Dark Age (Red Rising Saga #5)

by Pierce Brown

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

A moving mind is always fed. At rest, mine eats itself.

I no longer believe in the Vale. I am the walking dead. Woe to those who cross my shadow.

Atalantia thought she could steal my Imperator. That her Fear Knight could keep my friend as a toy for torture. That I would simply run back to Luna and let my men die. That she could steal my son and there would be no consequences. Well, here I am, you deviant bitch. Here I bloody am. The motherfucking consequence.

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.

“Mars is with you, till the Vale.” Others hear his words and begin to thump their chests over their hearts in the Fading Dirge, except it is an inversion. Not the fast beating to a slow stop as in death, but a slow pace quickening to a racing beat. I’m about to say something to Dago, when he lights another burner and blows the smoke in my face like old times.

What common language would we speak, I wonder, when they have not seen inside the box and I am its lock?

I suspected it was a fever for kills, chasing some imaginary number where his soul would finally be quenched and deem it enough. Today is the first time I realize the number isn’t counting up. It’s counting down. How many more can he kill before he goes?

The dread monster rises in the belly of me. Laughter spews from between my teeth. 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.