Howling Dark (The Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

The rightly tuned mind does not deny its emotions, but floats with them. It accepts what it feels and so incorporates that feeling to itself. Thus the mind is not subject, but rules itself.

True lessons require not only knowing, but that the student practices his knowledge again and again. Thus knowledge becomes us, and we become more than the animal and the machine. That is why the best teachers are students always, and the best students are never fully educated.

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.

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.

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.

For the fever and flame of that moment and the strength of her arms I would have given all of myself. I was in love, and we were in love, and that love built the whole of our world—if only for that private moment. A paradise for us two. A walled garden sheltered from the world. But every garden has its snake, and every light its shadow. It did not last, nor did I. It could not last. But nothing is beautiful because it lasts.

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.

As children we imagine that there is a secret mythology in nature, and that everything in nature is a party to it. As we grow, we experience enough of nature to know there is no such magic, and are forced to inhabit the everyday. We trade the mythology of childhood for knife-edged reality and call it truth, forgetting that there are deep truths, and deeper magics in our universe.

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.

“So you’re saying freedom is a bad thing?” she asked, eyes narrowing. I could see her working herself up to a sneer, could hear the word twisting on the air two seconds hence. Anaryoch. Barbarian. I laughed at her instead, hoping to wrong-foot her long enough to get another word in. “Of course not! You think I like it in here? That I liked being trapped in Count Mataro’s palace? Or in my father’s house? No, no. I only mean that you can be too free. That’s chaos. You have to have a goal to aim at and to orient yourself to. Imore says the properly lived life is one which draws the best path between that goal—who you could become—and who you are today, but that this is accomplished by sacrificing certain freedoms. By making choices.”

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.

Some people believe that the painter who works his canvas is not an individual because he acquired his skills at the knee of some earlier master. That the soldier who stands before the enemy is not a hero, but a pawn—and one of many. There is no truth to this. Each of us contains multitudes, but it is not that we are cells in the body of humankind. Rather we are clay, shaped as the mountain is shaped: by the wind, the tramping foot, and the rain. By the world. The mark of other hands is on us, but we are ourselves alone.

“You hope to reconcile mankind with that other kind. The Cielcin. Why should your burden be light?” Often in dreams we cannot answer, and perhaps such a thing had happened to me, for I sat mute and—listening—heard: “This is well. We are beasts of burden, Hadrian, we men. We struggle, and by that struggle are filled, and so define ourselves. That is the way.”

But Gibson is with me still, even in the solitude of this writing cell. Alone as I am, he is with me—part of me now—as are all those we meet and who matter to us.

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.

The magi who had summoned her quailed, and wrung their hands, and wept for the evil they had done, but did it all the same—for ever are magi 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.

The greater part of war, I think, is such forgotten acts of heroism. You sing your songs of Hadrian Halfmortal, of the Phoenix of Perfugium, of other heroes, but I tell you we are nothing, nothing next to those ordinary men who lay down their lives—who are not ordinary at all.

Who must stand when those whose duty is standing have gone? Those who can.

“If I have learned anything in more than fifteen thousand years,” said both Kharn Sagaras together, “it is that all stories are true. We have but to make them so.”

All children believe they are immortal. This was not the question of a child, but the fear of the very old man, the demoniac—his body almost all machine—that I had met in the inverted pyramid beneath Vorgossos. I sensed then that it was the answer to this question, among others perhaps, that had set him on that throne and set him to pondering all that great art. He had seen much of the outer world, traveled strange highways, sailed strange seas by stranger stars—but the answer was not out there. The answer was within. Within the structure of literature, of art and meaning that we humans had raised about ourselves like an ark, a curtain wall to block out the waters of chaos and the world. That is why we pray, why we build great temples and write great books: to ask great questions and to live—not by the answers, for such questions are unanswerable—but by the noble process of seeking those answers, that we might stand tall and struggle on.

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. If only once.