The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3)

by Ada Palmer

Behind the shades, the broad gray plain, that sea of shapeless gloom extending on and on across the mockeries of trees, that vast borderless shadow, millions on millions. Souls, reader. That gray waste is all forgotten souls, minds empty of memory, smeared one into another, stripped of self but conscious and eternal still. And to this absolute dissolution Caesar damns his enemies. Damnatio Memoriae. Keep it away! Away! Back, sea of shadows! Not me! I will never let you take me! I will carve my memory into history, by work, by force, by guile, in swathes of blood and ashes if I must! I will! I part my lips to shout my name into the dark, but grope for it, slipping away: I am … I am … Thou art Mycroft Canner. I am Mycroft Canner! I weep for joy as it comes to my lips: my name, my past, my self. Draw off, vain shadow! I will never be yours! I am armored against you forever now, with this strong Master Reader at my side. Draw off, and hear me laugh, and know that you will never have me! The dead look up hearing my laughter, great Agamemnon rising from his game of dice with Ajax. But … that is not Agamemnon’s face. It is inhuman, art’s primitive parody, as anonymous as the generic face that decorates some urn or shield boss, and as far from life-mask as a child’s doodle. What is this face? Can I even call ‘eyes’ these scratched slits between shapeless metal cheeks? I recognize it now: this is no flesh face but the death mask in thin hammered gold, doubly lifeless, doubly frozen...