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.

In a way, it’s easier to imagine the world’s going to end. At least there’s a certainty to it. End—bam—done. But change—where does change stop?”

Progress. Pah. 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?

Magic’s just science we don’t understand.

It’s a hell with no master, that men made themselves.”

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

The whole world’s made up of systems now. Systems that are too big for any one person to understand or control, or stop.