Howling Dark (Sun Eater #2)

by Christopher Ruocchio

She was a dryad, one of an ancient people made before the rise of the Imperium and the Writ of the Chantry. Her skin glowed thick with chlorophyll, so that she was green as Midsummer in the forests of Luin.

Humanity was trying, as it always did, to make the desert bloom. Still, I was glad to be only visiting.

He’d called me Had. I have not forgotten that. He almost never used my name. I didn’t quite notice at the time, but later . . . looking back, it stood out clear and sharp in my memory as the edge of my own sword.

Funny thing about lessons: the idiot student thinks when he is given a little fact that he owns it—that two and two is always four no matter the circumstance. Just as it was not true for Orwell, it is not true for anyone.

I carry Gibson with me even still, and often it is with his eyes that I see myself, and through them that I have come to know who and what I am.

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.

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.