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.”

Well, here I am, you deviant bitch. Here I bloody am. The motherfucking consequence.

Or do you want to stand here bickering semantics and freezing our dicks off as I pretend a hundred thousand of my sailors didn’t die for your political wet dreams?”

This is no tale of salvation, it is one of sacrifice.

“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.

“You would use Howlers … on me?” “That choice is yours.”

“If you are forced to choose between saving our army and killing theirs, I need your word you will choose us.”

“From Vanguard till Vale, sister.”

Fuck. She sees right through me.

Sevro’s little monsters.

“Watch how a pitviper strikes, my son,”

Then the horizon stutters with white light, and the mushrooms grow.

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?

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

I’m coming, Atalantia. I’m coming for your head.

And then the entire top half of her starShell disappears as a rail slug the size of a man rips Romulus’s daughter clean in half. My commands stick in the base of my throat as the legs of the mech teeter and collapse sideways, spilling her intestines out the top. “Incoming!” Kalindora bellows.

Two hundred and three against an army and the sea.

I turn with a heavy heart and head back to my men to lead them south toward the battle in the desert that will decide the fate of us all.

It is easier to find men who will volunteer to die, than to find those who are willing to endure pain with patience.

Chop ’em if they’re taller. Stomp ’em if they’re smaller. Mauler, brawler, legacy hauler, smoke that crow, earn this holler. Mauler, brawler, legacy hauler, smoke that ant, pay off your collar. Legio! Aeterna! Victrix! One more time, you fuckin’ dogs! Mauler, brawler, legacy hauler …

To his people: he is Big Brother. To Golds: the Sky Bastard. To everyone else: Valdir the Unshorn. Warlord and royal concubine of Sefi the Quiet.

“Save your prayers to gods and spirits, Basillicus. Humans made this mess. Humans will fix it.”

No one, not even me, believes that Sevro is completely sane.

Speakin’ of fire. How’s the cooch rash?”

“Selfish jackass,” Holiday snaps at him. “Traitorous twat.”

“You are shortsighted, emotional, and in dereliction of duty, Imperator.”

“When was the last time you got your hooves bloody in a tussle, horsey?

“Imperator Barca and Howler First Cohort reporting for duty, ma’am.”

“Boyo, sorry to be the one to tell you this. But I think you just got skullfucked.”

He shakes his head one day when the thirtieth Obsidian in a row is unable to tell a lie to one of Sun Industries’ first-generation lie detectors.

“Most operatives rely on being inconspicuous. You will never be inconspicuous. You are very conspicuous. So you must be good liars. Next!”

“In Nagal, quiet and wise are the same word. So if I say ‘Mann ni spakr,’ it means that man is not quiet, and thus stupid and loud.”

All that fills my ears is the roar of the human ocean as it sings the song of my husband’s first wife.

They even sing Eo’s song as they bear my dying wife upon a sea of bloody hands.

There is no life without that woman. There is just a cold world and the ugly creatures who fight for its scraps.

“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.”

“Sevro is not coming. No one is coming. Disarm your forces. Assemble your men south of the city. Lower your shields. And submit to your fate with dignity.

The liar, Ephraim, who saw I was broken, and put me back together only so he could use me.

Darrow and the Vanguard. Darrow and the undead Goblin. Darrow, the Julii, and Valkyrie at Ilium. Darrow and the Jackal and the Two Hundred Seventy Days our messiah spent in the monster’s table.

Electra drives all mad by pacing the deck like a pissed-off alley cat.

The psycho’s eyes gleam at the idea of evil, red-skinned, far-flung Obsidian warlords.

“The Sovereign is dead.”

“As a human, I am entitled only to death.”

During war, the laws are silent.

I’m a walking, talking totem of invulnerability. A spirit warrior. Proof of the existence of gods.

And sitting directly across from me in a leather chair, in green metal armor with a weeping sun on the swollen abdomen, is Victra au Barca.

She wipes sleep from her eyes and looks down on me with such protective love that I start to cry. Not for myself. But for her, for the pain I see in her eyes, and all the pain she must have felt these last days for her son, for her grandson, for Sevro, for me. And then I cry for Daxo and Theodora, and the friends I left behind with the monster. She cradles me as I do, humming in my ear as I have always wished my mother had done for me.

“Maybe I can one day forgive you for doin’ what needs doin’. But I can’t give you permission to abandon my boy.”