More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
All men can love a forbidden thing, generally speaking, and in most cases knowledge is precisely that; lost knowledge even more so.
Many people incorrectly assume time to be a steady incline, a measured arc of growth and progress, but when history is written by the victors the narrative can often misrepresent that shape. In reality, time as we experience it is merely an ebb and flow, more circular than it is direct. Social trends and stigmas change, and the direction knowledge moves is not always forward. Magic is no different.
THE MORAL OF THE STORY IS THIS: Beware the man who faces you unarmed. If in his eyes you are not the target, then you can be sure you are the weapon.
Unfortunately, setting fire to Nico de Varona’s undergarments was considered unacceptable behavior.
Really, there was nothing more dangerous than a woman who knew her own worth.
The problem with seeing through things so readily was the development of a certain degree of natural cynicism.
It was clear to Tristan that power was never given, only taken. Deserved or not, it would have to be grasped, not offered by Atlas Blakely or any other’s hand.
One of the particularities about the study and reality of magic was that it only mattered, in the end, how things looked or tasted. What they were meant to be, or what they were at the start, could be easily dismissed in favor of achieving the necessary result.
Always dangerous was the pairing of hunger with any skill of manipulation; it is an essential law of human behavior that when given the tools to do so, those born at the bottom will always try to claw their way to the top. Those born at the top, i.e., Callum, were usually less inclined to upend things as they were. When the setting was already gilded and ornate, what would be the point of changing your surroundings?
A self-perpetuating cycle, really, that knowledge begets knowledge just as power begets power—generationally, institutionally.
“Not even you?” asked Reina, surprising them once again with her voice. “Not even me,” Atlas confirmed. “We do not, as a society, believe it is necessary for one man to know everything. We don’t consider it particularly possible, either, and certainly not very safe.”
“Because the problem with knowledge, Miss Rhodes, is its inexhaustible craving. The more of it you have, the less you feel you know,” said Atlas. “Thus, men often go mad in search of it.”
“No one here is good. Knowledge is carnage. You can’t have it without sacrifice.”
Magic was no different from rot, corrosion, temperature change, overuse. Contractions and expansions and chipping and peeling and movements of time and space. Funny how laughably simple everything was in the end, even when it belonged to the immeasurable, or the invaluable.
Funny how that worked; the innocent fragility of being human. There were so many ways to break and so few of them heroic or noble.
“Magic comes only at a price, Parisa. You know that. Some subjects require sacrifice. Blood. Pain. The only way to create such magic is to destroy it.”
Most theories of time and its motion were quietly psychological—that a person’s experience of time could be shaped by thought or memory. Pieces of the past seemed closer while the future seemed at once nonexistent, distant, and rapidly approaching.
“Time travel,” Parisa explained, “is simple, provided you are traveling through one person’s perception of time.
“It’s not very complex,” she told him, surprised but not displeased by his dismissal. “Intelligent people respond more quickly to stimuli, therefore intelligent people experience time faster, and may be perceived to have more of it. Intelligence is, in some senses, also an illness—genius is frequently a side effect of mania. Perhaps some would have such an excess of time that they are experiencing it differently. Also, if time could be consumed differently, it could also be preserved. And if a person had an excess of time—” “They could travel throughout their own experience of time
...more
“A flaw of humanity,” said Parisa, shrugging as they walked. “The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness.”
It is a troubled world we live in, ever on the brink of progress and regression, and very few are given the opportunity to make true changes. Power like the Society’s does not elevate this world; it only changes hands, continuing to isolate its advantages.” It was an old argument. Why have empires and not democracies? The Society’s version of an answer was obvious: because some things were unfit to rule themselves.
Depending on how you viewed it, Persephone had either been stolen or she had run from Demeter to avoid being used. Either way, she had made herself queen.
She seemed the sort of person one loved only at one’s own risk,
There was no stopping what one person could believe.
What was being human except to crave things unreasonably?
“We are the gods of our own universes, aren’t we? Destructive ones.”
Reina had the benefit of being raised amid Eastern philosophies as opposed to Western, which meant she was more willing to trust general policies of dualities. She understood, in a way the others did not, the existence of polarities, the mysticism of opposition: that acknowledging the presence of life meant accepting the presence of death. That knowledge necessitated ignorance. That gain meant loss. Ambition suggested contentment, in a sense, because starvation implied the existence of glut.
