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HERO WAS OF THE opinion that once decent folks began pulling things out of one another’s bodies, one should take a second look at the decisions that led them to that point.
“They burn them first, the stories. Humans always come for the stories first. It’s their warm-up, before they start burning other humans. It’s their first form of control, to burn the libraries, to burn the books, to burn the archives of a culture. Humans are the stories they tell. If you want to destroy your enemy, destroy their stories. Even if the people survive, it will be as if they never existed at all.”
robes. I’m not sure if humans have sacrificed more ink than blood to their gods over the years, but if not, it has to be a near thing.”
“I want you to know I never regretted it,” he read under his breath. “Not one moment of my life with you. No matter how the end comes now, choosing you was the best decision I ever made. You are . . .” Hero
“I would have thought you’d understand,” Rami said with a contemplative look. “Losing the chance for closure with people you may never see again.”
The curse of unwritten books is to never truly live but exist forever.
Mad . . . now, that’s a peculiar term, and, saints, don’t they love applying it to women. Women have a special facility for madness. We’re encouraged to go mad over the littlest things, because if our anger caught and held on the big things, we’d shape the world. It’s acceptable to be mad; it’s dangerous to be angry. The secret is that I am both.
The best of humanity can be found in Hell. I’ll fight any theologian on this fact. Hell is a place you sentence yourself to, which by necessity requires a solid bit of self-reflection. Or, at the very least, a death’s-bed awareness.
It wasn’t easy, making peace with the wound inside your heart,
Every book is a secret that only readers know.
It is perhaps the most final kind of death in all the afterlife realms. The death of a forgotten book.
Stories were made of soul stuff, fragmented and spurred from their human authors. Humans could create because they could birth little pieces of their souls to do it. Books existed in the afterlife, because the afterlife was a place of immutable things, including souls.
Life—it goes on. Change happens. Secrets get out. Challenges appear. Decisions are forced. Whether we’re ready for them or not.”
