The Fires of Vengeance (The Burning, #2)

by Evan Winter

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.

His freshly shaven head gleamed and he had thick eyebrows that sat on a forehead large enough to keep rainfall from ever wetting his nose.

Yes, if the measure of a man was height, then Nobles were taller. If the measure of a man was physical strength, then Nobles were stronger. But Tau knew who decided what needed to be measured, and they’d chosen things in which they already had an advantage.

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.”

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