City of Last Chances (The Tyrant Philosophers #1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

arguing about morals and ethics and other things you couldn’t eat or stab someone with.

Behind closed doors, they were all factions and rivalries, and crippling self-esteem issues, just like everyone else.

Don’t do this stupid thing. Literally, in the speech of the Divine City Do not be made a part of it. It was all process and passive verbs, in that language. In the City, you did not do, you were. Do not be this thing.

a faint, rough accent, clipped vowels, laboured consonants he can only clear by adding extra sounds as a ramp.

They stared at him and let his words run down their face and slope off their shoulders like rain.

“God is less concerned with goals than means,”

she knew exactly how, when you took off your public face and turned it inside out for private use, it could end up a very different shape.

the sword’s only shiny until you shove it into someone. After that, it’s messed up like everything else.”

It must be the art, all those partway creations of Shantrov’s imagination surrounding them. Lending meaning to trivial things, the way art always does.

“Sometimes all you have are embers,”

Once, there was a forest. One day, there will be the forest once more. Until then, Ilmar.