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“We dance alone, because only alone do Helldivers drill. Only alone can a boy become a man.”
“Rather a drink be my master than a man. These chains taste sweet.”
“Speak and they will listen,” she urges. “It is that bloody simple. All ears yearn for a voice to lead them through darkness.”
Few men truly like seeing beauty burn.
“We must take a different path. An empire cannot be destroyed from without till it is destroyed from within. Remember that. We’re empire-breakers, not terrorists.”
A thousand cities span the face of Mars. Metal behemoths sail between the planets in fleets carrying weapons that can crack the mantle of a moon. On distant Luna, buildings rise seven miles high; there the Sovereign Consul, Octavia au Lune, rules with her Imperators and Praetors. The Ash Lord, who made the world of Rhea cinders, is her minion. She controls the twelve Olympic Knights, legions of Peerless Scarred, and Obsidians as innumerable as the stars. And those Obsidians are only the elite. The Gray soldiers prowl the cities ensuring order, ensuring obedience to the hierarchy. The Whites
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“Ares once told me that it is the hottest fire that forms the sternest steel. Keep pushing the boy.”
“Look into yourself, Darrow, and you’ll realize that you are a good man who will have to do bad things.”
It is strange. This boy likes me. He insults me, but he likes me. Even stranger, I desperately want him to like me. Why? I think it is because I feel as though he is the only one, including Roque and Cassius, who understands life. He is ugly in a world where he should be beautiful, and because of his deficiencies, he was chosen to die. He, in many ways, is no better than a Red.
Man cannot be freed by the same injustice that enslaved it.
“He told me he wanted me to rub his shoulders. Told me to do what he said because he was my master because he spent blood taking the castle. Then he tried … well … you know.” A hundred generations of men have used that inhuman logic.
“You do not follow me because I am the strongest. Pax is. You do not follow me because I am the brightest. Mustang is. You follow me because you do not know where you are going. I do.”
“Nothing binds like pain shared.”
“An army marches on its stomach.”
Breathe the anger out. Breathe it out and move. Easier said than done for me.
“He’s locked in Apollo’s dungeons.” “The stupid Pixie!” He laughs again. They have an odd relationship.
Sooner or later, they had to know I would snap and come to cut them down. Or perhaps they think I’m still a child. The fools. Alexander was a child when he ruined his first nation.
The ones we’ve captured, even the ones a little bemused by the idea of students invading Olympus, now stare at me with pale faces. They realize they’re part of the game they thought they escaped many years ago, and that there are no medBots directed toward Olympus. Funny thing, watching gods realize they’ve been mortal all along.
“It is the way things were,” I say harshly, surprising him. But I believe what I say. “I am something different. I freed the enslaved and let the broken mend themselves. I gave them something you older generations can’t understand.”
I am the spark that will set the worlds afire. I am the hammer that cracks the chains.
Words are a weapon stronger than he knows. And songs are even greater. The words wake the mind. The melody wakes the heart.
