Demon in White (The Sun Eater, #3)

by Christopher Ruocchio

The Eternal City: old and venerable as sages, proud and beautiful as any queen. She was the heart and eye of the galaxy. The axis about which all our worlds turned.

Rome of old was not loved for its greatness, so the poet wrote. Rome was great because men loved her, as I loved my Empire in that moment.

All the art that the geneticists of the High College could contrive was in her body, and the strength of empires was in her eyes.

He looked round at the solarium as if he’d never really seen it before. I knew the look well. It was a look more closely kin to fear than people really believe. A fear born of the fact that though we may come back to a place at the end of our journeys, we never really return, for we are not the same person who departed.

To the boy I was like a character from a storybook—not a man at all. He looked at me as I might have looked at a dragon had one crawled off the page and curled itself around the Galath Tree.

I left Hadrian Marlowe the Halfmortal’s coat in a compartment by the door and hung the Devil of Meidua’s belt on a peg. Stooping, I unfastened Sir Hadrian, Knight Victorian’s boots and left them in a bolt-hole underneath the coat. Unshod and unbelted, whatever was left of me crossed the vestibule. The inner doors were only wood, and opened at my touch.

We lie to ourselves all the time, but there remains a piece of us near our heart that whispers, You don’t believe that. That part often spoke to me when I thought of Valka and of the bond between us, but she had a way of silencing it with her presence.

The way she looked at me, as though I were spun from glass . . . no one else looked at me like that. Not since I became a knight. Maybe not ever.

What cosmic prank had brought that false sun to shine the moment I set foot on Gododdin? What irony brought that false light to mark the Sun Eater’s first visit to the world he would consume? I felt a smile pull at my lips then, as I weep now in writing. I breathed the air that two billion men and women shared. The air I burned to nothing, the men and women I washed away in fire. They cheered me as I came, and welcomed me with silver trumpets.

“Because I have earned their respect. Rank only formalizes relationships between people, Alexander. It does not create them. One has rank because one deserves it, and if one does not deserve it, he will lose his rank. Or his life. A man would do well to become worthy of his honors, else he will be deposed as a tyrant.”

It is the obligation of those of us born to power or who earn it to wield that power with virtue, because power is no virtue unto itself.

To be a good knight, a good leader, a good man for that matter, you must judge a person by his or her actions. By their character.

I felt a stirring of pity for the men, whatever their crimes. Most people die before they go to hell.

As a child, we believe the world enchanted because age has not killed the magic we are born with. As we grow, the simple spells of new sights and far-off places no longer work on us, and we grow cynical and cold.

We live in stories, in the demon-haunted world of myth. We are heroes and dragons. Evil and divine.

That is why the best commanders, the best captains and kings, make themselves known to their people—that their people may be known to them. That we might not betray their trust and obedience when the critical time came.

The Cielcin did not build. They burrowed. All our human construction: our towers, castles, and fortresses. Our temples and warehouses, even our humble homes . . . all of them reach for the heavens. The Cielcin dig toward hell.

“Everyone does, in times like these,” I said. “But we do not choose the challenges of the day. Only our answers to them.”

The thing the world called Hadrian Marlowe was like a suit of armor, a colossus in which I rode that moved of itself. Without me.

Such relativistic thinking is always attractive to the young. Despising their parents—and through their parents all authority—they decide there is no authority but themselves, and therefore all knowledge which was and came before them is evil, and they alone wholly good.

I had believed that I alone had the wisdom to set the world to rights, not knowing then that true wisdom lies in knowing that I did not possess that wisdom, and never would.

Love is not a burden—though it is a responsibility. A duty. Love is an honor—an office we hold. An oath.

Men are slower to act from principle than self-interest, and far slower to act on principle than jealousy or revenge.

Time cycles. Moments return. We cannot escape our patterns. The same choices—the same sins—return us to the same places.

Every place is the center of the universe. Everything matters. Every one of our actions, every decision, every sacrifice. Nothing is without meaning, because nothing is without consequence.