Howling Dark (The Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

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

Almost I could pity it, but for the fact it had escaped and made for itself a mean, vile heaven of the hell of its life. Master though it was of its own destiny, the world had turned it cruel, or perhaps cruelty had been its nature.

“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.”

Cat was dead, too. Dead not because of my efforts, like so many others, but despite them.

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. Before it has to end.

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.

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.

It is strange how we humans make our homes. We arrive in a place and—finding that place foreign and uncomfortable—place objects just as foreign in it until it becomes lived in and all strangeness is gone.

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.

But nothing is beautiful because it lasts.

You cannot blame yourself for offering the road, no matter where it ends.

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.

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.

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.

It did not take an oracle to know that violent lives end so often violently. In lonely places. Down lonelier roads.

My vision went red a moment, and it took every ounce of strength and Gibson’s training to calm myself. Rage is blindness, I thought.

Gibson had shaken his head. I did not ask which was greatest, Hadrian, but highest. Devotion requires an attachment which tends to vice if you let it. Thus the devoted is made a slave to his devotions. Such love wears chains. Compassion, then? I asked. Compassion. The scholiast agreed. Compassion might have demanded that Valka and I stun these two misguided children, haul them out of that awful place—by the hair if necessary—and deliver them from Vorgossos. We did not have the luxury of compassion, nor the benefit of time.

The price of life is death. With what will you pay, Halfmortal?

Grief is emptiness, I thought. Grief is deep water. Grief. It felt less like Switch had betrayed me and more like he had died. That he was lost to me, forever sundered by some ocean vast as the ocean of stars through which we wheeled.

The world is filled with monsters: dragons in the wilderness, serpents in the garden. We must become monsters to fight them. Anyone who thinks otherwise has never really had to fight for anything. I knew where I stood, on the wall between the wilderness and the garden. Whatever humanity was—whatever it is—it is mine, and worth defending. Given the choice between the Cielcin and human monsters, I’ll choose the human every time.

In a faint voice dry as old leaves she murmured two words I have never forgotten. So small were they, I strained to hear them. But heard them I did. “Kill me,” she said.

One massive hand seized me by my tunic front, and the Prince hissed, “Apologize.” I did no such thing,

The idea that pain is evil is the basis for all morality. Ours. Theirs. Everything’s. But was I evil, then? Or had I only done evil?

Always forward, always down, and never left nor right.

I switched the booth off, banishing Prince Aranata and its kind. And to myself—to no one—I said, “The Sword, our Orator!”

first Marlowe’s words, those words we took for our own when we took the name: Our swords shall play the orators for us.

At least I had kept my feet in the end. You see, Father? I remember thinking. Here I am. It was very nearly my last thought. “Do it,” I said, or thought I said. I am not sure. I am sure of almost nothing, unless it is one thing: that in the end—at the end—I stood.

Like the end of the world. My world. So much blood. There was so much blood. Then there was nothing but darkness. Darkness and a profound, echoing quiet.

Forward. Back. The way forward is the way back.

Rage is blindness,

I’ve lost control, I remember thinking. Somewhere in all this, I lost control. We are not always the authors of our own stories. Some of us never are. I think that is what we struggle for: the command of our own lives. We struggle against our families, against the state, against nature, against our own weakness. All that we might choose for ourselves, if only for a moment.

“You’re immortal,” Bassander said. “That’s proof. That’s a sign.” “He’s half mortal!” someone interjected. Was it Crim? “Half mortal?” someone echoed, quieter than the first. And then it began for true. “Halfmortal!” someone repeated, and made of the joke a cry. A declaration. A name. “Hadrian Halfmortal! He died! We all saw it! Halfmortal!”

There are endings, Reader, and this is one. Some endings are beginnings. Such is this. As the Phoenix is reborn from its ashes, as new gods are ever born from the bodies of the old, so too was I reborn by that lakeside beneath that glassed-in sky. I left much of what I was by those waters: my scars from Emesh, my dreams of peace. Most of life consists of such transformations. If what I have done disturbs you, Reader, I do not blame you. If you would read no further, I understand. You have the luxury of foresight. You know where this ends. I shall go on alone.