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I understood how the bleakness can take a man. You feel it in the exhaustion that follows you around, that presses down like a weight just above your eyes, telling you to just sleep through it all. To blot out the world with dreams and closed eyes so that at least you don’t have to be aware of it. It tells you to be frantic, to elicit some kind of change to make things better, even as it tells you that there’s nothing you can do and no point in trying. It says you had something before, and that will never come back,
Time will numb you to anything. There is nothing that a determined human being cannot come to cope with in time. It doesn’t mean that the pain of the loss is gone, or that its embers cease to burn, deep in your core. It just changes. It changes from the incapacitating agony of a gut punch to the solid, deep aching of a broken bone. It becomes familiar. You carry it with you, accepted, never to leave.
Lawyers are the worst. I have a deep hatred of bankers, but they at least pursue their greed with an honest kind of blatancy.
Survive the world long enough and inevitably you will be replaced, cast down and despised.
None of us get to be what we wanted. We are, in the end, what the world makes of us. It would have to be enough.
Do not trust your master, Nall had told me. Do not trust the Nameless, Crowfoot had said.
“You want a weapon?” I asked, offering her my dagger. “I have a weapon,” she said. “You.”
“What victory lies in being an emperor of dust?”
“This body,” he said. “Which parts of it were me, back at the beginning? Any of it? I don’t remember anymore. If you replace yourself piece by piece, when do you cease being you and become something that you’ve created? If you create yourself, does that make you your own god?”
Guilt is a powerful thing. It wraps you, weighs you down, breaks your connection to the truth of the world, and yet, we cannot relinquish it, because in letting go we betray those that we failed.
We are all nothing, come the end.
“There is no purpose,” I said. “We are the essence of instability. Change, and change again, she says. Never stop changing. Never end the flow of possibilities. There is no purpose. There is nothing. We are all nothing.”
“What if I don’t want to know the truth?” I asked. “What we want doesn’t matter all that much,” Nenn said. “It’s time you knew. You can’t finish this unless you do.”
Fate is a spinning coin, balanced on an edge so fine that the slightest breath of wind can set it spiralling away from you. But sometimes, in a moment of utter certainty, you have to slam your hand down upon it and make the call.
“Rise up. Rise up, those that fought and died. Rise up, you that bled, and loved and were afraid. Rise up, you that were lost and broken before your years. Rise up with me now and stand against the darkness one last time.” I straightened and raised a fist into the air, black energy coursing out of me, into the ground, into the air, blazing through the sky. “Rise up with me now, Children of the Misery.”
Do not fuck this up.”
