The Burning White (Lightbringer, #5)

by Brent Weeks

“You can have all the lands of the Seven Satrapies. The nine kingdoms, whatever you wish to call them. You may also have all of the Cerulean Sea. The Everdark Gates, however, will belong to neither of us. A no-man’s-land. Everything within them is yours; everything outside them is mine. No people, no magic, not so much as a rowboat or letter or child is to be sent from one realm to the other. We’ll have mirrors set up on either side to message each other in case of emergencies. Otherwise, nothing. If you wish, have your wars among your humans. Let there be peace between the gods.”

Liv Ferrilux's true goal?

People had thought the same of him, on Sun Days, as he slaughtered so many.

Will the freeing still be necessary by the end?

He was the monstrous fist inside the velvet glove. If an institution requires the monstrous in order to operate—requires, not commits incidentally, requires in an essential way—is it not therefore itself fundamentally monstrous? Can one commit murder and walk away clean?

Tisis had gathered a wealth of new intelligence for Kip’s maps. In no small part, she was trying to see how she’d missed Koios’s getting around them to take the river with her scouts never hearing of it.

“Nine of the dark ones survived into our era. Nine were enough to devour all the bane that formed. On the day Uluch Assan killed the ninth, Dazen Guile’s gift awoke.” “My gift? Drafting black, you mean.” “I’m not going to be more specific.” “But you know.”

The auditarae’s discipline involved training their memories with various tricks and a great deal of practice to a point where they could listen to a speech of half an hour and replicate it point for point, if not word for word. Others of their order were trained in a traditional shorthand, and partnered with an auditarae, so that together they could compare their recollections and notes to form an accurate representation of the speech. This was not primarily for an accurate text of the speech—skilled shorthand was more than adequate for that—instead, the auditarae wrote annotated copy akin to a musical text, noting accents, rising or falling volume, pitch, speed, obvious sarcasm, physical movements, and other verbal flourishes or delivery idiosyncrasies. These, requiring judgment calls, were more art than science, and the auditarae worked first in isolation with their partner and then often compared their results with other auditarae.

The Whites of old believe that the nature of the old ‘gods’—Anat, Dagnu, Molokh, Belphegor, Atirat, Mot, and Ferrilux

Aha. He’d arrived at it only a moment too late. “Asafa ar Veyda de Lauria del Luccia verd’Avonte. A pleasure to meet a Keeper of the Word, Chief Librarian.” This was Katalina Delauria’s father; this was Kip’s maternal grandfather.

“Kip, there are two kinds of mirrors a man should fear, because both push their will into him and can do so without him even realizing they’re not objective or passive. The figure in the mirror raising the wrong arm is our hint that between reality and perception, things can get twisted.”

“He’s a hundred things more! And not one of them matters. I worry what you’ll see when you look in his eyes, Kip. Because he’s warped. People come away from meeting him hating themselves and hating the world. People meet with you and they come away with hope. You’re a thousand times the man he’ll ever be—no matter what happens. No matter what.”