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‘Warden doesn’t matter any more.’ Liar. I heard his voice as clearly as if he were in the room with me, a memory so lucid I felt it. It sent tremors working down my arms, right the way to my fingertips.
Great patches of the field had been uprooted. That was the fabric of my mind, torn and scarred, as if it had been ploughed by some infernal engine.
The dreamscape I found was a room full of filing cabinets, lit by stark white lights. This was a clean, precise person. She fitted every thought and memory into a sterile box.
‘One day, it all became too much. Like a doll dropped to the ground, I broke.
Words give wings even to those who have been stamped upon, broken beyond all hope of repair.’
Writing didn’t carry the same risks as speaking. You couldn’t be shouted down or stared at. The page was both a proxy and a shield.
That night, I sat high on the rooftops of Seven Dials, watching the sun set. This was the most beautiful time of the day, when the light shone through the gaps between the buildings and turned the skyscrapers to blades of gold.
‘“The Seven Seals do not have friends. Only those who would break us, and those who can’t,”’
London – beautiful, immortal London – has never been a ‘city’ in the simplest sense of the word. It was, and is, a living, breathing thing, a stone leviathan that harbours secrets underneath its scales. It guards them covetously, hiding them deep within its body; only the mad or the worthy can find them.
It was kill or be killed. My spirit cut through her mind, throwing her spirit right out of her body. A heartbeat later, the corpse slumped on top of me.
‘Everything here is dying. Even your fuels are made of decomposed matter. Humans use death as a means of sustaining life.
Above the madness of the metropolis, the night sky put me in mind of the æther: a network of orbs, some bright, some dim, pinpricks in the endless folds of darkness that could have been full of knowledge or ignorance. Too much of it to see or comprehend.
Fuck the lot of them.
But fear and understanding were kindred things. Both involved the loss of the familiar and the terrible danger of knowledge.
The White Binder can keep his Seven Orders of Clairvoyance. And because our actions will speak loud and clear to Scion, who would never listen to our words . . . ours will be the Mime Order.’
‘Hope is the lifeblood of revolution. Without it, we are nothing but ash, waiting for the wind to take us.’
‘It will end,’ I said, ‘when there are no Rephaim left on this side of the veil. When you rot with the rest of your world. The moths are out of the box, Nashira. Tomorrow, we will be at war.’
