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“The old rage in colder ways, for they alone decide how to spend the young.”
(null)
Flavinian armorkill
“Together you and I…we’ve broken worlds. 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?”
“Where is it, Darrow? Where is our demokracy?”
“Because hope is an opiate, not a plan.”
She stops and turns. “According to our Senate, you’re not my commanding officer. You’re a traitor.” There’s only one thing to do with doubt. Stomp on it.
“The tanks and infantry meant for Mars, Luna, and Earth will die here on Mercury.” I am proud that the officers do not flinch. Any illusions of rescue that my return might have awoken now dispel. I cannot wave my hands and whisk them back to Mars. This is no tale of salvation, it is one of sacrifice. This is our Thermopylae.
I am no Cassandra. But the moment the first Peerless boot touches Mercurian soil, we’ve lost the planet. This isn’t Thermopylae. This is Cannae. We will die in the Ladon.”
If I don’t know how strong you are, why would I choose you for a dancing partner, young man?” “Because all others are taken, and the song creeps upon crescendo.”
Darrow thinks this is about good and evil. It isn’t. This is about order and chaos. I have chosen my side.
“We are Legio X Pardus! We are the vanguard! Ours is a place of honor! Ante mortem!” he bellows to the Golds. “Gloria!” they roar.
“Contact Feranis. Tell her to expect heavy mechanized assault from the northwest from landfall on the Talarian Peninsula.
“This is Reaper. Broken Sky. Repeat, Broken Sky.
Where is the immortal majesty the poets promised me? Where is the stern will my ancestors preached to their children? It was just an illusion conjured by fools who never left their libraries, or by agents of necessity. This is the Noble Lie.
Thirty million life threads interweave, some carrying on, others clipped short. It is so horrible. “Be a giant,” Ajax said. How, in all this?
“Your fight is behind you. Remember now your beloved. Your wife, your husband, your father, your mother, your daughter, your son.” I meet his eyes. They look so much like my mother’s. “Remember the sea, the highland forests, Agea at dawn, Olympia at twilight, Attica in spring, Thessalonica in harvest.” As I speak, they close their eyes and unscrew the canisters of Martian soil to clench in their hands. Gold and Red, Blue and Orange, Gray and Obsidian. My heart breaks in half. “Remember home. Remember Mars. You go there now to rest under the shade of her—” They disappear in a wash of static.
damn, the closest I’ve come to crying in a book
The hollow abyss of despair calls to me. The voice that found me in the Jackal’s prison tomb. Reaper, Reaper, Reaper. Look what you have done. Look what you are. In your shadow, nothing can survive.
“Only a crime if there’s a court.
The pressure of Gold society and his own fantasies the child and then the man wove together in the moments before sleep, night after night, until they resembled nothing short of destiny. This was to be his moment of glory. Now he looks total annihilation in the eye.
“Like a good knight. The peril of oaths, no?
She was not ready for this. I felt it, but I could not believe it. Now Mercury pays.
Did this all begin with betraying the Sons of Ares in the Rim? With the destruction of the Ganymede Dockyards? With my Rain over Mercury? So many concessions in the name of necessity. So many horrors in the name of liberty.
I let fear drive my hope away. I let war become me, and my men followed.
“Did you know there were once fifty thousand griffin on Mars?” he asks as he strokes the mare’s forehead. “Poachers sell their talons and feathers to new money on Luna. Now there are less than five hundred.” The horse jerks as Rhone’s pulseKnife sinks into her brain. “Nothing beautiful survives the mob.”
“Should the Void take you, celebrate, my brother. For before death, there was glory.”
You asked, what do I fear? I fear a man who believes in good. For he can excuse any evil.”
She throws a bundle of Gold standards on the floor. Dozens more legionnaires file in behind her, each hauling an armful of enemy standards, some with Gold gauntlets still gripping their poles. They pile them until the stack is even taller than Thraxa herself. She slams her heels together, raises her burned fist, and declares, “Victory.”
It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience. —JULIUS CAESAR
(null)
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.
Two hundred of your ships of war destroyed. Thousands of your sailors killed. Millions of your brothers and sisters marooned. Quadrillions of your wealth squandered. Not by virtue of enemy arms, but by the squabbling of your Senate.”
Cassandra Syndrome?”
“The gigavok are metaphors for your virility, and your fear that if you had children, they would eat each other.”
Matter, how tiny my share Time, how brief my allotment Fate, how small my roll to play Self, all that can be mastered
Senators become the courted, the hunted, the pressured, the wooed, the fooled, the bamboozled, the corrupted, and the purchased.
“Treason might float on Luna, but not on Mars. Any senator that votes to kill the Free Legions and the Reaper of Mars better enjoy that bloodsucking moon, for if they come back, I’ll pull their bloodydamn feet!”
Theodora’s Splinter operatives, deadly Pink assassins
(null)
One by one, the Howlers separate from the shadows to join them on the floor until twenty-five of the hardest killers in a demokracy of eight billion stand looking at Sevro. Their demands are clear. Sevro picks his teeth with Tickler, tucks the blade away, and snaps to attention. The Howlers stomp their heels together.
Ares dreamed of individual freedom, because of his son and his Red wife. Darrow dreamed of a world without monsters. Dancer’s private dream was more delicate. He believed it was Gold who made his people wicked. And without Gold, they could be good. Bit by bit, he’s seen reality wither that dream on the vine.
Each sharing the same story of the Griffin Knights who held back an army to give them time to escape the sea.
Harnassus considers Orion’s storm a genocide. Thraxa thinks it the noblest of sacrifices.
“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.”
“The tragedy of the gifted is the belief they are entitled to greatness, Lysander. As a human, you are entitled only to death.”
We did this to ourselves. And our men, my Praetorians, millions of civilians and loyal legionnaires paid the price.
“That is a chair I cannot fill. I will not fill. Every man and woman in this army volunteered to fight with the understanding that they would be led by the Reaper of Mars. Behind him, we liberated our homes. Behind him, we found our way from the desert. He will deliver us from this planet.
He was a Gray. Looked such a legend, leaning on the fountain like he owned it. Had a Titan Rain badge on his chest, a shattered Rhea beneath, a shower of golden teardrops on his face, inky in Legio XIII blacks. You weren’t around then, but even Golds gave that sort a nod.”
“If it don’t fit, it’s Howler shit.
This is a philosopher-torturer with the practical detachment of a pig butcher.
“All of a man’s affairs become diseased when he wishes to cure evils by evils,” Atlas recites. “For order, I impaled soldiers. For liberty, you drowned cities. The victor writes history with the blood of the vanquished. I wonder, in the end, which of us will turn out the hero? Don’t you?”
Lady Victory, the wife of Silenius the Lightbringer.
