The Fires of Vengeance (The Burning, #2)

by Evan Winter

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.

You’ll expose evil by doing evil?” “No,” Tau said. “I’ll reclaim my humanity by destroying a man who would otherwise deny it. You can’t talk people into giving up their hold over you. You have to make them do it.

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.

Vizier Nyah, 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.

Champion Solarin,” Kellan said, “don’t give in to the lie that you honor the dead or Gifted Zuri Uba by closing your heart forever. 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.”

Where did Lessers stand in a world where dragon callers, colossal warriors, and illusion-wielding tribespeople went to war against immortals?

The powerful, in Tau’s experience, kept seeing the loss of their desires as being world ending without ever once stopping to realize that for people like him, every day held that potential already.

I… those are pretty words, sounding true on their face,” Hafsa said, “but my life has been spent learning that those who argue for the moral necessity of a fight are far better at spending lives than they are at saving them. Won’t enough people die in the battle that’s to come? What difference can one more body make in it?

“You call me a monster because I won’t let you treat me like my life is worthless, a thing to be used and thrown away?” it said. “You call me a monster because I refuse to live like you think I deserve? If that’s what you mean by monster, watch me be monstrous!”

“That’s not everything he is or all that he’s done,” it said. “He put so much pain and grief inside me, it’s driving me mad.” The demon showed its teeth and drummed a clawed fist against its chest as if it would rip its heart free from the cage of its body. “He gave me this rage that consumes me, and I will finish this so I can finally have peace.”

As Esi made clear, those Nobles all had lives and loves, duties, aspirations. They could be kind and a comfort to their friends and families. But there was another truth about them as well. Nobles granted themselves a humanity that they did not extend to people like him, and because of that, they thought little of ruining or even ending a Lesser’s life.