The Fires of Vengeance (The Burning, #2)

by Evan Winter

“The only way to get as far as you have, considering what they think of us, is to become undeniable.

“It’s because the powerless, having no understanding or experience with how much real power can save or destroy, think too simply. They see things as either right or wrong, but the world and the purposes of those in it are distorted, misjudged when reduced to so basic a binary.”

To be understood, he’d speak the one language the powerful share with the powerless, the language of pain, fear, and loss. The powerful had to be shown that people can only be pushed so close to the flame before they catch fire and burn everything down.

“Because the limits to which we’ve been yoked were never ours, and the stories we’ve been told about our nature, our insignificance, and our lack, they were never true.”

“The lie isn’t that we can’t be their equals. The lie is that they were ever anything but our equals.”

They wrote the rules in their favor, succeeded more often than others, and pointed to that as proof of their superiority. It was all a lie.

“Rage is love… twisted in on itself,” he said, using some of the words she’d spoken to him on the night Zuri died. “Rage reaches into the world when we can no longer contain the hurt of being treated as if our life and loves do not matter. Rage, and its consequences, are what we get when the world refuses to change for anything less.”

He knew that the difference between the ones who stood and the ones who fell was that the truly triumphant taught themselves to meet all their fights, regardless of circumstance, in spite of the odds, and in defiance of fear.

“If your ideas hold merit, they’ll win out in spite of your person.” “Yes, that’s the lie everyone unaffected by hidden hardships believes.”

I think the world is too complex for most things to be purely right or wrong. Given that, the way words, actions, or even intent is viewed depends on who is doing the viewing and on who is being viewed.”

Grief, anger, they’ll hold you for a time. They must. But if you let them root and fester, they’ll become a hate that will consume you.”

“Lady Gifted, as far as I know, the only path to becoming what others cannot is to suffer what others will not.”

she might understand that, though the mind is chained to the body, it is not the body.

“Priestess, a fighter who will only go into battle when they’re at their best fights for pleasure and not principle,” he said. “The things worth fighting for die in darkness if we’ll only defend them in the sun.”

“I don’t believe that I’m the difference that matters, but I am the only difference I get to control. So I’ll fight, because it’s the only principled choice I can make, and doing anything less is the same as an acceptance of defeat and the admission that it’s deserved.”

“It isn’t. It isn’t good enough and nothing will be for a while, because that’s part of what loss is, an absence of goodness and happiness that can’t be reasoned with or diminished.”