Howling Dark (Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

The actor knows he is on stage. The character knows there is no stage.

I shut my eyes against the Dark, and found only another darkness, deeper still.

Not the most beautiful of worlds, but beautiful in the way that only planets can be. Immortal, changeless, uncaring—the nearest thing to a material god.

Like Dante, I stood upon the edge of a dark forest, where the true path was lost . . . and here was the wolf, slavering, on the hunt, and ready to drive me into darkness.

Regret is stronger than fury, and is comparably immortal.

The rightly tuned mind does not deny its emotions, but floats with them. It accepts what it feels and so incorporates that feeling to itself. Thus the mind is not subject, but rules itself.

“Sad is like a big ocean, and you can’t breathe deep down. You can float on it, you can swim a little, but be careful. Grief is drowning. Grief is deep water. Say it.”

True lessons require not only knowing, but that the student practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated.

But the ugliness of the world does not fade, and fear and grief are not made less by time. We are only made stronger. We can only float together on their tides, as otters do, hand in hand.

The bright line, he writes, between man and what was before man is drawn by that dignity with which we honor the dead. Man does not leave her dead to rot, but burns or buries or builds, protecting the body and the memory of the fallen. There is civilization: its cornerstone a grave.

We have little control over our ends, and none over what passes beyond them. But if we live well and truly, those who follow on may remember us for our lives and not our deaths.

Critics of the oldest stories used to say that men believe women to be goals, prizes to be won or bought. They did not understand. No man could think such a thing and remain a man, for to love is in part the attempt to become a creature worthy of love.

There are two sorts of men. One hears an order from his better and obeys. The other sees order in himself and obeys that. All men obey something, even if it is only themselves.

Were I still the boy I’d been, I would have said she owed me for my mercy. But mercy that expects repayment is no mercy at all, nor is a friendship truly a friendship that stands on debt and gratitude.

We believe our fear destroyed by new bravery. It is not. Fear is never destroyed. It is only made smaller by the courage we find after. It is always there.

As children we imagine that there is a secret mythology in nature, and that everything in nature is a party to it. As we grow, we experience enough of nature to know there is no such magic, and are forced to inhabit the everyday. We trade the mythology of childhood for knife-edged reality and call it truth, forgetting that there are deep truths, and deeper magics in our universe.

Deep truths there may be, but none is deeper than this: Those lost to us do not return, nor the years turn back. Rather it is that we carry a piece of those lost to us within ourselves, or on our backs. Thus ghosts are real, and we never escape them.

There is no morality in poverty. It is only that wealth gives the immoral greater opportunity for abuse.

Thus he seems to me in memory: King of the Titans in all his ruinous glory, couched in numb contemplation of the Dark. How long he’d been seated in that awful chair I could not imagine, nor imagine the well and depth of years in his experience.

To no one in particular—to the memory of the moment past—I said, “I was worried about you, too.”

We like to imagine that we are ourselves a unity: one mind, one spirit. Not so. In truth we are each a little legion, a pack of little personae—each one-eyed in its attentions and single-minded in its aim.

Through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.

And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder, and a voice crying out from the desert of my soul.

Always it is thus: that the threat from outside drives wedges between those who should stand together. Who must.

You cannot twice step into the same river, Heraclitus once said. There is no coming home.

“This is well. We are beasts of burden, Hadrian, we men. We struggle, and by that struggle are filled, and so define ourselves. That is the way.”

A man is the sum of his memories—and more—he is the sum of all those others he has met, and what he learned from them. And that is an encouraging thought, for that knowledge and those memories survive and are part of us through every storm, and every little death.