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February 26 - March 11, 2025
All books, no matter their binding, will fall to dust. The stories they carry may last longer. They might outlive the paper, the library, even the language in which they were first written. The greatest story can reach the stars
Some words are so suited to their task that they keep their role within scores of tongues. Some sentiments transcend language. When spoken, expressions of love or hate rarely require translation for the meaning to penetrate.
Kindness carries a weight; it’s a burden all its own when you have nothing. Some undeniable part of Livira wanted to bite the hands that offered so much so freely. Pride is stupid, pride is blind, but pride is also the backbone that runs through us: without pride there’s no spring-back, no resilience.
Meaningless graffiti written at great risk for an audience of dozens. Some people strive so hard for centre stage—bleed themselves dry for your attention—and when they finally get there and the lights find them, they discover that all they had to say is ‘I was here.’
“None of us really know what we’re here for or what we’re supposed to be doing. So, we shout out, hoping someone will hear, hoping someone will see us and reveal the great secret.”
She was used to being told not to ask questions. Adults didn’t like it. But she had always thought that they knew the answers and that they simply found it too irritating to supply them to a child on demand. And yet here was a man who dwelt in a city built on selling knowledge, a man with direct access to the library from which that wisdom came, and rather than deflecting questions with angry denials he admitted his ignorance with weary acceptance.
“And like the branches of a tree, language forks and forks again until the common root is barely a whisper. Those branches spread and touch distant lands where strange tongues reshape both words and grammar, and where strange hands find new alphabets in which to trap new sounds.
Like all hunters, sorrow advances on slow, silent feet, until the last moment when it attacks from cover, springing with such speed that the impact rocks its victim on their heels.
For all but the most damaged of us, doubt is the other side of that coin. Success, even if earned through hard toil, comes hand in hand with the belief that one is an impostor, admitted to an inner sanctum by mistake and without invitation.
When asked to pick from the treasure chest of the divine and take just one power, it is often that of flight or of invisibility that prove to be the most popular choice. The power to find that which has been lost is commonly overlooked. But when one considers just how much our kind have lost, and how often, then the wisdom of such a path is . . .
it was the aroma of time itself, the scent of passing years. And when you opened a book, especially one that had waited lifetimes for someone to turn its cover, that first breath was of something new, almost individual.
So instead, he often wasted his time hunting for a read instead of reading.
It unsettled her how the same words could mean such different things to different people. How it might be possible for two sets of eyes to witness the same events and later give accounts at odds with each other.
Livira wondered how long it had taken the ancients to discover these secrets the first time, not by poring over the pages of learned tomes but uninstructed, through painstaking observation of the universe. She supposed that might depend on quite how many people there were. Perhaps ten billion souls could throw forward a sufficient number of geniuses to unlock the secrets of existence in the same timescale that ten thousand souls might be led through the necessary steps by careful instruction. But the real questions here were Yute’s. How many times had it happened before? And why were they back
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power had a tendency to clump together. Any small concentration of it rapidly drew in more, and it jealously accumulated in any hands that managed to grab a portion. Money did the same and seemed to be, according to Arpix who did not apologise for the pun, another side of the same coin.
Everything we see is seen through the lens of our expectation. Our prejudice provides a broad brush, imagination sprinkles detail, some of which may actually be there. We ascribe meaning and intent with a careless disregard for our constant failure at such prediction. One is forced to wonder if the blind man’s hands lie to him as eloquently as vision does to the sighted.
weapons that can level continents and leave nothing save dust. And Mayland knew about wars in which that actually happened.” Livira, who had lived most of her life amid seemingly endless dust, wondered for the first time quite how that dust came to be there,
With an unexpected howl the wind tore it from him and in an eye-blink the night had it.
This is what enables Livira to find the corner of the paper in the first place out in the dust, so he must be in her past somewhere
Few things are worse enemies of civilisation than a corrupt official, but an honest official of corrupt laws is definitely one of them.
All of us steal our lives. A little here, a little there. Some of it given, most of it taken. We wear ourselves like a coat of many patches, fraying at the edges, in constant repair. While we shore up one belief, we let go another. We are the stories we tell to ourselves. Nothing more.
“The greater good cannot be served by demonising a species, Algar, let alone a race of man. And if the greater good was never truly your goal, then consider that in this instance the same also applies to profit.”
This book really is such a critique on mankind and the constant cycles of power and hubris that become our downfall time and time again
Anyway, the fire-limit is when a people become advanced enough to start a fire but lack the resources to put it out when it spreads.” “What happens to them?” Livira asked. “They burn.”
Knowledge, he said, was not wisdom.
