The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3)

by Ada Palmer

There are more illiteracies than script, reader: Ancelet can read numbers, Headmaster Faust the subtleties of face and phrasing, Madame blushes, Eureka Weeksbooth her ten billion balls of light, while others read stones, DNA, star streaks, the flights of birds—all hen scratch to the untrained. I think all humans feel rage at our finitude when we see others read what we cannot. In some eras fire was the solution, to burn, like infected sheets, the witches and heretic philosophers who read too well the signs and stars. But wiser eras hold such prophets dear.

Each death is an infinite waste, but infinity still has degrees.

who dared break the peace in Hobbestown would face, first

“Now there’s some top-quality despair. If you won’t give me a number, look at these forty-eight pictures of things eating bananas.”

We forget, I think, how the countryside we think of as “wild” has been reshaped so many times by life, how the jungle’s false chaos is really a scripted mesh of symmetry, leaf matching leaf, child parent, every life-form acting out its role as strictly as the dancer spinning on a music box. Life’s symmetry has had no hand in this Antarctic, nor adaptation, cycle, food chain. All there is as random as the Moon, and when a … shape of ice which has no name, as big as … itself, for it was the biggest thing that I had ever tried to label with a size, loomed before me, I tasted the terror that stands twin to the romance of touching a new world.

Death. It was Death, beautiful and certain. We are a coddled species, reared in soft soil where we have but to cast seed to the earth for food to grow.

Kosala had the overperfect hair and fresh-pressed wrap of someone trapped between Important Meetings,