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.

Soon I will join them on the surface of Mercury, but first I have work to do. It would be easier with Sevro. Everything violent is.

I know the truth now. War is our time. Sevro thought he could escape it. I thought I could end it.

After war, most men shrink. Some from the rending of flesh. Some from the loss of fellows. Some from the loss of autonomy. But most in shame at discovering their own impotence. Confronted with horror, their dreams of destiny crumple. Only a cursed few relish the dark thrill in discovering they are natural-born killers. Alexandar is a killer.

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

While I regret my fondness for violence out of a Red sense of guilt, the old-blood Gold bathes in its furor. Not the glory Cassius loved, or the noble fight Alexandar chases, or the cathartic revenge Sevro needs, but the primal essence of battle itself. Never is Thraxa more alive than after thirty days in the field, crusted with saddle sores and sweat, hunting men who have never been prey. “I like to kill people I don’t like,” she once said when Pax asked why she follows me. “And your daddy brings ’em like flies.”

He points the paint gun at my face. “What’ll it be? Goblin black, Valkyrie blue, Minotaur purple, Julii jade…” “Blood Red.”

In the spitTube again. Waiting for the kill. I hate this part.

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

Is this the life I crave? To rise before the sun? To smile at the cock and fart jokes of killers as they grow younger and I grow older? To sleep under tanks, in the ruins of cities, amongst the corpses?

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

Most have forgotten the slingBlade of my people was not made to kill pitvipers. It was made for hacking off limbs of trapped miners.

Systemic rage builds as I prepare for contact. 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.

Six enemies, all coming for me. I struggle to stand. Then, one by one, the six shapes divide into twelve. A lean figure glides through them all like a Lykos dancer. “Pup One, reporting.”

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.

Ajax was born of the unholy genetic union of two apex bloodlines: Raa and Grimmus. He is her superior in every martial way except experience, and in that he’s gaining.

Her face is half gone. It looks as if it has been eaten. But her eyes are as blue as I remember. They fill with tears as Orion reaches to touch my face with the stumps of her fingers. Through tattered lips, she sneers, “Hail Reaper.”

He reaches for my hand, and flattens it so he can give me half of his dust. “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.

“You were just my uncle. Then we came down with Orion. And I could see it. Every bloody soul was waiting to give Mercury their carbon. Then they saw you jump out this ship.” The hairs on her forearms stand on end at the memory. “You ain’t old. You just need to let others haul their freight. Even the Reaper needs sleep, sir. Especially if he’s gonna get us all home.”

She watches me with the same hard scrutiny my mother wields. Aside from Victra, Lykos women are the most stubborn breed.

“Sir, at your side I’m a one-point-two-meter, forty-kilogram liability with quiet feet and a dirty gob. In a starShell, I’m decent. In a Drachenjäger, I’m a full-metal god.” Blood flushes her cheeks. “I know you’re worried about my pa. But it was my choice to join you when Sevro bailed. My choice to be here. My choice to fight.” Her voice hardens. “And if they get through us, it’ll be iron over my pa’s head, over Dio’s head, my brothers’ and sisters’ heads. So fuck your guilt. And let me do my job.”

Amongst my own people, I had a home. Orion was never accepted by hers, until she climbed over their backs to the top, and looked down to see them all pretending to have lifted her up.

“I know you think Atlas broke me.” “If I thought you were broken, you’d be in the sick bay. I think you’re dented.”

My only care is that my best weapon is sharp before zero hour. Will you be sharp, Imperator?” She snaps to attention. “As a rat’s teeth, sir.”

My army is a band of marionettes held up by strings called nazopran, dolomine, and zoladone.

Tell me, who is the most exemplary of the Rim Knights? You?” “I would be a poor judge. But if you measure the worth of a man by his skill with a blade, then I imagine it is the person least like you.” Seraphina blinks at her brother as if he just grew horns. A slow smile grows. The Rim is not here to be pushed around.

“A man is nothing before the storm.” Ajax stands nose-to-nose with the smaller man. “I am the storm. Take it off.”

The sword of the people should never silence its voice. And the voice of the people is the Senate. Not you.” “And what does the Senate tell you now?” I cup my ear. “The voice isn’t speaking. So the sword will.”

“You know why I prefer Sevro to you? He might burn hot. But you go cold. There’s no talking to you when you’re like this. You’re inhuman. You’re a god emperor.”

