Dio

“I could see nothing but those eyes. They filled the universe, *became* the universe and behind them and through them I beheld countless suns. They scattered like embers and blew out, all but one. Toward it I fell and into a city whose spires and bell towers recalled the castle of my home, but all the buildings were strange. I heard a great wailing, as from an infant, as I stood beneath the vaults of a mighty chapel. There a cradle stood amid shattered statuary, and I approached, but the cradle held nothing but air. The image crumbled, and I fell backward through thick mist. As it parted I beheld a great ship studded with statues of men and gods and devils. She stretched across the heavens and drowned the unfixed stars.
And I saw the Cielcin standing in rank and file amidst the black of space itself, marching in the night. How bright their spears! And the song of them was like the flash of cruel lightning. Where they passed, the stars fell and planets went up like smoke. And I beheld one greater than the rest. Silver was its crown, and silver the inlay of black armor, and its eyes were terrible as the worlds burning in its wake. The great ship with her statues overshadowed that Pale host and plunged into the nearest star like a knife descending.
Light.
I was blind, though in that brightness I sensed a presence. Shapes moving invisibly, casting no shadows. I tried to cry out, but the words would not come, for I had forgotten them. I felt nothing, heard nothing. Knew nothing.
Save three words.
*This must be.*”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“Even small actions have consequences. And while we can often choose our actions, we rarely get to choose our consequences.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“Cid Arthur found more than poverty when he escaped his father's palace. He found sickness, too. As did I. The Gray Rot had been on Emesh for some years, brought by some unscrupulous trader from off world. The natives had no immunity, and the animalcule chewed through like paper and festered in the street. I was palatine. I was immune, Mother Earth have mercy on me.
Have you ever stopped to think about what it would be like to sit in the belly of an epidemic, untouched by it? I felt like a ghost. My body's almost-alien biochemistry--the legacy of tens of generations and of millions of Imperials marks worth of genetic recombination--preserved me from every weeping sore, every bout of necrosis, every bleeding cough. It sounds like a blessing. It is no blessing to watch other men die, even less to watch the ones you love waste away. When I started this account, I thought to skip this part, so painful was my loss of Cat. But I was wrong. She matters. She must matter.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence

“The ancients used to complain that the stars of heaven were too numerous to suppose that we were the only life, the only inheritors of the universe. They used to think it strange that no other races cried out into the darkness, their radio waves and noise blasting across the unending Dark. The truth we discovered when our long ships plied the oceans of night and planted flags on far shores was simple. We were the first. The Chantry took that fact to heart, declaring loudly and often that the stars were *ours*. That they belonged to the Children of Earth. They built their religion on that essential fact as much as they did on a fear of the corrupting power of technology and the pollution of the human form. We had a right to conquest, they claimed, as the ancient Spaniards had claimed when their sad ships crashed ashore.”
― Christopher Ruocchio, Empire of Silence