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She had thought she might keep them, but now she could not see any sentimental value in doing so. They were just clumps of dead hair. She wouldn’t even be able to sell them for much up north—Sinegardian hair was famously thin and silky, and no one wanted the coarse tresses of a peasant from Tikany. Instead, she hurled them out the side of the wagon and watched them fall behind on the dusty road.
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.
“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 tore apart her mind and pieced it back together, decided he didn’t like the order, tore it apart again. He strained her mental capacity just as Irjah did. But Irjah stretched Rin’s mind within known parameters. His assignments simply made Rin more nimble within the spaces she was already familiar with. Jiang forced her mind to expand outward into entirely new dimensions.
She was so terrified of the thought of not thinking that she wasn’t able to accomplish it because she kept thinking about not thinking.
When man begins to think that he is responsible for writing the script of the world, he forgets the forces that dream up our reality.
