The Strength of the Few (Hierarchy, #2)

by James Islington

Grief, my mother once told me, is love’s most honest expression. The last and hardest aspect of truly, truly caring for someone. She said it at her own mother’s funeral rites, tears in her eyes even as she tried to comfort a boy too young to understand why he was so sad, why his grandmother couldn’t be there anymore. She explained through choking sobs that without grief, love would be meaningless. Because it is impossible to truly love something that cannot be lost.

We can spout a lifetime of words and they will echo and fade, and history will not remember a single one. I don’t like it either but when power is so entrenched, so impossibly distant, blood becomes the only possible currency of change.”