The Strength of the Few (Hierarchy, #2)

by James Islington

I know it’s a choice in name only. I’m done with running.

The illusion of power too often becomes power,

Easier to despise than understand. Easier to mock than empathise.

“One of my teachers back home once told me that sometimes, the only thing we can control is our attitude. And sometimes that can be enough.

“Foundation is like life. You can make no mistakes at all, and still lose.”

There’s some logic to it, I suppose—they’re assessing aptitude and thus potential, as opposed to work ethic or common sense—but that entire approach is unbalanced.

MY TUTOR ONCE ASKED ME who would win in a fight between two men. It was a lesson about Will, funnily enough. About how obvious advantages can lead to presumptions, but that strength can never truly be known until it is tested.

“They may remember the facts of a result, darling,” the muscled, playful organiser of the fights at the Letens Theatre told me one night, not long after I had started. “But they will always judge you on the how. On the after. You have to make them believe, my dear boy, whenever they see you step out onto that stage. Because it is faith that makes us cheer, and a triumph forgotten is no different to defeat.”

“A father is a man who loves you, no matter what. Not all of us can have one.”

Rule a man, and he will do whatever you can imagine. Befriend him, and he will do more.”

Death is a doorway

the concept of home is, at its core, about safety. That no matter how familiar you may become with a place, no matter how long it is your abode—if it ever loses its sense of comfort, you can no longer truly call it by that name.

A MAN WHO IS CHASED may be free. A man who chases never is. Kadmos told me that, once.

Men condemn what they do not understand.

Anonymity isn’t about being invisible. It’s about being forgotten.” She glances at me, briefly assessing.

Grief, my mother once told me, is love’s most honest expression.

I’m not sure if my tears are for the boy whose time was cut short, or myself for having to bear his absence.

a man is known by his failings until he is known by his actions. Just because you are not right for a place does not mean you were never meant to be there.

Sometimes… appreciating what you have isn’t something we do well, I think.”

most of the time, people need to be shown a truth before they will truly believe it.”

“The oldest argument for doing something wrong is that everyone is doing it. To dismantle what they have built would have required the agreement of every man who had spent his life building it,”

child needs to hear and truly understand only three phrases from their father as they grow up. ‘I love you.’ ‘I will help.’ And, ‘I don’t know.’

Grief never really leaves you, but at some point it becomes remembered rather than enveloping. My

“All of us wake up one morning for the last time,

FEAR IS A LACK OF control, realised. My father told me that, once. Explained that it is not the absence of control itself, but the understanding of it. The true, stomach-churning grasping of the fact that we have no significant way to affect what comes next in a given situation.

in the end, it is only the strength of the few that matters.”

Instead of the easy gift of our lives, we must suffer the hundred little deaths of self in order to protect this world. Not