Light Bringer (Red Rising Saga, #6)

by Pierce Brown

“Indeed, for the glory,” Cassius replies. “But mostly for the patrician pleasure of watching an ill-mannered brute from a mediocre bloodline crumble under the burden of his own grandiosity.”

I know you balk at religion—rightly so—but if Father is anything, he is bloodydamn hard to kill.

“Mother, your inheritance was guilt. Father’s was surrender. Because of you, because of Father, mine is struggle. That is better than guilt. It is better than surrender. I do not blame you. I thank you. You never pretended the world wasn’t broken, even when a broken world favored you.” He takes my hands. “I think…if love is anything, it is truth. If life is anything, it is struggle.

“You don’t have me by the throat. You have me by the balls. You can wrench and twist and it will cause me terrible agony. But in the end, they are just balls, and I am a woman, so I will go on, enduring without my balls and I will pester you with death by a billion cuts.

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.

“Tell him I wish he and I had kept riding that gravBike,” I say. “Tell him when this is over, we’ll ride from coast to coast. Just him and me.”

“That’s what progress does, you see. It leaps ahead of the past, but we can never outrun the trauma that fixed our course.

“Well, she pissed on Sevro and lived,” Cassius manages between fits of laughter. “Name one other person who’s done that.”

In the cold prison of our minds, we are alone with our self-hatred, our doubts, and guilt. No one more than Sevro. A friend may reach through the bars and hold our hand, but they cannot open the door for us. Only the prisoner has the key. All I can do is remind him we’re waiting for him when he gets out.

“Julian.” I sit a little straighter. He never mentions Julian. “He’d say I judged my own worth too much by the people I kept around me. I was poor in those days. I’m quite rich now, I think.”