The Inheritance Trilogy

by N.K. Jemisin

“We don’t call them gods.” Viraine smiled faintly. “That would be an offense to the Skyfather, our only true god, and those of the Skyfather’s children who stayed loyal. But we can’t call them slaves, either. After all, we outlawed slavery centuries ago.” This was the sort of thing that made people hate the Arameri—truly hate them, not just resent their power or their willingness to use it. They found so many ways to lie about the things they did. It mocked the suffering of their victims.

It is blasphemy to separate oneself from the earth and look down on it like a god. It is more than blasphemy; it is dangerous. We can never be gods, after all—but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.

There is a tale of the Nightlord that the priests allow. Once long ago, before the war between the gods, the Nightlord descended to earth, seeking entertainment. He found a lady in a tower—the wife of some ruler, shut away and lonely. It was not difficult for him to seduce her. Some while later, the woman gave birth to a child. It was not her husband’s. It was not human. It was the first of the great demons, and after it and others like it were born, the gods realized they had made a terrible mistake. So they hunted their own offspring, slaying them down to the tiniest infant. The woman, who had been turned out by her husband and was now deprived of her child as well, froze to death alone in a snowy forest. My grandmother told me a different version of the tale. After the demon-children were hunted down, the Nightlord found the woman again and begged her forgiveness for what he’d done. In atonement he built her another tower and gave her riches so that she might live in comfort, and he visited her ever afterward to see that she was all right. But she never forgave him, and eventually she killed herself for grief. The priests’ lesson: beware the Nightlord, for his pleasure is a mortal’s doom. My grandmother’s lesson: beware love, especially with the wrong man.

To the infinite hells with obviousness, I decided.

“Mischief, not politics!”

He was always hot to the touch. Assuming we could come to some agreement on the sleeping arrangements, next winter I could save a fortune on firewood.

I was beginning to understand, a little. “Is that why you’re a usurer?” Madding chuckled. “I prefer the term investor. And my rates are perfectly fair, thank you.” “Drug dealer, then.” “I prefer the term independent apothecary—”

The Lord Arameri, summoned to my room to find a barely alive demon, an exhausted fallen god, several dead and nearly dead godlings, and a human-shaped pile of ash, reacted remarkably well.

YA: Madam, please. We do not speak… that name you mentioned, the— NS: What? Enefa? (shouts) Enefa, Enefa, Enefa!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffwFXGPRDu4

Lil tried to eat me. Typical.

lovely little shoujo OAV and TV series called Mahou Tsukai Tai,

There was a long silence that fell between us. This was not recriminating. It was simply that such statements stirred up sediment of the past, and it was natural to wait for that to settle before we moved on.

I had to get Hymn’s father to teach me how to shave. This so amused him that he forgot to be afraid of me for a few minutes, and we actually shared a laugh when I cut myself and yelled out a very bad word. Then he started to worry that I would cut myself and blow up the house someday. We don’t read minds, but some things are easy for anyone to guess.

“There’s no evidence that they’re building an army at all,” said Nemmer. There was, but it was subtle. I thought of Usein Darr’s pregnancy and that of her guardswoman, and the woman in Sar-enna-nem who’d had two babies with her, both too young to be eating solid food yet. I thought of the children I’d seen there—belligerent, xenophobic, barely multilingual, and every one of them four or five years old at the most. Darr was famous for its contraceptive arts. Even before scrivening, the women there had long ago learned to time childbearing to suit their constant raiding and intertribal wars. Their war crop, they called it, making a joke of other lands’ reliance on agriculture. In the years preceding a war, every woman under thirty tried her best to make a child or two. The warriors would nurse the babes for a few days, then hand them over to the nonwarriors in the family—who, having also recently borne children, would simply nurse two or three, until all the children could be weaned and handed over to grandmothers or menfolk. Thus the warriors could go off to fight knowing that their replacements were growing up safe, should they fall in battle. It was a bad sign to see so many Darre breeding. It was a worse sign that the children hated foreigners and weren’t even trying to ape Senmite customs. They certainly weren’t preparing those children for peace.

Also, don’t go in black holes, no matter how much they look like cute little Nahas. They are not cute! They are actually very bitey and kind of mean.