Ashes of Man (The Sun Eater, #5)

by Christopher Ruocchio

The ugliness of the world does not fade, nor are fear and grief made less by time, nor is any suffering forgotten. We are only made stronger by its blows.

So often we don’t see the truth because we won’t look low enough.

suffering is not quantified or measured. It only is.

We have need of heroes, however broken, however terrible, however insufficient they may be. And we have need of more than one hero, for heroes do break, you know.

“Do you not have your answer a hundred times over?” A brief tremor shook her arm, but she hid it behind her back and shook her head again. “Monsters don’t have doubts.”

“Maybe you’re right. But there are women and women, commander. Some ask nothing of us, and so we are nothing to them. But there are those women who ask all of us. Those are the ones worth giving all for.”

One cannot step in the same river twice, and home is not home when you return, for you are not yourself. The man you were yesterday died yesterday, and is only a piece of the man of today, as you will be tomorrow.

But there is little right in all the universe, and none which we do not fight for and make for ourselves.

The universe is infinite, or so the scholiasts say, and I have seen that it is so. But it is infinite only in certain ways: in space and in potential. It is bounded in time, for time had a beginning—all magi agree—and so it must have an end. As will we. Something in this asymmetry between infinite space and finite time, I think, explains all coincidences, conserving fact as readily as other laws conserve matter and energy. Or perhaps . . . it is only that we are human, and that our human lives are woven together, and are more tightly bound by the action of the loom of human drama.

“Some men love a thing so much they hide it away, others love a thing so much they boast of it at every opportunity.”

“I read,” I said, and shrugged. “People always accuse me of wasting my time, but they don’t complain when I have their answers.”

“The world’s changed,” I allowed, and glanced back to where Prince Rafael Hatim sat with Garan Peake and the others. “But men have not. Nor will.” I clapped him on the shoulder. “We keep making the same choices. The same mistakes. So the same wisdom will ever serve us.”

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

What good was it serving good and truth, if I must lie even to her?

What good is there without sharing it with a loves one?

We believe war is waged by heroes and brave men, and it is so. But war is waged as much—and more—by those not brave at all.

Beauty is Truth, the poet once observed, and I have said it is not so, for there are hideous truths. But Truth is good, I thought then—and think now—even when it is hideous,

“Oft hope is born when all is forlorn.”

But to know a thing and to see it, to experience it, are as different as the moon and the finger pointing to it. Knowledge is not truth, only the apprehension of it. Experience is something else entirely.

Everything matters. 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?

For all his power, all his station, his breeding and command, the king could move but one square at a time.