Dark Age (Red Rising Saga #5)

by Pierce Brown

It would be easier with Sevro. Everything violent

War is our time.

“The old rage in colder ways, for they alone decide how to spend the young.”

Unlike Sevro, Virginia did not accuse me of parental malfeasance. She knows the shearing forces at work on my heart.

The responsibility to many outweighs the responsibility to one, even though it breaks something inside me.

Well, here I am, you deviant bitch. Here I bloody am. The motherfucking consequence.

“Hail Reaper.”

I once thought the greatest sin of war was violence. It isn’t. The greatest sin is it requires good men to become practical.

Oooof

I must kill it before it kills us.

Who can do what we have done? What our men have done? Yet we put ourselves at the mercy of rats. We free them. Protect them. Die for them. And when we turn our backs, they unveil their little teeth and gnaw at us one bite at a time. And when we turn to face them, they cheer, and we pretend their gnawing hasn’t made us weaker. Rats cannot even govern their own appetite. How can they govern themselves?”

Orion regards him with as much respect as Sevro would a particularly small turd.