The Fires of Vengeance (The Burning, #2)

by Evan Winter

“She saved me, Jabari. The life I’d made wasn’t worth living. Finding her in this city saved me.”

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

The argument worked, the champion grunted his assent, and it was, as her old mentor had been fond of saying, time to twist the knife.

Tsiora blinked at him. “And what can one do with rage?” “Everything.” “Is it like love, then?” His father’s face, Zuri’s face, both flashed in his mind. “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.”

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.”

“Nyah told me that life, like love, is meant to be shared and that we are least linked to our own selves when we have no one with whom to share what we are. None of us are meant to go through this life alone.”

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

Only a few spans passed in Uhmlaba, but Tau hunted and butchered for days, fighting until his mind began to crack under the crush of the endless slaughter and torture. He fought until his rage burned itself out, its final blaze emptying his soul of everything he thought he was, leaving him with visions of a world that mixed the realm of his birth with the one that had forged him.

Narrative summary

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.”