Ashes of Man (Sun Eater, #5)

by Christopher Ruocchio

My dead outnumbered my living—as becomes true for each of us in time. The dead become ever closer companions as we grow old ourselves and nearer eternity. And afterlife or no, they live on in us. Perhaps that is why it seems we have ghosts. Because we carry them in ourselves.

“Angels are only demons that kept their oaths . . . and still serve good and truth.”

The cosmos is not cold or indifferent because we are not indifferent, and we are a part of that cosmos, of that grand order which has dropped from the hand of He who created it. Every decision creates its ripples, every moment burns its mark on time, every action leads us ever nearer to that last day, that final last battle and the answer to that last question: Darkness? Or light?

No words can enclose that silence, or capture the blackness on the holograph where she had been. I can write of that day only as a terrible emptiness, a void blacker than space. Mere words are insufficient, are too small to capture the chasm that had opened beneath my feet.

Time runs down, and leaves no man unscarred