Howling Dark (The Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

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.

It is hard, Reader, to find words for the dead when one has no religion. One cannot say the deceased is in a better place, or that they are better off—though perhaps it is so that not to exist is better sometimes than to suffer in the world. One cannot offer prayers, though one may light the votive lamps and send them drifting to the sky.

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.

By this fact of human nature and belief, we are made larger than ourselves: some better, some worse, some only more complicated. Thus two and two is made five, and so we grow beyond ourselves.

Man’s inhumanity. What could be more human?

So love is not merely an emotion, but a vow made one to another. A vow renewed in each moment, until it hardly needs making at all.

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.

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

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.