The Inheritance Trilogy

by N.K. Jemisin

In a child’s eyes, a mother is a goddess. She can be glorious or terrible, benevolent or filled with wrath, but she commands love either way. I am convinced that this is the greatest power in the universe.

That taste was something I had little experience with, yet I knew it the way an infant knows love, or an animal knows fear. Jealousy, even between father and son, is a fact of nature.

Usually only my fingers were that sensitive, but now my thighs made out the arcs and curves and jagged turns of gods’ language, each character perfectly clear in my mind. It was more than words; there were strange tilted lines, too, and numbers, and other symbols whose purpose I could not decipher. Too complex. He had created language at the beginning of time, and it had always been his most subtle instrument.