Howling Dark (The Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

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.

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. Or until it is not made, and death or deed does them part.

is strange, is it not, that there are always people such as I? Men who believe the stranger is always more trustworthy than their neighbor? When we were young we looked to the stars with hope, praying that what gods or kings there were in the unpastured Dark were greater than Man, and so moral and righteous beyond imagination. We imagined they might descend from heaven and bless us with their gifts, and that it was only human nature that corrupted, for evil required the black hearts of men to create it. In my flagellatory arrogance I could not conceive of evils other than our own—darker and stranger—nor could we conceive that what was evil to us was natural to others. Incidental. But Satan sprang not from Adam, and it was from the blood of Kingu that Marduk made the first men—and not the other way round. Evil is older than we, other than we—or is greater than, extending back and forward across all of conscious Time. Reader, there are other devils than Man. And by our evolved reason we may be sure of understanding human devils only.

Reader, I have seen things you cannot imagine. Things the Cielcin have done. Children—human and Cielcin alike—plated and served at table. I have seen slaves mutilated for the sake of art, partners maimed because it is a mark of status that one be made dependent on another, and the Black Feast to mark the coronation of their dark lord. The banality of that which we might consider monstrous writ casually as a night at the opera. Not because they are evil—though that is also true. But because they are not us.

Here there be dragons.

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.

I have told you I once believed that wars are fought with words, not soldiers. I have told you I was wrong. Here was my first glimmering of that realization. For when a war is done, no matter how small, pieces of it remain. Most of this shrapnel is carried in the hearts and souls of those who visited that strange country we call battle.

Those who say we are only flesh must reason that we have no will of our own, that we serve our impulses, which are rooted in our brains and nowhere else. Such thinking gave rise to the homunculi, who are made happy in their servitude. After all, to such thinking we are all slaves, if only to our breeding. Thus it is no crime to create creatures such as Naia. And yet it is clearly a crime. Evil needs no explanation. You know it by its smell. That knowledge—that apprehension of the Truth which is there and obvious—spoke to me of something more. To us. In us. A quiet thing.

When men contend, it is always with the underlying threat of violence. I have known some women who insist it is the same, and having sometime seen the nail-scratched faces and torn hair I think perhaps it is so—if less commonly. But I think men found their communication on the threat of that violence. We must speak, they say, raising their hands to emphasize the point, lest we use these.

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.

We struggle, and by that struggle are filled, and so define ourselves. That is the way.”