Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater #1)

by Christopher Ruocchio

Hands tugged my signet ring from my left thumb and started on my terminal’s magnetic clasp. Then I heard it: “Guys, we’re fucked. Look.” I smiled, though my face was in the pavement. I knew he was showing them the ring. “He’s a fucking Marlowe. We’re fucked.” I wanted to smile, but my lips would not respond. A palatine’s ring is everything. It holds his identity; his genetic history, both of his family and his constellation; his titles; and the deeds to his personal holdings. If they took it and tried to use it anywhere on Delos, Father’s men or Grandmother’s would find them. Fools. I don’t remember anything else except darkness and the absolute certainty that I was dead. Crispin would rule. No question about it now. Let him have his throne, his place in the Imperium. Let Father grow to lament his choice. I didn’t care. Certain scholiasts teach that each experience is only the sum of its parts. That our lives may be reduced to a set of equations, that they may be factored, weighed, balanced, and understood. They believe the universe is one of objects and that we are only objects among objects. That even our emotions are no more than electrochemical processes carried out in our brains, accessories to the pressures of Bloody-Handed Evolution. This is why they struggle for apatheia, the freedom from emotion. This is their great failing. Human beings do not inhabit a world of objects, nor did our consciousness evolve to live in such a place. We live in stories, and in stories,...