The Will to Battle (Terra Ignota, #3)

by Ada Palmer

I barely remember. If ever, reader, you have seen a graveyard, where the centuries of Zeus’s tempests have rinsed away the faces of carved angels and the names they mourned, my memory is much the same. Facts which in a sane mind would stay clear wear away quickly, their contours barely traceable upon the weather-beaten stones.

The memory itself does not feel real. We see images of ruins so often in movies: burned-out houses, castles, cities, Dresden, New York, Pompeii, vivid with fire and artistry, with music and smelltracks to add pathos. What we saw on the screen now was artless, a tumbled, jagged something, dim and badly framed, hard to differentiate from a construction site or unsuccessful art. On either side stood houses, gardens, children’s swings, but the shapelessness between had nothing to prove it used to be a home.

“Now there’s a symbol, and not an ignoble one: kill me if it will serve the human race. Many have worn lesser sigils proudly. Many will wear this one. When you can tell friend from foe, you can make battle lines.” Flush rose in the great commander’s cheeks, flush of anticipation, anger, readiness. “With this you can make war.

“Tell me as much of what happened to you as you’re willing to,” Martin ordered, “but don’t fill in the gaps with lies, not tonight.

All human achievement, our empires, good deeds, art, the Great Project itself, all are distractions, invented by a race so weak we cannot sit still in a chair for five minutes and face our finitude.

“Though my return here makes narrative sense, and narrative is a powerful force in the world, at least for me.”

Society changes, Mycroft, faster, faster, always, always. How many eternal-seeming dreams did our ancestors have five hundred years ago that we now laugh at?”

I am content with what I have become.

It is not power that corrupts, but the belief that it is yours.