Empire of Silence (The Sun Eater #1)

by Christopher Ruocchio

In my dreams I was alone, passing under the narrow arch that led from the necropolis to the mausoleum where my family’s ashes lay interred. How many times have I walked that way in dreams, who in life stood there only once? That had been for the funeral of my father’s mother, Lady Fuchsia, when I was yet a boy. I had not known her well, but hers was the first body I had ever seen. My first encounter with Death. The stink of it and the memory have never left me. It haunted me, and often when I witnessed Death again I recalled the cloying smell of myrrh, the smoke of the incense tapers, and the drone of the chanters and of old Eusebia as she led the funeral march down the echoing steps to our necropolis. To my young mind it was less that my grandmother had died and more that Death had visited us, so that each death that followed hers recalled that procession, those steps, that walk into the underworld. In the dream, Father went first behind the prior, carrying Grandmother’s ashes, while we, her family, followed with the canopic jars. I had her eyes, suspended in cerulean fluid; mother had her heart; my uncle Lucian—dead now seven years himself, killed in a flier crash—carried the brain. A shroud of some hue darker than black concealed the statue of my grandmother erected on the rough floor amongst the stalactites. I could hear the water dripping from the stone ceiling, dropping into pools flat as mirrors. In my dream, when I tore that pall away, it was my father’s statue ben...