All those rural people who hate cities are afraid of something legit; cities really are different.
I live the city. It thrives and it is mine. I am its worthy avatar, and together? We will never be afraid again.
And I know what you want, Nahadoth Nightlord, Skyfather and Shadowmother, lifeblood of the universe, flesh of chaos and change.
But without love of the self, others’ love will never be enough.
There are stages to the process of being betrayed by your society. One is jolted from a place of complacency by the discovery of difference, by hypocrisy, by inexplicable or incongruous ill treatment. What follows is a time of confusion – unlearning what one thought to be the truth. Immersing oneself in the new truth. And then a decision must be made.
The shake that passes will echo. The wave that recedes will come back. The mountain that rumbles will roar.
The stabbing is the outcome of an impossible choice he demanded of her: to be either his daughter or an orogene. She refused to commit existential suicide. He refused to suffer an orogene to live. There was no malice in either of them in that final moment, only the grim violence of inevitability.
You are lightning, dangerous unless captured in wires. You’re fire – a warm light on a cold dark night to be sure, but also a conflagration that can destroy everything in its path.
Her family had shown her that love is a lie. It isn’t stone-solid; instead it bends and crumbles away, weak as rusty metal.
Astra inclinant, sed non obligant;.
Nothing human beings do is set in stone – and even stone changes, anyway. We can change, too, anything about ourselves that we want to. We just have to want to. People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.
It was important, they’d told her, to know where her food came from, and to understand that not just one, but many deaths had enabled her survival. Therefore it was crucial that she use every part of the animal, as much as she could, and take no more than she needed. To kill under those circumstances, or to survive, was respectful. To kill for any other reason was monstrous.
Real gods aren’t what most of you Christians think of as gods. Gods are people. Sometimes dead people, sometimes still alive. Sometimes never lived.” She shrugs. “They do jobs – bring fortune, look after people, make sure the world works as it should. They fall in love. Have babies. Fight. Die.” She shrugs. “It’s duty. It’s normal. Get over it.
Home isn’t where the heart is. It’s wherever the wind feels right.
Back when Aislyn was a teenager, she often thought of her mother as dull. Since then Aislyn has come to understand that women sometimes have to pretend to be dull so that the men around them can feel sharper.
And so this is Um-Helat: a city whose inhabitants, simply, care for one another. That is a city’s purpose, they believe – not merely to generate revenue or energy or products, but to shelter and nurture the people who do these things.
Dread works best in complete silence.
How much I’ve had to fight my own internalized racism in addition to that radiating from the fiction and the business. How terrifying it’s been to realize no one thinks my people have a future. And how gratifying to finally accept myself and begin spinning the futures I want to see.
Evil comes from elsewhere, Matthew Houlihan believes. Evil is other people. She will leave him this illusion, mostly because she envies his ability to keep finding comfort in simple, black-and-white views of the world.
Bronca’s not sure how Manhattan makes such a quiet statement sound so awful – but maybe it’s the fact that there is compassion in his gaze, instead of coldness, when he says it. Coldness would be reprehensible, horrifying. Compassion is worse, because it cannot be dismissed as evil.