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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.
Something entered the airlock, pulling itself forward with too many hands. The doors shut behind it, and it regarded us with too many eyes.
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.
A single spar of adamant, black as hell, reached up from that pale and shadowed planet like a pillar of smoke, like an accusing finger aimed at heaven. Impossibly thin it was, hanging like a thread of evil gossamer between the planet and the stars, rising mile upon thousandth mile into the Dark.
It was an ugly painting, but unforgettable. It showed a naked man with tangled hair and beard, a giant clutching the mutilated corpse of a headless man, his teeth tearing an arm off at the joint. There was self-aware horror in the eyes of the mad Titan. He knew what he was doing was wrong, and yet would not stop himself, so hungry was he for life.
“Wars end,” Kharn agreed, more coldly still. “War does not. And I am not much troubled what form our wars take.
I stood, half-turned, half-facing Kharn, half-facing Bassander, and waited for those higher parts of me—where dwells Reason in that place just behind my eyes—to catch up with the rest of me.
“Go to Bassander, if he means so much to you. Go back home to Danu. Go back to your Master Set.” I bit that last one off, knowing it would sting and hating myself for it. The shame I felt at that wounded my own pride further still, and as we so often do when our own actions cut us so deeply, I doubled down. “Go to hell.”
Grief is emptiness, I thought. Grief is deep water. Grief. It felt less like Switch had betrayed me and more like he had died.
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.
If there existed no possibility of understanding, what hope was there for reconciliation? If one cannot domesticate the tigress, if one cannot make her change her stripes, what is one to do besides shoot her?
The light blazed as a second barrage flared up, and for the briefest second before the flash I saw the mushroom-flowering of nuclear impact hundreds of thousands of miles away, and thought, Oh, it’s beautiful.
There was nothing in his eyes but the reflection of nuclear fire from the sky above.
Memories of the battle with The Painted Man and his SOMs came back to me. I had lost my sword then, too. So common an occurrence and so terrible. A kind of nakedness more desperate than nakedness.
Self aware Hadrian
Hidden from the world for a moment by two doors of solid steel, I slid to my knees and wept. For Switch, for our friendship. I wept for Smythe, for Crossflane, for Aranata, for Nobuta, and Tanaran. I wept for the soldiers we lost, for the futures that might have been. And for myself. Myself most of all.
