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She had bribed a teacher. She had stolen opium. She had burned herself, lied to her foster parents, abandoned her responsibilities at the store, and broken a marriage deal. And she was going to Sinegard.
“Power dictates acceptability,” Kitay mused. “If the capital had been built in Tikany, I’m sure we’d be running around dark as wood bark.”
Classes became like warfare, each interaction a battle.
But the misery she felt now was a good misery. This misery she reveled in, because she had chosen it for herself.
“I have taught her class the crushing sensation of disappointment and the even more important lesson that they do not matter as much as they think they do.”
Jun can teach you how to be a decent soldier. But I can teach you the key to the universe,”
You can’t kill a movement.
What a difference an accident of birth made. In another world she might have grown up at an estate like this, with all of her desires within reach. In another world, she might have been born into power.
“Well, it was a kid’s story after all,” said Kitay. “And genocide is a little depressing.”
Because if she could just erase her past, then she could write herself into whoever she wanted to be in the present. Student. Scholar. Soldier. Anything except who she used to be.
Youth, Rin thought, was an amplification of beauty. It was a filter; it could mask what one was lacking, enhance even the most average features. But beauty without youth was dangerous. The Empress’s beauty did not require the soft fullness of young lips, the rosy red of young cheeks, the tenderness of young skin. This beauty cut deep, like a sharpened crystal. This beauty was immortal.
“Deep in your subconscious mind, you know the truth of things.”
“Supernatural is a word for anything that doesn’t fit your present understanding of the world. I need you to suspend your disbelief. I need you to simply accept that these things are possible.”
“Don’t be silly. I am not a god,” he said. “I am a mortal who has woken up, and there is power in awareness.”
He was building up a background of possibilities for her, a web of new concepts. How did you explain to a child the idea of gravity, until they knew what it meant to fall?
Some truths could be learned through memorization, like history textbooks or grammar lessons. Some had to be ingrained slowly, had to become true because they were an inevitable part of the pattern of all things.
She knew that on some level, there was more to the cosmos than what she encountered in the material world.
“Then find out. Find out the nature of the cosmos.”
They worship men whom they believe are gods, not gods themselves.”
Once an empire has become convinced of its worldview, anything that evidences the contrary must be erased.
On the sixth day, the Empress formally replied that Ryohai could go fuck himself.
War doesn’t determine who’s right. War determines who remains.”
Children ceased to be children when you put a sword in their hands. When you taught them to fight a war, then you armed them and put them on the front lines, they were not children anymore. They were soldiers.
In that moment she realized that all this time she had been playing at being a soldier, playing at bravery. But now, on the eve of the battle, she could not pretend anymore.
War was not a game, where one fought for honor and admiration, where masters would keep her from sustaining any real harm. War was a nightmare.
Fear was impossible to eradicate. But so was the will to survive.
“I didn’t ask to come here,” Rin snapped defensively. “I didn’t have a choice.” “None of us did,” Qara said curtly. “Try to keep up.”
Amateurs obsess over strategy, Irjah had once told their class. Professionals obsess over logistics
It was utter carnage. It was beautiful.
“I would tell it not as a love story, but as a story of gods and humans.”
“I don’t love you,” Rin said. “And I can kill anything.”
“You know who I am,” she said. “I am the guardian. I am the Traitor and the Damned. I am redemption. I am the girl’s last chance for salvation.”
“There is a clinging, and a conflict. Things will come to pass that exist only side by side. Misfortune and victory. Liberation and death.”
“It’s easy to be brave. Harder to know when not to fight. I’ve learned that lesson.”
Chaos does not discriminate, Trengsin,
Your country is ash. You can’t bring it back with blood.”
“If you give me freedom,” she snarled, “the first thing I will do is burn you alive.”
He was burdened with the legacy of a million souls forgotten by history, vengeful souls screaming for justice.
“You’ll have to live with the consequences. But you’re brave . . . you’re the bravest person I’ve ever met.”
“You humans always think you’re destined for things, for tragedy or for greatness. Destiny is a myth. Destiny is the only myth.
She had not just altered the fabric of the universe, had not simply rewritten the script. She had torn it, ripped a great gaping hole in the cloth of reality, and set fire to it with the ravenous rage of an uncontrollable god.
I have become something wonderful, she thought. I have become something terrible. Was she now a goddess or a monster? Perhaps neither. Perhaps both.
They were allies, now, bound by the mutual atrocities they had committed.
She was no victim of destiny. She was the last Speerly, commander of the Cike, and a shaman who called the gods to do her bidding. And she would call the gods to do such terrible things.
