Demon in White (The Sun Eater, #3)

by Christopher Ruocchio

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.

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.

His was the fear of the convict before the judge, as all sons are before their fathers, all men before women, all mortals before gods.

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.”

If I teach you nothing else, it is that you should treat the people under you like family, and that if you’re very, very lucky they may do the same. 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. Do you understand?”

“Here is the kingdom of Death,” I quoted, murmuring under my breath, “and we the living have no place in it . . .” I couldn’t recall who had written that. It wasn’t Eliot or Shakespeare. It might have Bastien, in one of his darker plays, or D’Lorca. I was glad no one had heard me, feeling suddenly foolish.

Any other time I would have found it interesting just how much historical detail had been preserved in the study of war, names and persons remembered at a level of resolution lost in the broader study of things. So much data had sunk into the morass of time, history transformed to legend and myth, and yet certain names and data remained like grains of sand in a broth.

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 despised the Empire because I despised my father—who was its chief representative in my young life. Seeing his authority as unjust, I had decided there was no justice save that which I might make myself. 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.

“Then we should be grateful to have men like you fighting our battles, Sir Hadrian.” It was my turn to laugh then. “I should hope there are not too many men like me, Your Highness.” I had forgotten her order to call her by her name, but she did not rebuke me. “What makes you say that?” “I mostly live in my head,” I answered her. “Sooner or later I won’t be able to escape from it.”

The only way out was through.

Time is an illusion, an artifact of human consciousness. A way of perceiving the higher dimensions of physical reality that your limited minds cannot comprehend. Time is only another kind of space, through which things move. Your kind moves forward only, toward what you call the future. There are other kinds. Kinds that move backward. Kinds that move sideways. Kinds that do not move at all.

“The great empire of silence: higher than all stars, deeper than the kingdom of death! It alone is great; all else is small.”

Consciousness, I think, is a mechanism we humans have evolved for sorting the threads of time. We do it blindly, and that is enough for most of us, most of the time. I am no different, save that I have learned to listen.

The universe has no center, they say . . . and yet the universe is infinite. Is not then every point the center of the universe, surrounded on all sides by infinite space? Copernicus was as wrong as he was right. The Earth of old was as much the center of the universe as the sun she circled. So too were Mars, and Jupiter beyond. So too Delos and Emesh, Vorgossos and Annica. Berenike and Gododdin. 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.

We do not get to choose our circumstances or our trials. We can only choose how to respond to them.”