Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga, #4)

by Pierce Brown

It’s my duty as a free man to read so I’m not blind, being led around by my nose.”

My wife is not as fickle as a flame. She is an ocean. I knew from the first that I cannot own her, cannot tame her, but I am the only storm that moves her depths and stirs her tides. And that is more than enough.

But history is so often molded from tainted clay by those who remain.

Forgive me, but I find books a passion more illuminating than carnivals of flesh.”

The great philosopher Sagan once preached it was in our nature as a species to explore.

Perhaps some brilliant boy or girl who has yet to take their first step will one day make an engine to carry us faster than the speed of light beyond our single star. Beyond the stain of man. Would all this chaos be worth that one innovation?

I often imagine what humans could do if there were no scarcity. Nothing to fight over. Just an unending expanse to explore and name and fill with life and art. I sm...

“Do not let fear touch you. Fear is the torrent. The raging river. To fight it is to break and drown. But to stand astride it is to see it, feel it, and use its course for your own whims.”

opportunities multiply as they are seized.” “Don’t quote Sun Tzu at me like it was your idea.

Sometimes, little one, it’s best if the worlds think you a little mad.” He winks. “Inspiring what they’ll let you get away with.”

“Any chance they found out what’s what with Sophocles?” one of the Reds asks. “Heard he’s gone mental.” “You would too if they cloned you twenty-odd times,” says an old woman named Garla, exhaling burner smoke.

Only ever been one fox in House Telemanus. Sophocles is seven hundred years old. This just happens to be his twenty-first life.

perruques

It is not their ancestral sword, Starfire. That was lost at the Reaper’s Triumph when his father’s corpse was robbed—its owner now a great mystery.

“The mastery of music is its own reward,” Apollonius says. “The process by which one’s heart is entwined with masters of old. You do not know the toil, nor could you suffer it, and so you will never know the reward of understanding it.”

“Using the claws of others is not brave, nor is it the same as having claws.

I forgot the stars were there. But now as I know it is the last time I will see and feel them, I wonder how I ever survived without them.

“Do you know him, Holiday?” the Sovereign asks. The stocky woman nods and laughs a sad laugh to herself. “You could say so. He’s my brother-in-law.”

you are wise and lucky and live long as me, you will learn this pain is just a drop in the sea.” She sets a hand on my heart, her eyes intense. “So feel all of it, boy, before time makes you forget.”

Young death is divine. It freezes the flower in time. A gift in a way, to remember her as that instead of watching age ravage and devour…” Her blue-veined hands pull absently at the loose folds of her neck. “…till she is a shadow of what she was.”

“These ten years I’ve been looking for the man I married,” Dido says to her husband. I strain to hear them over the wind. “Now I see him again. The young Moon Lord who burned a city for a girl of the pearl shore. Romulus the Bold. Dido of Numidae. What a pair they were. What an end they had.” “No,” he whispers. “This is not the end. I loved you before I ever met you. I will love you until the sun dies. And when it does, I will love you in the darkness. Goodbye, wife.”