Kingdoms of Death (Sun Eater, #4)

by Christopher Ruocchio

It is said that in the presence of an observer, the particles of light collapse from waves of energy into the beams our eyes understand, that the presence of consciousness alters reality itself.

The scholiasts say that memory exists to impart lessons that protect us from injury. The memory of burning our hands teaches us not to play with fire. What then can be said of my memories of the future? If that was what they were?

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

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?

But there exists a gulf between master and servant—even more so between master and slave—that is wider than the Rasan Belt, wider than the Gulfs where no stars shine, and the only avenue across it is coercion. And love does not coerce.

Or perhaps I’d become paranoid in my old age—if it was paranoia to suspect the hand of an institution that had conspired to kill me on no fewer than four occasions of abetting a fifth.

They’d taken my gown from me, and I hung unclothed for all to see, my mutilated right hand permanently raised as a sign and warning to all who saw me. I had defied the Prince of Princes, and all would see the consequences of that defiance.

I was not going to die here. I was going to Akterumu to die. This was only hell. Death came later.

There was no hero coming to save me, no good to prevail. But there was evil. There is always evil—and the Cielcin were a flood come to wash mankind away.

The next time they lowered me into that dreadful hole, it was with one needle in my arm and another in my thigh, one to hydrate me and the other to constantly replenish my blood supply. I could not sleep. I could not die.

I was on display. Like so many captured lords of antiquity, I had been trotted out as a symbol. There were so few emotions that stood congruent in the hearts of our two species, so few rituals held in common. But humiliation was one. And shame.

There are older, deeper languages than language, and love has little need of words.

I have said before that in love the universe contracts, its horizons shrinking until you and the other fill the universe entire.

In writing I dissolved my madness and my sorrow both, for it is the peculiar nature of words to trap feelings larger than themselves, and so reduce those forces and passions which might overthrow us to objects we can handle and name.

Much of what transpired and what we talked about I shall not here record. They are quiet moments, private moments, moments which belong to us and to memory, not to history and you.

“But you should not despise him for what he is. We are all shaped by our suffering. That we are only what we are is ever our chiefest sin.”

“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.”