The Book That Broke the World (The Library Trilogy, #2)

by Mark Lawrence

The greater tragedy of our world is not the victims of cruelty, but that so many of those victims would, given the opportunity, stand in the shoes of their oppressors and wield the same whip with equal enthusiasm.

How many people, Evar wondered, had spent their youth, their whole lives, battering at locked doors, only to find—if they ever managed to open them—that there was nothing on the other side they couldn’t have found on their own side?

Her anger had never been a flame, quick to catch, ready to become violent in response to some new indignity. There was no hidden threshold over which she couldn’t be pushed without consequence. She had already been pushed far beyond any such boundary. Her anger was the implacable heat of a planetary core. It wasn’t going away, ever. The wounds had been struck too deep and too early for forgiveness to be an option. Lutna might be nice, the boy behind her might be mean: it made no difference. They were pieces in the machine that had devoured her.

Every notable toymaker puts a piece of her soul into each creation. The love with which it was crafted can be seen in every line. But even the cheapest toy, die-stamped and disgorged from mechanical bowels on conveyor belts, has a place where a child might hang their heart. The power of a fresh imagination is such that the meanest vessel can hold miracles.

“I haven’t mourned them.” He admitted this for the first time to the darkness and a stranger who had nearly strangled him. “I don’t know how to.” “You should cry their loss to the moons and vow revenge,” Clovis answered. “Revenge on whom?” Clovis made no answer. “On the next canith I see?” Arpix asked. “On the ones I see running from the skeer? Should I have doused the light and left you to it?” “You should still howl for them, loud enough for the moons to hear.” Arpix felt that perhaps he should, but could only offer, “It’s not our way.” He meant it wasn’t his way. Salamonda had wailed for her lost ones, no room for shame in her grief. Arpix felt somehow lessened by the fact that his own mourning had been unable to step over such social constraints even in this forsaken wilderness. Instead, it ached inside him, along with the regret that he’d never been able to tell his quiet and reserved mother or his quiet and reserved father that their quiet and reserved son had loved them very much in his own strange way. Clovis sniffed the air, or perhaps his neck, close enough to make Arpix shiver. “You should howl for them.” Some gentleness in her tone made him imagine she might have intuited the depth of his emotion by scent alone. She moved away. “You’re going?” “I know the path back.” “I’ll come with you,” Arpix said. “You should stay.” Clovis’s growl became more distant. “To not speak to the moons is to poison yourself from within. You should stay.” “I . . .” Almost beyond hear...

😭😭😭😭😭😭

“It seems as if I’m to be the last one to get a pet human. I have my eye on the Meelan, or perhaps the Salamonda. She seems capable and comes with an able guardian.”

Kerrol 😂 coming out of no where to become my favorite

If you pick the solution you think is best out of a host of possibilities then everyone is going to have a slightly different answer to the problem. You need support, so you accept a few small changes and move to someone else’s solution. Now there are two of you behind one idea. You need more. The process repeats and repeats. You see people coalescing behind an idea you hate, and it becomes more important to be lined up behind something vaguely palatable that has the numbers to oppose them than it does to get exactly the solution you wanted. In the end there are two solutions, aligned against each other.