Queen Amid Ashes (The Sun Eater, #2.5)

by Christopher Ruocchio

There are things stronger than our words for them. Have I not said so? Or perhaps I will have said so when all is done. In some other place. But it is so, regardless. Time and space. Death. Stone. Sea. Things that are and would be even without us. Things that are in nature and belong to it. But there are things weaker than our words. Many things. Civilization is one. Civilization is a story we tell, a story in which we are only players, characters on a stage. There are others: history, for example—the field if not the string of incidents itself—would not exist but for our making of it, for history is another story we tell. So too is virtue weaker than we, as are goodness, and beauty, and truth itself. And justice. Justice perhaps most of all. Please understand: I do not say that we have invented these things. On the contrary, I believe these things make us, shape us as a narrative shapes its characters. Indeed, I believe these weaker things are higher, deeper than we, and are so made mutable by their hiddenness, their remoteness from us. But we may bend them, or deny them, or negate them, as we may not negate the baser realities of time and space.