Dark Age (Red Rising Saga #5)

by Pierce Brown

We turned on our greatest general, the sword who broke the chains of bondage, and demanded he accept a peace he knew to be a lie.

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.”

“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.”

Only humanity could grasp the stars and then let them slip through its fingers for the pettiness in its heart.

Do they really love this? What creatures could be so at ease here and now? Am I even the same species?

Matter, how tiny my share Time, how brief my allotment Fate, how small my roll to play Self, all that can be mastered

“Life is meant to be felt. Else why live? Valleys make the mountains.”

Weldschmer. The pain in discovering the world fails to fulfill expectation.

And I will make you appreciate the works of the Spanish Surrealists. Because they are the best artists the world ever conspired to create, and they are unappreciated by modern society. Are there any questions?”

“Please. This horse rides for only one man.” —

love him so much I cannot bear to think of him.

You are good, my dear. You are patient when it is not in your nature. You are attentive when you are taken for granted. You are kind when the world insists it is convenient to be cruel. You are good. True good.

You deserve this day. You deserve this joy. You deserve this proof that your faith is not just right, but necessary.” I find myself in tears, and I can’t reason why. There are things you know, but when revealed to be known by others can make the world shine in a peculiar way.

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

Reveries come and go. I see my father and grandmother often. Sometimes there is a chair. Great and silver and carved with eccentric faces. I have never seen it before.

’Lo, husband,” my wife says with a gentle smile. I pause it. Her face floats in my palms. I hold it there for a minute, cherishing the words on her lips, the absence of any other thought but me on her mind. The wind makes the palm fronds overhead swish like the skirts of Red girls at Laureltide.

“Daxo taught my son to build castles in the sand. Pax cried when the waves came in. Your brother sat him on his knee and told him that’s all life is. Moments you build only to see washed away. But that doesn’t mean it’s all for nothing.” I stop at the door and tap my temple like Daxo tapped Pax’s. “The key is having a long memory for the sweet, and a short one for the bitter. I will miss your brother, Thraxa. But he isn’t gone.” She

The Forbidden Song drifts ominously in the wind.

“You’re shit at bedtime stories,” I say. “Apologies. Next time I’ll tell you the tale of Sophocles the clone, a creature so noble and so wise he learned to cheat death.”

“My people have a word,” Sefi murmurs to me, “rahgschni. There is no translation in the Common tongue. As close as can be said is: the sorrow one feels in seeing fresh morning snow, knowing its beauty cannot last.”

It’s just a hard road to a cliff, with all the good ones falling over it far too quick.

This is the domain of the Obsidian. A world within an unseen world. Beneath the hallucination, I feel the beauty and inevitability of this day. For ten years, the Obsidians were to the Republic as Volga was to me. Doggedly carrying the weight of all the rest. Only to be denied the fruits of their labor. Fight, the little ones said to them. Kill for us, Valdir. Leave your homeland, but have none of our land, Sefi. Don’t shop in our stores, Volga. Don’t stand too tall, Volga. Because we are afraid of you. Well, a pox on hypocrites one and all. They had their chance, and now the Queen of the Valkyrie has come for their helium mines. I find myself proud of them as I laugh with the mad shaman, because in all this stupid, greedy world, the spirit comes alive when you see someone say, no more. “Do you see!” Ozgard shouts beside me with tears in his eyes. His face is like that of a child, not a monster. “We have come home! Do you see! This is our Volkland!” “Yes!” I proclaim, pumping my dread rifle in the air.

Only one thing can bind them, maybe in peace. The blood of Ragnar. I am not the last to carry it. Volga is Ragnar’s daughter.”

“He’s real,” Volga whispers, gripped with awe. The dark fairy tale of her letters appears. “Volsung Fá.” His voice is a deep vibration. He’s looking right at me. No. Through me to Volga. “Volga. I offer you these Stains.”

AFTER MY MOTHER THREW HERSELF off the cliffs of our Martian estate, my father came to me. It was one of the few audiences with him in which I was not summoned to stand sweaty-palmed before his desk next to that bloodstain in the carpet. He found me in the stables sitting in the sawdust. He was a giant to me in those days. He stroked the muzzle of my favorite horse and said: “Self-pity is the plebeian’s luxury. All that occurs is either endurable or unendurable. If it is endurable, endure it. If it is unendurable, follow your mother.” For once, I am thankful for the lesson.

“We all want to be special. It must ache to discover you are not.”

She wipes sleep from her eyes and looks down on me with such protective love that I start to cry.

Victra sways there, in a world of two, rocking the baby so tenderly, so intimately, with such encompassing love that I am unable to look away. They begin to pulse, to throb with color, the warmth inside them or maybe the emotions in me triggering the parasite so that their thermal heat glows in the coolness of the room. “It’s a boy, Sevro,” Victra’s glowing mouth whispers. “You guessed right.” And for a moment, as I watch, as I see the heat that makes their bodies, the vibrations that form her words, I believe the hero of my brothers can hear his wife, wherever he might be. Just as I believe deep down I could feel the death of Aengus and Dagan and Liam, the last of my family. Neither time nor space can sever the strands of life between those we love, not really. It is not the parasite telling me this. It is my heart. In the room, I feel my father and mother, my sister and my brothers. The joy we had is no lesser for having ended in horror. It is not gone, as I thought it was. It is here. In these moments that are larger than the world itself. They were alive. They lived. They were loved.

And someone once told me revenge is patient.”