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“You didn’t have the decency to kill them,” Zanj replied. “You bent them so they can’t look up. And what did you do with those who wouldn’t bend?”
When it thought, it thought with her mind, grand cold inhuman thoughts that left aches and blood behind,
There was nothing left to eat, but still he hungered. So he grew new teeth, facing inward, and began to eat himself.
If only we could all be so selfish as to be heroes, freeing the cosmos by making messes for others to clean up.
Nevers and onlys and forevers grew as you did. The sky went on forever, but if you had no context save the height of the nearest trees, you could fool yourself into thinking the blue hung just beyond your reach, when in fact it was never there at all, and what was, was deeper than you could dream.
When afraid: live.
“We’re here for our sky. Our homes. For freedom from collars and crowns. That’s what we’re fighting for.
Imagine playing twenty games of chess at once, with the clocks running down, only you can’t touch the board yourself, but have to make each move through one of those joke cascade devices where a flipped switch rolls a ball down an inclined plane to knock open a door, which releases a mouse, and a cat to chase the mouse, but when the mouse runs into its hole it trips a wire that causes a broom to sweep down, and so on until finally a dart pops a balloon that lets a weight fall that that pushes the piece into place. Only at any time your opponent may change the game to checkers. Or Go. Or
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The twin fires of Yannis and Nioh had dwindled to dots, choked by waves of green. She ran. If none of this worked, if she’d fucked it up and led them wrong, at least she stood beside her friends, here at the end of everything.
With a cry he grew, and spread his arms, whirling fire and blades, a formless, pulsing will, the last child of a broken place.
Ah, child, his mother said: If you can pass your life without fighting, do. If your problems can be solved with reason and argument, solve them. But you may find yourself with no choice but war.
What is a grain but a seed? And from a seed, you can grow anything. Like, say, a family.
Zanj, with a scream, with a sickening, tearing sound of burst flesh and chipping bone, lurched forward.
If you seize my power, you’ll make the same choices I did.” “You’re right. I would. That’s why we have to change.”
The galaxy waited for her. Trillions of beings. Ghosts and gods and living mortals. The poetry of archives. The power to build suns and break them. All at her, at Her, command. And it felt glorious. Which was the problem.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know who I am.” Zanj, exhausted, shrugged. “That makes all of us.”
She wanted to run. She settled for a limp, for now, hand in hand up the beach from the end of the world.
But the fight for a world where all of us can enjoy lives of freedom, exploration, hospitality, and encounter is not new, and none of us are alone in it.
Be willing to challenge yourself. Deconstruct
Find allies. Take care of yourselves. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.
