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. Before it ends.

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.

It was not that I lied, but that I valorized those final moments because the truth is so much larger than those material facts of the world. Better to recall his rough laugh than imagine whatever horrid sounds he’d made with damaged lungs in those final moments in the tea house.

I imagined there was a kinship between us, as if Life shared a common ancestry with Life—as indeed is the case for all terranic life forms. I ignored our differences out of necessity and the necessary idealism of youth. I needed to ignore them, and so imagined that it was Humanity I saw in the inhuman lines of its face.

“Not so different?” I repeated, looking at a woman with glittering wires woven beneath her skin. Crim watched the woman go by with appreciation. “Chantry has it wrong. Human blood doesn’t thin so easy as that. Their machines just make it easier for them to be what they want to be.”

I was a liar. I am a liar. I have no illusions about this. But I am a liar in the service of Truth, or so I tell myself. In service of the Good—which is the same thing. I had told my lies because they ennobled me, whereas lying in service to the Empire, to an Empire that might sell its own people to the Pale . . . such lies diminished me.