Howling Dark (Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

“November,” I mused. Of the Year of our Empire 16219. Forty-eight years since Emesh, though I had lived but twelve of them. Forty-eight years pretending to be mercenaries. Forty-eight years free of Count Mataro and his designs on me for his daughter. Forty-eight years a special conscript of the Legions of the Sun.

Time jump!!!

It was an innocent time, a period of happiness between two oceans of storm, and the skies were getting darker.

Humanity was trying, as it always did, to make the desert bloom.

Jubala smells like coffee tastes: bitter, dark, and unpleasant.

Speak for yourself lmao

I say this because the light in each eye of every living child of Earth tells us something of the mind behind it. It’s a subtle thing, hard to quantify or even to describe.

I lashed out, retreating into a lunge that caught one in the chest. The highmatter sword met no resistance, its edge as fine as hydrogen. Without slowing, I tugged the weapon sideways, cleaving effortlessly through the ribs and right arm in an arc that severed the head of the man beside it.

Hell yeah

Rustam’s gravity, he must have been like Herakles.

Proper name! We love a smart man

The Painted Man grinned at me, its lips blossoming to scarlet. “You’re mine, lordship.” The second stunner blast—when it came—felt like nothing at all.

Holy shit!!!

“Satan had his companions, fellow devils, to admire and encourage him, but you are solitary and abhorred.” “Are you always like this?” The Painted Man sneered. “Melodramatic? Oh yes,” I said with my customary lopsided grin. “Ask anyone who knows me.”

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.

Man’s inhumanity. What could be more human?

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.

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

Trusting myself to my solitude, I unclipped my terminal from its gauntlet and set the device on the tabletop, calling up the text of Impatian’s The First Emperors, a biography of the first eleven emperors. I’d finished his History of the Jaddian Wars while locked in Sagara’s vestibule. I set the thing to playing and soon a cool, artificial voice began reciting the text aloud.

Even had uses audiobooks

Valka fired. The Exalted screamed. Glass melted. Shattered. Fell like rain. A child fell with it, white-limbed and red-haired, as unlike Kharn Sagara as any in the tree above. It smashed on the hard floor, broke like a china doll, like a melon.

The left hand. That struck me, for there are no left-handed men or women among the palatine.

If she had been right—if I’d ever taken that posting—much evil might have been avoided.

Tigers and lambs. Tor Varro delivered this translation to Smythe in a whisper. The tribune leaned back a ways in her chair, sitting as tall as ever I had seen her do, and she answered, “We are men.”

Kinda annoyed it is men not humen or man but that aso makes me annoying

If a smile can be irritated, hers was. “Anaryoch . . .” “That’s me,” I said tartly.

Time as well stopped a moment and lingered at my shoulder, and with eyes unclouded I saw another shape standing just beside the tall and white-robed herald. It was as if some unseen hand pointed to it.

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.

What the actual fuck

In all that howling Dark I was myself alone, borne upon its tide.