Kingdoms of Death (The Sun Eater, #4)

by Christopher Ruocchio

Fingers tightened on the dual trigger, and the highmatter blade flowered like a ray of moonlight on that world that had never known a moon.

The war had left its marks on each of us, as all Time’s servants must.

“Those are your orders,” the Emperor replied. “Go and perform your magic, sorcerer.”

“No man ever steps in the same river twice,” I murmured, quoting. “Everything flows.”

They were a people who called slavery freedom, a nation that called narrative truth, a culture that glorified its People by destroying the very concept of personhood. How could they be anything but a nation of book burners founded on a book?

Machiavelli had it wrong. Far better to be loved than feared—and better still to be both loved and feared.

Like every Faustian pretender, they had not realized the very act of purchasing their desire had put that desire forever out of reach.

But despair is the deepest sin, and the final failure.

Revolutionaries are always few, always forcing their vision on the disinterested masses, caring little for how those masses suffered in the execution of their dreams.

Pain, I have said, forms the basis of all morality, for no man who suffers pain doubts that it is evil. No one who experiences pain can even question it.

Art, great art, serves as a reminder of invisible things and of their manifestation in things visible.

No word came to me then. No quotation. No cutting remark. A scream escaped instead—beneath language and beyond it—a roar of fury and of seven years of pain.

Thus it is in the nature of things that ugliness and evil bend to good in time.

“Be grateful we do not get what we deserve, dear boy. If we did, paradise would be empty, and this life would be even darker and more difficult than it is.”

There is pain always, and ugliness, but the light and beauty of the world shine always above and beyond the powers of darkness to destroy.