Light Bringer (Red Rising Saga, #6)

by Pierce Brown

“Ears. You could have chosen pricks.” “Thought about it. Gender biased and too heavy. Golds, you know.”

But fortune ain’t kind to those who conceive revolution. The generation that lights the fuse usually gets buried in the rubble.

We achieve perfection first by acknowledging our failures. We increase understanding first by recognizing our ignorance.

“Mother, your inheritance was guilt. Father’s was surrender. Because of you, because of Father, mine is struggle.

“I think…if love is anything, it is truth. If life is anything, it is struggle.

Was it a man who said ‘hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’?” A lancer brings her gauntlets. “It must have been—to imagine something so petty as scorn to be the utmost misery a woman could suffer. What, I wonder, would he make of a mother who has seen her husband sold like meat and her babe nailed to a tree?” She dons her gauntlets. “Perhaps: wrath, I am thee?

“I hope it doesn’t make him do anything stupid.” “He won’t,” Holiday says. I turn on her. “He’s with Bellona and Sevro. Put them together and the stupidity tends to be exponential.”

I try to find the Mind’s Eye. It evades me. I’m terrified. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be here. I have to be here. Noble thoughts flee. No more peacemaker. No more politician. No more feeble seed. I am Iron. I am Death. I am Gold.

It’s very hard for the human mind to accept dying alone.

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.

The true home for a slave is in dreams.

“Worry is a spiral with death at its center, Cassius,” I reply. I feel Aurae smiling. Cassius rolls his eyes. “Worry is a spiral with…I mean, come on. You trying to outdo Stoneside?” I shrug. I am not as confident as I pretend to be, but how can you lead if you cannot walk—and how can you walk if you fear every step?

Forgetting is essential to learning, just as exhaling is essential to breathing.

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.

So many died for me so I could lay by my wife, cradle my son, win my war, have my peace.

“Humans are a herd animal. We do as our fellows do, for few can bear the shame of doing otherwise.

“In a world of chaos, where it is all against all, strength is not measured in the power of a body nor the numbers of your host. Strength is measured only in what the heart can bear to attain its goal.”

“What? Did somebody compliment me?” he asks. “It’s the jawline. Isn’t it selfless, really. I take the pressure off everyone else. They don’t have to worry about being the most handsome in the room. They can just be. Ah. Heavy is the chin that sets the bar.”

“That motherfucker’s gonna burn.”

right. Nothing makes people fall apart like fear, or come together like hope.

All the beauty seems so inconsequential when someone you love is in danger. Stone, states, philosophy, they feel so secondary to the fleeting preciousness of life.

There has always been a human pyramid, in every civilization beneath the sun. It is human nature to crawl upward. But if there are not rigid ceilings, everyone will think they should have everything. Then what do you get? An unstable structure at war with itself. Ravenous resource consumption, the despoilment of natural habitats, beauty, worlds.

Demokracy gives humanity what it wants, boy. The hierarchy gives humanity what it needs. Structure, and hope to escape our own stupidity.

we watch the three boys ride their horses across a moonslit plain. The boys were us once. Drunk on victory, they carried an owl standard and howled like idiots at the moons. We were idiots. Trapped in a world of lies, maybe the howls were the truest things that came out of our mouths. We were all just lonely and in search of a pack.

I love you. I am coming home. I have an army. I have an armada. We will win. For Eo, for Ragnar, for Fitchner, for Cassius. For them all.