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November 5 - November 11, 2025
Corbin hated people, but he loved his work, and he was damn good at it.
milquetoast
Valuable was not the same as irreplaceable.
Harmagians had money. Aeluons had firepower. Aandrisks had diplomacy. Humans had arguments.
As usual, though, he had forgotten about the smell—a heady mix of fuel, dust, spices, fire, perfume, kitchen grease, solder and the natural odors of a dozen or more sapient species. Behind it all was the constant mossy funk emanating from the surrounding shores.
The moon of Coriol was tidally locked, which allowed an uninterrupted source of sunlight to fall upon the skins of matted scum that capped its quiet seas. The merchants and traders who kept permanent residence on the moon often made their homes on the dark side, away from the sun and the stink.
Larab, they would call it in their native tongue, a word to describe form.
And gruss, too, a word for the color of unseen matter.
But when it comes to evolution, we are hatchlings, fumbling with toys. I believe this is why many of my peers still cling to theories of genetic material scattered by asteroids and supernovae.
In many ways, the idea of a shared stock of genes drifting through the galaxy is far easier to accept than the daunting notion that none of us may ever have the intellectual capacity to understand how life truly works.
They say that nobody can define you but you. So when Bear gave himself a new arm, he didn’t do it because he didn’t like the body he was born in, but because he felt that new arm fit him better. Tweaking your body, it’s all about trying to make your physical self fit with who you are inside.
Change is always dangerous.”
Life isn’t fair, and laws usually aren’t, either. You did what you had to do.
“It was our own doing. Our extinction wasn’t caused by a natural disaster or the slow crawl of evolution. We killed ourselves.”
“We cannot blame ourselves for the wars our parents start. Sometimes the very best thing we can do is walk away.”
People can do terrible things when they feel safe and powerful.
Feelings are relative. And at the root, they’re all the same, even if they grow from different experiences and exist on different scales.”
Their whole thing is that they’re trying to figure out the pattern and match their lives to it. Apparently, that’s why they’ve been circling the Core since who-knows-when. The galaxy spins, so they should, too. That’s where the clans come in. Everybody’s got a different idea on how the patterns work, and they get pretty violent over it. And clans can change really fast when new ideas come in. They sound like a very compulsive sort of people.
They call it a yegse, a change that rules all.
“Well, come on,” she said. “Let’s go save the bastard.”
The people we remember are the ones who decided how our maps should be drawn. Nobody remembers who built the roads.”
They get who you are, and what you like, and they don’t care who you sleep with or what mistakes you make, because brothers aren’t mixed up in that part of your life. They see you at your worst, and they don’t care.
