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“It’s not victory that makes a man. It’s his defeats.
“In the words of Lorn au Arcos, if you must only wound the man, you better kill his pride.”
Rise so high, in mud you lie.”
What dread those natural-born humans must have felt to see the Conquerors falling from the sky. Man perfected, but bringing chains instead of hope.
I am not made for the cold war of politics. Not made for subtlety.
His power is of a different breed. Where I am kinetic energy, he is potential.
“A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.”
a father must cuff the ears of his children if they make an attempt to set fire to his house;
If so, the word stuck in her throat, because she knew, as I knew, that I had not given her all of me. I had not shared all that I am. Greedily, I kept secrets. And how could someone like her, someone with so much self-worth, bare herself and throw her heart at a man who gave so little in return? So she closed her golden eyes, shoved the razor into my hands, and told me to go.
There is more than one path to the top. Always remember that, brother.”
How cruel a life, that the sight of my dead wife means hope.
Well, I want you to imagine media as a pipeline to a city in the desert.” He waves around. “Our metaphorical desert. I can provide only thirty percent of the content of what comes through that pipeline, but I can affect one hundred percent of it. My water contaminates the rest. That is the nature of media. Do I want this city in the desert to hallucinate? Do I want its inhabitants to writhe in pain? Do I want them to rise up?” He sets his chopsticks down. “It all starts with what I want.”
I wonder if she’d smile so broadly if she had to kill all those people with a knife. How easy we make mass murder.
We’re all just wounded souls stumbling about in the dark, desperately trying to stitch ourselves together, hoping to fill the holes they ripped in us.
“You were not strong enough then,” Harmony says. “Are you strong enough now, Helldiver?” I look at her, tears blurring my sight. Her hard eyes soften for me. “I had children, once. Radiation ate their insides, and they didn’t even give them pain meds. Didn’t even fix the leak. Said there weren’t enough resources. My husband just sat there and watched them die. In the end, the same thing took him. He was a good man. But good men die. To free them, to protect them, we must be savages. So give me evil. Give me darkness. Make me the bloodydamn devil if we can bring even the faintest ray of light.”
I am a child of hell, and I’ve spent too long in their heaven.
There is no greater plague to an introvert than the extroverted.
“We all have our own tides inside. They go in. Out.” He shrugs. “Not really ours to control. The things, people, that orbit us do that, at least more than we’d like to admit.”
‘Home isn’t where you’re from, it’s where you find light when all grows dark.’
We are not our station in life. We are us—the sum of what we’ve done, what we want to do, and the people who we keep close.
“In a world of killers, it takes more to be kind than to be wicked. But men like you and me, we’re just passing time before death reaches down for us.”
“Pride is just a shout into the wind.”
“I will die. You will die. We will all die and the universe will carry on without care. All that we have is that shout into the wind—how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall.”
They are the messenger pigeons from his story, crossing again and again in the sky. How excited he was to be reunited with her.
Death is not grander than his pride.
I claw because I carry the torch of something that must not die, must not go out.
“Never tell me the odds, just do it,”
But this is why I was made. To dive into hell.
“Watch how a pitviper strikes, my son.” Father once clutched me by my wrist and made me play this game. “Watch it coil upward and upward till it reaches its crest. Don’t move before then. Don’t strike out with your slingBlade. If you do, then it’ll get you. It’ll kill you. Move just when it’s coming down. Do that with the terror in life. Don’t act till you’re as scared as you’ll get, then …”
I can’t think. I’m screaming inside. Laughing like the flames of a wildfire. Laughing because I know it is my madness that these logical warriors cannot fight.
Out of me roars a madman’s scream.
Their understanding of the mortal coil is being adjusted.
I’ll never forget those faces. I brought them this. How many families will weep because of what I did here?
Humans, no matter their Color, are fragile as doves in the meat grinder of war.
A heavy silence as the first sparks of revolution are struck.
And though they die, I feel the flickering of rebellion as I give them permission to do what they’ve wanted to do their entire lives. It’s there, even if you never see it till the end—that spark of individuality, of freedom.
“In the end, I believe I’ll enjoy war,” he says. “Gotta toughen my spine a bit. Callous my hands. Bastards tell us it’s all roses and glory.” He looks up. “Don’t you smell the roses, Reaper?”
Break the chains.”
“Kind? A quaint fiction. But we both know I’m far from kind.”
“No one knows of these people,” she says. “No one but a handful of Golds with access. The human spirit tries to break free, again and again, not in hate like the Dark Revolt. But for love. They don’t mimic each other. They aren’t inspired by others who come before them. Each is willing to take the leap, thinking they are the first. That’s bravery. And that means it’s a part of who we are as people.”
“You are not wicked,” I say as I take her hand in mine. “You are not cruel.” She shakes her head, trying to pull away. I take her jaw between the fingers of my right hand and bend her head till her eyes find a home in mine. “And what you do for the people you love cannot be judged. Do you understand?”
He was never a monster; and if he ever becomes one, I know it will be because of me.
When falls the Iron Rain, be brave. Be brave. —LORN AU ARCOS
“Wise men read books about history, Pliny. Strong men write them.”
Show them we drip with power. We are arbiters of life and death.
“Hateful to me as the gates of Hades is that man who hides one thing in his heart and speaks another.”
“When you are in the salt, you feel like every gale is the world ender. Every wave the greatest that has been. These boys ride the gales in rapture at their own glory. But every now and then, a true storm rises. It shatters their masts and rips the hair from their heads. They do not last long till the sea swallows them whole. But their mothers have wept their deaths long before, as I wept for yours the first day we met.”
“They say you can hear the dead stormsons whooping in the wind,” he mutters. “I say it’s the crying of their mothers.”
“To think about what hands feel,” Lorn mutters. “These have felt the lifeblood of my sons as their hearts pumped it out of their bodies. They’ve felt the cold of a razor’s hilt as they stole the dreams of youth. They’ve worn the love of a girl and a woman and then felt those heartbeats fade to silence. All for my glory. All because I chose to ride the sea. All because I do not die easily as most.” He frowns. “Hands, I think, were not meant to feel so much.”
“You meet a man, you know him. You meet a woman, she knows you.” He laughs to himself about some memory. “Might be easier thinking her some terror in the night. But she’s flesh and blood. She has friends. She has family. And she thinks you a threat to them.”
