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There is an art to smiling in a way that others will believe. It is always important to include the eyes; otherwise, people will know you hate them.
The earth is good at healing itself. This wound will scab over quickly in geologic terms, and then the cleansing ocean will follow its line to bisect the Stillness into two lands. Until this happens, however, the wound will fester with not only heat but gas and gritty, dark ash—enough to choke off the sky across most of the Stillness’s face within a few weeks. Plants everywhere will die, and the animals that depend on them will starve, and the animals that eat those will starve.
This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another. This has happened before, after all. People die. Old orders pass. New societies are born. When we say “the world has ended,” it’s usually a lie, because the planet is just fine. But this is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. For the last time.
Mother said, hidden everything, pretended to be a child when she was really a monster, that was what monsters did,
“Don’t look back,” Schaffa advises. “It’s easier that way.” So she doesn’t. Later, she will realize he was right about this, too. Much later, though, she will wish that she had done it anyway.
May your dreams be ever still.”
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; Death is the fifth, and master of all. —Arctic proverb
When the reasoning mind is forced to confront the impossible again and again, it has no choice but to adapt.
neither myths nor mysteries can hold a candle to the most infinitesimal spark of hope.
The body fades. A leader who would last relies on more.
“Don’t you ever just want to… to be human?” She comes into the house and leans against the wall next to the door, crossing her arms and her ankles. “We aren’t human.” “Yes. We. Are.” His voice turns fierce. “I don’t give a shit what the something-somethingth council of big important farts decreed, or how the geomests classify things, or any of that. That we’re not human is just the lie they tell themselves so they don’t have to feel bad about how they treat us—” This, too, is something all roggas know. Only Alabaster is vulgar enough to say it aloud.
“Everyone thinks I don’t like them,” Syenite says. Most of the time, it’s true. “I do like you.”
There passes a time of happiness in your life, which I will not describe to you. It is unimportant. Perhaps you think it wrong that I dwell so much on the horrors, the pain, but pain is what shapes us, after all. We are creatures born of heat and pressure and grinding, ceaseless movement. To be still is to be… not alive. But what is important is that you know it was not all terrible. There was peace in long stretches, between each crisis. A chance to cool and solidify before the grind resumed.
She looks into her son’s face sometimes and marvels that he exists, that he seems so whole and right, when both his parents have nothing but bitter brokenness between them. Who’s she kidding? It’s love. She loves her son. But that doesn’t mean she wants to spend every hour of every rusting day in his presence.
Some say the Earth is angry Because he wants no company; I say the Earth is angry Because he lives alone. —Ancient (pre-Imperial) folk song
“I’ve never wanted much from life. Just to be able to live it, really. I’m not like you, Syen. I don’t need to prove myself. I don’t want to change the world, or help people, or be anything great. I just want… this.” She gets that. So she lies down on her side of Innon, and Alabaster lies down on his side, and they relax and enjoy the sensation of wholeness, of contentment, for a while. Because they can.
