves as you expect. You will not know whom to trust, but you must trust regardless. Do you understand?”

suppose that is another piece of advice for you, Laura. Do not despair. Endings—they are beginnings too.”

What’s progress? Give people God’s power—to build ships like islands, or fly like birds, or set fire to the bowels of earth like the devil in his damned pit—it just writes their stupidity larger and larger until they drown the whole world. Our hands get bigger and our spirits shrink. Is it any wonder, really, that God’s done with us?

“Because out there you can give up every piece of yourself for nothing, let the mud swallow you, nameless and naked, or you can sell yourself to me, story by story, for all the delights of peace. There are two evils”—his voice turned wry—“and I am the lesser.

Ghosts have warm hands, he kept telling me, as though it were the greatest secret in the world.

It was the poet’s alchemy, to seize the intangible or unspeakable and drag it, real, into the living world.

It was so much easier to hate a man than a system: vast, inhuman, bloodstained.

We won, screamed the people outside. Don’t they know, Laura thought, we all lost?