Thraxa worried over my choice of theater for this game, surrounded by Harnassus’s men. But you don’t get the wolf by the tongue without reaching through its teeth.

He lost the army as soon as I returned. I understand him well enough to know he once harbored thoughts of stepping in if I took us to the edge. Now he knows that was never an option.

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.”

I broke Darrow’s armada. I broke Darrow’s heart. Now I break his back.

“You think this is about me. It isn’t. Darrow thinks this is about good and evil. It isn’t. This is about order and chaos. I have chosen my side. But to have a voice, I must have a scar.”

You pretend Lorn au Arcos was the picture of an Iron Gold because he was wise and honorable.” She jams a thin thumb into her sternum. “We know the truth. He boarded our ship. Arcos in a corridor was death incarnate. You want to play the big game? Fine. But you play to win. You make them fear you.”

If you hear wolves, find me. It’s no jest. Only a legion accompanying the Slave King is permitted the howl. If you hear it, he’s coming. I’ve seen that man carve through a platoon of Ash Guard like a shark through tuna. You’ll want me there.”

Where the din of battle is the loudest, he will come. And today I plan on making such noise.”

“The blood of giants fills our veins: honor the valiant dead with your deeds.” “Honor the living with your might,” I recite.

I suspected it before, but I feel it now as I see the excitement on her face as she turns back to the war machine. She didn’t betray her father because she loves her mother. There was another, hidden reason, which was the source of the guilt I saw in her eyes as she watched Romulus walk to his death. It is the source of the anger she feels toward him, toward me. Anger that should be for herself, because deep down she knows that it wasn’t loyalty to the Rim or her mother that incited her to ferry evidence of Darrow’s crimes against the Rim back to the council. It was her hunger for war. Now, after weeks of starvation, she is about to be fed.

It drives me fucking mad that they refuse to understand how sick and dogged and obsessed with our destruction our enemies are. Yet they live in a fantasy built on the bodies of my friends.

Rhonna swallows as she watches Alexandar blink at the result of his error. Fall asleep in the Ladon, you wake up to this. I walk up to him. “We all carry weight. I need you to carry this. Can you?”

The roughest veterans of a generation stare at me, knowing all is lost. Eight million more are out there in the desert, mountains, coastal jungles, without shields. They need more than orders. I rasp into the com. “Brothers, sisters. Atalantia has come for our lives. She thinks we wait looking at the sky for rescue, that fear has made a home in our hearts. She thinks we have forgotten ourselves. But I have not forgotten what we are. We fought in the ruins of Luna. On the plains and oceans of Earth. In the mountains and the tunnels of Mars. Whatever soil we have stood upon, we have freed. We are not marooned refugees waiting for rescue. We are not prisoners waiting for chains. We are the Free Legions. And today we become the rock they break upon. All legions, prepare for Rain.”

Strategists, I understand. But warriors…I thought I did until now. The insidious arithmetic becomes apparent of how overwhelmingly visionary warriors like Darrow, the Minotaur, and Atlas must be to be able to shift the face of a battle once it’s already begun.

Sorry, little brother. Lost you in the sea of Praetorians. You should wear a crown so we can find you.”

And, all at once, the mission that took a month to plan and half a year to prepare, one that was to be executed by men and women who’ve made a vocation of war, comes apart with no explanation except that the Reaper is sharing our planet, and that my family is a line of paranoid tyrants.

Orion has given me my lever. I’m putting my full weight on it.

It breaks something inside me to see an instrument of creation perverted into a weapon. Whatever doubt I held vanishes. Darrow is no longer a good man.

You are an annoying little bitch

“There will be no rescue. The sea will come in.” “Well, I haven’t had a bath in weeks.” “Why are you doing this?” I ask, searching the strong bones of his face. “They’re just baked peasants.” “Even peasants don’t float, sir.”

All this time I held a mild disdain for him, because I thought my approval was all that mattered to the man. But he believes in the Rising. I see it now, just as I saw this moment coming. The moment I must choose to spend his life. But he has surprised me by choosing to spend it himself. I could not be prouder of the man.

On impulse, I pull out my razor and I am about to deliver him the Peerless scar when he stops my hand. “I know what I am.” “Do you?” I reach back to unclasp my wolfcloak from the ring on my left shoulder. Nearly losing it to the wind, I snap the clasps onto Alexandar’s mech. He falls to a knee, looking at it as if it were made all of diamonds. I lift him up. “Howlers never kneel.”