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“We,” he declared, “are damaged but not dismayed, oppressed but not overwhelmed. We are the Broken, for when our oaths were tested, we broke them and ourselves. We were the despised: Here are my best friends. This world sees a bastard, an orphan, a hostage, a cripple, an idiot. I call them the Mighty. We—you—are outcasts all, the homeless driven from the lands where our mothers were buried. They have taken the light from our lives. Killed our loved ones, our friends. Taken our homes. Left us to wander as ghosts and feral dogs.”
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“They have taken the light from us. Yes. But now they expect us to cower like dogs beaten and fade like shades forgotten. But I don’t see dogs and shades here. Do they not know what they’ve begun? I see wolves. I see ghosts …”
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“Have you forgotten? Have they made you, for this brief hour, forget? Ghosts and wolves hunt at night. They think we cower, waiting for the light? Alone we are broken, bereaved, afraid. Together we are strong. Together we will hunt. In darkness, we will usher them into the final darkness. Alone we were weak and frightened. That time is past. Together, today, we are the Nightbringers.”
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They stood nearly a hundred paces from each other, a man in white and a woman in white, across the white sands, under Orholam’s white, hot eye. Karris drew her pistols and handed them off. She drew her bich’hwa and her ataghan and handed them off as well. Last, she took her green and red spectacles off their necklaces and gave them away.
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The burn scars. Orholam. Her beloved brother’s face looked as if someone had given a wax poppet to a cruel child. His face had been melted. One eye was lower than the other. A thick knot of tissue had fused his cheek to his neck, and then been cut.
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It’s easier to build a new culture on the graves of the dead than around the homes of the living.
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“Evil is what we call what we don’t understand.”
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“Dazen … psst, Dazen … do you think today might be the day?”
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skritch
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supplicants
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“Surely a man who gives his life trying to save his friends is just as much a hero as one who dies actually saving them, right?”
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“What you need is introspection and time. Come and rest on my breast.” “Rest … after?” he asked. “No.” “Rest … first?” he asked. “Only. Rest only.
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“I created us one at a time,” the voice said. “Blue first, then green sometime later, yellow, orange quite a while later—the technical problems made it difficult to craft a chamber entirely of orange. It was important to me, to you, not to cheat and use multiple colors. We fixated on that. Red we did with many layers of seared red luxin and liquid red. Anyone else would have worried about placing what amounts to a bomb in the Chromeria’s heart. Superviolet and sub-red not even I could figure out.”
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“You carved out the space for the chamber, sealed it airtight on every side, then made a permeable wall of orange luxin that you stuck your hands through repeatedly. You burnt sub-red in that chamber until there was no air in it at all, and then you created the chamber itself with a monomaniac’s total fixation. That cell is perfect, a perfect sphere shining and crystalline, a marvel with the beauty of ten thousand flame crystals larger than anyone else has ever drafted. A perfect cell that no man will ever see.”
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It was the problem of both of them being leaders. They both had to sling grandiose horse shit sometimes.
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For beauty isn’t passive; beauty acts upon its beholder, moving and changing him.
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what you believe, what you behold, how you behave—each leading inexorably to the next.
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Once a man is convinced to believe the impossible, it’s impossible to make him disbelieve it.
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“Hairless cat,” Winsen said. “Hairless? They come like that?” Big Leo asked. “Oh, of course,” Ben-hadad said, light dawning. “Fluffles. The hairless cat. Not hypothetical, then.” “Odd texture. Feels like foreskin,” Winsen said. And that was how ‘petting the hairless cat’ entered the Mighty’s lexicon.
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I’m the promachos, and I go before us to fight in the ways I deem best.
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“Guile,” the dead man said. But now he didn’t speak with Gavin’s voice, but what might have been his own guttural growl. “Take me. I’m the only one who can save you. Touch that black stone in your eye patch to the wall, and I will make you emperor of this world in truth.” Gavin could swear that in the black-on-black he could make out a pair of hateful gleaming eyes. He smiled into the darkness. “What kind of a raka do you take me for?”
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Braxians that there’s something terrible below the Chromeria. Like about how you can’t take anything out of there, or something cataclysmic would happen.
Dead men??
I flattered myself that I was scary.”
His naturally golden eyes had been colored somehow to brown—lenses that sat on the eye itself? Was such a thing possible? The scleras of his eyes were red from the irritation of wearing them, but no more than a haze smoker’s.
“Only pain makes a Sharp.”
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“Diggity.
Karris fled, all her ideas of dignity and position forgotten, until she found herself on a rear balcony, in the shadow of the Chromeria, looking over the back bay, where a bone-white ship was loading. She gripped the rail unseeing.
Gavin leaving.
Below, the bone-white ship cast off from the quay. As the sun slowly rose, Karris watched it sail away until it disappeared into the horizon.
The bane lay below her. All of them, and all of them massive. Sub-red sizzling in the waves. Red smoldering. Orange placidly floating. Yellow awash in men and wights, every line perfect. Green bobbing wild. Cool blue melding with the color of the waves. And even the true prize, her superviolet bane, sitting invisible to most human eyes, known to most only by the odd bowl-shaped depression it made in the waves, waiting for her.
All of the banes????
It’s called golden joinery or golden repair. Look, maybe this is all just artists’ bullshit, right, but they say it’s not a celebration of flaws but an acceptance of them, addressed insofar as the structure needs it.
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Sub-red: Again the hardest to describe due to its flammability, but often described as feeling like a hot wind. Red: Gooey, sticky, clingy, depending on drafting; can be tarry and thick or more gel-like. Orange: Lubricative, slippery, soapy, oily. Yellow: In its liquid, more common state, like bubbly, effervescent water, cool to the touch, possibly a little thicker than seawater. In its solid state, it is perfectly slick, unyielding, smooth, and incredibly hard. Green: Rough; depending on the skill and purposes of the drafter, ranges from merely having a grain like leather to feeling like tree
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Luxen
Sub-red: Charcoal, smoke, burned. Red: Tea leaves, tobacco, dry. Orange: Almond. Yellow: Eucalyptus and mint. Green: Fresh cedar, resin. Blue: Mineral, chalk, almost none. Superviolet: Faintly like cloves. *Black: No smell/or smell of decaying flesh. *White: Honey, lilac. (*Mythical; these are the smells as reported in stories.)
Luxen smells
Sub-red drafters: Sub-reds are passionate in all ways, the most purely emotional of all drafters, the quickest to rage or to cry. Sub-reds love music, are often impulsive, fear the dark less than any other color, and are often insomniacs. Emotional, distractable, unpredictable, inconsistent, loving, bighearted. Sub-red men are often sterile. Associated vice: Wrath Associated virtue: Patience Red drafters: Reds are quick-tempered, lusty, and love destruction. They are also warm, inspiring, brash, larger than life, expansive, jovial, and powerful. Associated vice: Gluttony Associated virtue:
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Drafter personalities
Sub-red: Anat, goddess of wrath. Those who worshipped her are said to have had rituals that involved infant sacrifice. Also known as the Lady of the Desert, the Fiery Mistress. Her centers of worship were Tyrea, southernmost Paria, and southern Ilyta. Red: Dagnu, god of gluttony. He was worshipped in eastern Atash. Orange: Molokh, god of greed. Once worshipped in western Atash. Yellow: Belphegor, god of sloth. Primarily worshipped in northern Atash and southern Blood Forest before Lucidonius’s coming. Green: Atirat, goddess of lust. Her center of worship was primarily in western Ruthgar and
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Gods
