The Lesser Devil (The Sun Eater, #1.5)

by Christopher Ruocchio

Even after thirty years, he could still feel Hadrian in the old place; his brother who was gone, fled to the edge of known space. Maybe even kidnapped. No one really knew. No one had heard from Hadrian in over thirty standard years.

Fighting had been a part of who he was—or at least a piece of who he’d like to be. That piece had been slow dying. Dying. How much of life consists of such deaths?

Time was always depicted as a young woman running naked with wings on her feet, looking back over her shoulder. She had an old man’s face on the back of her head, and it was that face that looked in the direction she ran—forwards—and the youthful face that looked forever back.

Crispin smiled. He had always been the lesser devil. Always in Hadrian’s shadow, or his father’s. It had taken years, decades, to realize that it was this that had made him angry as a boy. This that had made him . . . whatever he’d been.

Cultures are always built on the bones of the cultures that come before.

If you answer violence with violence, you will inherit violence without end. Whoever slays the killer quickly discovers that killers are avenged sevenfold.