Dark Age (Red Rising Saga #5)

by Pierce Brown

You have not been abandoned. I will come for you. Until then, endure, my love. Endure.

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

How many times have I been here? Sealed in a womb of metal, not for birth but to eat the living? The confines afflict me with dread. Dread not of what lies beyond—you can never prepare for that game—but that this will be my eternal tomb. Cursed to live to kill. Is this who I will always be?

I was a killer at sixteen. A warlord by twenty. But the younger me wasn’t this. He was still tender and new to war. If he was the Helldiver, I am the clawDrill.

“Because hope is an opiate, not a plan.”

“My father once said anyone interesting is at war with themselves, and can thus be described in just two words.

“Fear those who seek your company for their own vanity. As soon as you eclipse them in the mirror, it won’t be the mirror they break.”

“Pandora was a fiction written by men to blame the miseries of the world on women.

Is a man a coward if he realizes that bravery is just a myth the old tell the young so they line up for the meatgrinder?

I laugh at the cosmic joke. Only humanity could grasp the stars and then let them slip through its fingers for the pettiness in its heart.

I let fear drive my hope away. I let war become me, and my men followed.

As violence reaches for him, Darrow does not flinch like a man; he reaches like a covetous river. He pulls violence to him, drinks it into his current, and leaps around the battlefield with a seemingly mindless capriciousness. Which, when inspected, illuminates the genius of his violence.

The wolf howls fade in the distance. The flames eat my eye. Only then do I begin to scream.

You asked, what do I fear? I fear a man who believes in good. For he can excuse any evil.”

What good is being smarter than everyone if no one listens?

“Life is meant to be felt. Else why live?

“I hate tea,” a synthesized voice growls from above. “It’s just coffee with piss instead of coffee.”

“No betraying inflections. No microexpressions of grief. Simply obduracy, despite the dread clawing at the back of your eyes—a doomed army, a lost child, a dead wife.” She wags a finger heavy with rings at me. “That is a Peerless Scarred. How much more gravitas he has than all the squabbling rats of demokracy.”

But in time, I don’t know when, their creation became a vanity of will, and in the shadow of that vanity, man grew lesser for having more. Lesser for mastering the keys of creation, because he mistook himself for god, and cared less for his people, and more that his works endured.

“The tragedy of the gifted is the belief they are entitled to greatness, Lysander. As a human, you are entitled only to death.”

“You know I believe we all begin equal parts light and dark. I fear you think your strength lies in your darkness. But the measure of a man is not the fear he sows in his enemies. It is the hope he gives his friends.

“Money can’t solve everything,” I tell her. “Wrong, but whatever.”

I would kill him if I could, naturally, yet I still wonder if his manhood is sufficient to please me. Probably not. I have high standards.

“All of a man’s affairs become diseased when he wishes to cure evils by evils,”

But for all this new civilization’s love affair with technology, they’ve been seduced by their own cleverness and fail to understand the simple truth: lying is not a science, it is an art. And art will always be a human language.

Nothing good comes of good intentions.”

There’s never a right call, just people who make the hard ones.”

we are entitled only to the moment, and owe nothing to the future except that we follow our convictions.

I gave him a choice long ago, a chance to live in peace, but he has returned to war. To see the boy become man scours the empathy in me. Ten years too late, he must die.

I would die for the truth that all men are created equal. But in the kingdom of death, amidst ramparts of bodies and wind all of screams, there is a king, and his name is not Lune. It is Reaper.

“You know the curse of this world?” I ask, looking at the body the Carver made for me. “The greatest gifts were given to the worst of us.”

“I had this picture in my head where I would wake beside Virginia. I’d let her sleep and rise to make coffee, breakfast. And when they woke, my wife and son would find me reading at the kitchen table, or maybe making something out back.”

Maybe that is the point of it. Knowing that though one day darkness will cover all, at least your eyes were open to see moments of light.

I think, as with all things, honor is best appreciated in moderation. As is cruelty.