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Inside me there is a coward who fears discomfort. That coward will offer solace in the form of excuses. But it is the coward who grooms a man for his defeats. The coward who makes him accept them because he is accustomed to finding a good reason to quit. The coward inside can only be killed one way.
“I think…if love is anything, it is truth. If life is anything, it is struggle.
That season of life is a haze to him, but when I die and reflect on my life, I know I will still believe that season was the meaning of mine.
As the door closes behind him, I think on the stupidity of war. How ridiculous we must be to wage it when emotions like love run so much deeper in us than hate. By the time Kavax makes it back to me, I am ready for the enemy to come. I have more reasons to fight than they do. My armor is my love.
Then there was the other man. The dark one. Not in features, but dark in his energy. There was a man who needed no witnesses to burn. His energy was igneous and parthenogenetic, fire reproduced of itself. At first glance, I knew he was a powerful being with no manners, no airs, no grace, only a direction—one that ran straight through me. It wasn’t love that he awoke in me. It was fear. But that is a part of love.
“When I was sixteen, Dancer O’Faran, one of the great heroes of my life, told me that I was a good man who would have to do bad things. That is why Ares chose me: he knew I could be the dirty hand of the Rising. I could be the man who does the bad things. For most of my life I have thought that was a curse. Now I see it was a blessing. If you look at where we started, we are a thousand times stronger now.
That wind becomes sacred to me with that realization. It finds its way through the smallest cracks and the biggest gaps. Darkness cannot stop it nor alter its journey. It cannot be chained nor held in the palm. It is movement unending. It is the sound of my childhood and Mars’s song to my people. It is my path to the Vale, back to Eo one day, back to Da, and Fitchner, Dancer, and Ragnar, Theodora, and Orion, Alexandar, Ulysses, and Uncle Narrol too. When I die, whenever that day comes, I will hear the wind that howls like a wolf and know I am home.
I am Cassius Bellona, son of Tiberius, son of Julia, brother of Darrow, Morning Knight of the Solar Republic, and my honor remains.”
People have saved my life before, but I think you saved my soul.” “And you saved Cassius’s,” she says. “It wasn’t me that did it. I liked him very much. In another life, I might have loved him. But he didn’t need a woman’s love. He needed a brother’s. The way he talked about you. Well…” Her eyes swim with tears. “Lysander was an obligation. You were an aspiration.
His path led back to you, because you made him feel loved. That is all that matters, Darrow. When he died, he knew he was loved. So when you think of him, when you feel sad, remember that.”
“If we do not meet again, I will see you in the Vale with Cassius. You know the path.”
Cassius had a heart like Eo, though it took him longer to find it. I wish he’d found it sooner. I don’t know how long I stand there thinking not of the past but all the life he had yet to live now that he’d become the man I always hoped he would be.
