Demon in White (The Sun Eater, #3)

by Christopher Ruocchio

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.

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.

place opposite me. “Your blood and your name do not make you more than other people. Those things belong to your ancestors, and if you are to inherit them properly, you will honor those ancestors by being a good man.

But we are not them, and must do our own great things, eh? The others deserve their chance, as well. They did not ask to be born as they are, and so you and I will not punish them for it. 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?”

lords. I used to wonder often if our ancient forebears made a mistake extending our lives by so many hundred years, for young as I was I was too old to long tolerate such things as politics.

Hey, carry home my broken bones and lay me down to rest! A thousand years of time I’ve known since I left my home and nest. A thousand worlds I’ve sailed and seen Seeking fortune and my fame! But I’ve lost it all—and gone and died Where no one knows my name!

Criminals and slaves, homunculi and inti, foreigners and xenobites and witches, too. My people. My friends.

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

Love consumes, so the aphorism goes. I have not found it to be so. Love is not a burden—though it is a responsibility. A duty. Love is an honor—an office we hold. An oath.

“Are you all right?” she asked me. “I’m happy,” I said, and truly meant it. “What did you ask him about?” She disentangled her hand from mine and wrapped the arm about my waist. “I didn’t ask him anything,” she said, looking up at me, bright eyes wide in her pale and lovely face. How had I ever thought her severe and unpleasant? She reached up and kissed my cheek. “I just wanted to thank him.” “For what?” “For you.”

“But then, so few of us truly think themselves evil. They simply think good and evil matters of opinion, and seek to impose their opinion—which is evil—on good. Nothing is evil in its beginning, it only grows that way.

“The Golden Age ended because men forgot philosophy in their pursuit of knowledge. They traded a love of wisdom for progress, and it destroyed them.”

I wanted her. More than a hundred years together by then, and it wasn’t enough. I still wanted her. Always her. Only her.

How could any of it matter? How could any of us? I know better now. 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.

Damn the Wall, damn the war, damn it all if she was not all right.