Golden Son (Red Rising Saga, #2)

by Pierce Brown

“A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.”

And I thought the Golds were broken. 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. Eo kept me from this end. Without her, I’d be like them. Lost.

‘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.

“A fool pulls the leaves. A brute chops the trunk. A sage digs the roots.”

And leave your oath whole. Do not raise a finger against me. You have killed Grays only. That is easily forgotten, yes? Return, and she will think this only a flight of youth.

I pause dramatically, knowing that any good song, any good dance, is a game of tension leading to a climax of sound and movement.

He is as he always told me to be—a stone amid the waves; wet, yet unimpressed by all that swirls about him.

but wisdom is found in the heart, not the head. Pax taught me that.”

My lie is too great to build a love upon.

“You taught me once, Lorn. I’m a better man for it. But now it’s my turn to teach you. Men can change. Sometimes they have to fall. Sometimes they have to leap.” I pat his knee and gain my feet. “Before you die, you’ll realize it was a mistake to kill Tactus, because you never gave him the chance to believe he was a good man.”

They go with the wind, chasing power. But they don’t realize power doesn’t shift. Power is resolute. It is the mountain, not the wind. To shift so easily is to lose trust. And trust is what has kept me alive. Trust in my friends, and their trust in me.

Because in the end, what does all the power in all the worlds matter if your closest friends can betray you?

Now there’s the roar. I hate how my body shivers at the idea of glory. There’s something deep in man that hungers for this. But I think it weakness, not strength, to abandon decency for that strange darker spirit.

I’ll wake in our warm bed, my hand tangled in her hair. I’ll wake to love and know that in the world before, I did my best.

“Friendships take minutes to make, moments to break, years to repair,”