The Inheritance Trilogy

by N.K. Jemisin

It is important to appreciate beauty, even when it is evil.

truuuuth

But love like that doesn’t just disappear, does it? No matter how powerful the hate, there is always a little love left, underneath. Yes. Horrible, isn’t it?

“I must work harder to keep my temper around you,” he said. “You have a memorable way of chastising me.” He lifted his eyes, and suddenly I knew he was remembering the time I had stabbed him.

lmao

“Regret is never meaningless,” I said. “It’s not enough, not on its own; you have to change, too. But it’s a start.”

This means, in a way, that true light is dependent on the presence of other lights. Take the others away and darkness results. Yet the reverse is not true: take away darkness and there is only more darkness. Darkness can exist by itself. Light cannot.

Loneliness is a darkness of the soul.”

Exquisite mortal, here is my soul; I want you to know it.

What a lovely line!

Choose how your nature shapes you. Embrace it. Find the strength in it. Or fight yourself and remain forever incomplete.”

So easy to endure pain and pass on in turn to those weaker than oneself. So easy to look into the eyes of someone who trusted me to protect him—and hate him, because I could not.

Only learning oneself better, and understanding one’s place in the world, made the touch of another mundane.

I considered several lies—then decided the truth was so outrageous that she might believe it more readily. “I’m a godling, sent by an organization of godlings based in Shadow. We think you might be trying to destroy the world. Could you, perhaps, stop?”

lmaooo

Because of us, you know all the wonders and horrors of possibility.

No. I would not kill my oldest friend, not for this. And I would not let my new friends, even if one of them had betrayed me, die. I was still a god, damn it, even without magic. I was still the wind and caprice, even bound into dying flesh. I would fear no mere mortal, no matter how powerful.

Sieh, mighty Sieh. How I love you!

Yet my heart still beats, and my brain still fires sparks within its wrinkled meat, and as long as those things continue, there is an anchor for my soul to hold on to.

I’m glad it will be like this. I died protecting those I cared for, facing an enemy, like a god.

SIEHHHH

Gods notice, but we learn to ignore these things early on, the same way mortal newborns eventually ignore the lonely silence of a world without heartbeats.

I suspected that if Wrath got through this day with his position intact, he would soon put his soldiers through a heavy training course on Gods, the Quick Recognition and Not Attacking Of.

lmao

“I may be older than the world, but I’m also just a man; no god is ever only one thing. If the whole of me frightens you, love whichever part you like.”

It had not been all suffering and horror. Life is never only one thing.

Nobody should try to make children be what they aren’t. Everyone should just be what they were supposed to be!

He was still himself: a great mortal temporarily folding himself small, choosing to bend and smile behind his sleeve and refrain from dancing in others’ presence. He might allow others to forget his worth, might have to remind them, might have to fight and bleed to make them recognize it—but as long as he remembered who and what he was, none of them could diminish him. He was, would forever be, glorious. Oh! And all he would ever have to do, to claim his true glorious self— OH! OH! OH! —was take his power back.