Who misses what they have never, ever even imagined?
To those who’ve survived: Breathe. That’s it. Once more. Good. You’re good. Even if you’re not, you’re alive. That is a victory.
The way of the world isn’t the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too.
Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with and move on to more interesting things.
Don’t be patient. Don’t ever be. This is the way a new world begins.
It’s a gift if it makes us better. It’s a curse if we let it destroy us.
There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both – taken and taken and taken, until there’s nothing left but hope, and you’ve given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing.
It’s not hate that you’re seeing. Hate requires emotion. What this woman has simply done is realize that you are a rogga, and decide that you aren’t a person, just like that.
You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you – again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise – that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.
The Fulcrum is not the first institution to have learned an eternal truth of humankind: No need for guards when you can convince people to collaborate in their own internment.
When we say that “the world has ended,” remember – it is usually a lie. The planet is just fine.
Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.
When the reasoning mind is forced to confront the impossible again and again, it has no choice but to adapt.
This is what you must remember: the ending of one story is just the beginning of another.
Because that is how one survives eternity,” I say, “or even a few years. Friends. Family. Moving with them. Moving forward.
Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall; Death is the fifth and master of all.
I remembered Nahadoth’s lips on my throat and fought to suppress a shudder, only half succeeding. Death as a consequence of lying with a god wasn’t something I had considered, but it did not surprise me. A mortal man’s strength had its limits. He spent himself and slept. He could be a good lover, but even his best skills were only guesswork – for every caress that sent a woman’s head into the clouds, he might try ten that brought her back to earth.
Say nothing to me of innocent bystanders, unearned suffering, heartless vengeance. When a comm builds atop a fault line, do you blame its walls when they inevitably crush the people inside? No; you blame whoever was stupid enough to think they could defy the laws of nature forever. Well, some worlds are built on a fault line of pain, held up by nightmares. Don’t lament when those worlds fall. Rage that they were built doomed in the first place.
And then we will understand that people cannot be possessions. And because we are both and this should not be, a new concept will take shape within us, though we have never heard the word for it because the conductors are forbidden to even mention it in our presence. Revolution.
So where they should have seen a living being, they saw only another thing to exploit. Where they should have asked, or left alone, they raped.