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Any Humanist transforms, grows stronger, prouder, when they don the Hive boots which stamp each Member’s signature into the dust of history, but if others change from house cat to regal tiger, Thisbe becomes something more extreme, some lost primordial predator known in our soft present only through its bones.
This is infinitely more important than money. This is theology!”
I am sorry, reader. I cannot offer wine without the poison of the alcohol within.
What could those inside see as he approached? A square-breasted Mason’s suit, light marble gray, and crisp with that time-consuming perfection only seen in those who perfect their appearances for another’s sake, a butler for his master, a bride for her beloved, or Martin for his Emperor.
Like Martin, Ockham wore no sign of hobby or of nation-strat, nothing but his Hive boots and the overpowering self-confidence of a man who guards something so vital that the law will let him kill for it.
There is no more shame in reusing such a rich inheritance than in knowing other kings’ hands held this sword before you drew it from the stone.
My many masters don’t always remember they must feed me, that their toil-earned handouts are the only sustenance permitted to we the unfree. But Danaë—this monster from a more barbaric time—always remembers the protocols of servitude.
No, good master. To understand what follows, you must anchor yourself in this truth, that, by the standards of the era which sculpted him from childhood, the woman Dominic Seneschal is the boldest and most masculine of men.
No nation, whatever its power, can be called great when it imposes tyranny upon its citizens—worse, upon people it claims as its citizens, not because they have enjoyed the fruits of its soil, or benefitted from its protections, but because by chance their grandparents were born within that blotch of color on a map it calls its own.
It was the Major’s voice, seasoned and powerful, like an old piano which sounds better than new ones because it’s yours.
“The Major and the soldiers and Mycroft told me what war is like. They say it’s the second worst thing in the world.” Man: “That’s an interesting definition. What did they say is the worst thing?” Child: “Not having anything worth fighting for in the first place.”
The blue of his eyes is beyond sky blue, beyond sea blue, beyond amethyst, a ferocious blue like the blue of diamonds and star sapphires, the Hope Diamond, the Star of Asia, gems who leave behind a history of murder.
And you may be right to call it sick, but should a sickness be cured if makes its sufferers happier than healthy men?
all Utopians drape themselves in their most precious nowheres.
I am the window through which you watch the coming storm. He is the lightning.
“Sexual desire is the purest and most natural of animal drives. To suppress it in favor of an intellectual and theological satisfaction is a perversion of nature in the most extreme sense. Why, even to fornicate alone, or with many people at once, or with a machine, or an ass or hound, is closer to Nature’s intent than abstinence. Do you not agree?”
You do not believe, reader? Then come, I challenge you, come to her offices, ask good Sister Heloïse to tell you of her vocation, and see if you have the strength of will to interrupt a nun.
“Jehovah Epicurus Donatien D’Arouet M-Mason.” I always stumble somewhere in that name, as if part of me fears what would happen if I recited the full, unbroken invocation.
Torture, humanity was supposed to be past that. Gender, we were supposed to be past that, too.
Animals may hunt by speed, by trap, by disguise, by ambush, but name for me another besides mankind that hunts by trust.
