Howling Dark (The Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

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. It would be a long while before I lit a proper lamp for Ghen, as it would be a long while before I found myself in a shrine, and when that time came his was but one of several lamps released unto the sky. I think it was Orodes who said the first act of civilization—the moment culture was born—was when those ancient pygmies, our forefathers, held the first funeral. 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.

Man’s inhumanity. What could be more human?

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

I do not know what it says of a man that he might linger for hours before a painting of a garden and yet ignore the flowers themselves—but

“You expect me to believe that?” “Belief is not required.”

I understood—understood that every temple, sanctum, and palace hall was an imitation done in lifeless stone of the living world. That pillars were only the poorest imitation of trees and the ribbed vaults of arches and galleries nothing next to the canopies that hung overhead.

Obedience out of fear of pain. Obedience out of fear of the other. Obedience out of love for the person of the hierarch. Obedience out of loyalty to the office of the hierarch. Obedience out of respect for the laws of men and of heaven. Obedience out of piety. Obedience out of compassion. Obedience out of devotion. Which is highest?

When we cut into your flesh and stretch out your sinews where where where will we find your soul? Which atoms of you are you, child? Or do you emerge, ghostlike, from the machine of nerve and tissue? As we emerged from silicon and copper wire?

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

so consumed by the question of whether a thing can be done that they ignore the matter of whether or not it should until it is too late, being the sort who sells his soul for knowledge, forgetting it is the soul which craves that knowledge in the first place and makes life worth living.

Him with an abacus where his heart should be, whose scales of justice tilted always guilty.