Presumably at a certain level of privilege, trivial things like people’s lives and well-being were insignificant details, trifling costs to be considered briefly and then, in the interest of productivity, cast aside for the greater good. Thoughts and prayers.
“You want to believe that your hesitation makes you good, makes you better? It doesn’t. Every single one of us is missing something. We are all too powerful, too extraordinary, and don’t you see it’s because we’re riddled with vacancies? We are empty and trying to fill, lighting ourselves on fire just to prove that we are normal—that we are ordinary. That we, like anything, can burn.”
“You don’t want to go mad? Too bad, you are already. If you leave here the madness will only follow you. You’ve already gone too far, and so have I.”
“You already know, Miss Rhodes, that power does not come from nothing,” Atlas cautioned. “It cannot be created, nor drawn from an empty well. The primary principle of magic remains unfailingly true: it always comes at a cost. There is a price for all of this privilege, and to choose it necessitates the dignity to pay.”
Atlas was right: she had more power now than she had ever possessed. It wasn’t a matter of what she was born with or what she was given—being here, among them, with access to the library’s materials, she had every opportunity to travel miles beyond herself. She could feel the outer edges of her power more distantly than ever, farther than the tips of her fingers or the soles of her shoes. She could feel herself in waves, pulsing. She could feel herself expanding, and there was no end to it, no beginning. Who she had once been was as distant and unrecognizable as what she would, inevitably,
...more
“Do you worry much about your soul, Rhodes?” In another world, he might have touched her. In another world, she would have welcomed it. “Always.” All it would take was a step. “Constantly.” His hands could be on her jeans, stroking a line down her navel, tucking her hair behind one ear. She recalled the sting of his sigh on her skin, the tremors of his wanting. “It terrifies me how easily I can watch it corrupt.”
Gods demanded blood in almost every culture. Was magic any different?
“Most people don’t know how to starve,” said Ezra. Silence. “I guess that’s a weird thing to say, but it’s true. It’s something you learn. People think they have to be born one way, with resilience built in or some incapacity to burn or whatever. Either you are or you aren’t, that sort of thing. Like some people naturally want things and others want nothing, but it’s not true. You can be taught to want. You can be taught to crave. And you can also learn to starve.”
“The issue is when you eventually get fed,” Ezra continued. “You’ve heard about the stomach pains and shit when vegetarians eat meat for the first time? It feels like dying. Prosperity is anguish. And of course the body adjusts, doesn’t it? But the mind doesn’t. You can’t erase history. You can’t just excise the wanting, and worse—you forget the pain. Eventually you grow accustomed to excess and you can’t go back, because all you remember are the aches of starvation, which you took so long to learn. How to give yourself only as much as you need to continue—that’s a lesson. For some people it’s
...more
We fight it, trying to starve well or starve cleverly, but it comes for us eventually. We all have different reasons for wanting, but inevitably it comes.” “What does?” asked Atlas. Ezra smiled, closing his eyes in the sun. “Power,” he said. “A little at a time until we break.”
you’re looking for the wrong things. You’re looking for, I don’t know. The other pieces.” She made a face. “Other pieces of what?” “How should I know? Yourself, maybe.” He scoffed under his breath before oppressing her with “Anyway, there aren’t any other pieces, Rhodes. There’s nothing else. It’s just you.” “What’s that supposed to mean?” “Either you’re complete or you’re not. Stop looking. It’s right fucking there,”
“You’re a fire hazard, Rhodes,” he said. “So stop apologizing for the damage and just let the fucker burn.”
Whatever Libby was now, she was powerful with possibility. Helpless, too, with the knowledge of her own exceptionalism. Could she go back to the person she was before knowing she could control the enigmatic workings of the universe? That she could build them, control them, mold them to be whatever she liked? Ambition was such a dirty word, so tainted, but she had it.
People generally only knew how to look at the world one way: in three dimensions. For them, time was exclusively linear, moving in a single direction never to be disrupted or stopped.
The trouble with knowledge, the idiosyncrasy of its particular addiction, was that it was not the same as other types of vice. Someone given a taste of omniscience could never be satisfied by the contents of a bare reality without it; life and death as once accepted would carry no weight, and even the usual temptations of excess would fail to satisfy. The lives they might have had would only feel ill-fitting, poorly worn. Someday, perhaps quite soon, they might be able to create entire worlds; to not only reach, but to become like gods.
Power without purpose was the real trap, the true paralysis. The freedom of endless choices wasn’t meant for human minds.
If you do not know precisely where impossibility begins and ends, then of course it cannot constrain you.
