Desperation makes for poor stealth.
The quality of the light through the amethyst, as the sun slants toward setting, stirs a feeling of longing and relief in me that I will one day learn is called homesickness.
You have seen so much purposeless suffering that at least being killed for a reason can be borne?
Life cannot exist without the Earth. Yet there is a not-insubstantial chance that life will win its war, and destroy the Earth. We’ve come close a few times.
Someday, you must tell me what it’s like there. Why all who come out of that place seem so very competent... and so very afraid.
She wants to yell at him: Say you won’t hurt Schaffa again! Even though it feels wrong to yell at any adult. Yet she has also spent the past year and a half learning that adults are people, and sometimes they are wrong, and sometimes somebody should yell at them.
Some of them will decide that they also want to be beautiful and free, like you. Some will fight for this, if they must. Sometimes that’s all it takes to save a world, you see. A new vision. A new way of thinking, appearing at just the right time.
After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one’s being. I am me, and you. Damaya was herself and the family that rejected her and the people of the Fulcrum who chiseled her to a fine point.
That Castrima has lasted this far, a comm of stills who have repeatedly failed to lynch the roggas openly living among them, is miraculous. Even if “hasn’t yet committed genocidal slaughter” is a low bar to hop, other communities haven’t even managed that much. You’ll give credit where it’s due. It.
That taste was something I had little experience with, yet I knew it the way an infant knows love, or an animal knows fear. Jealous, even between father and son, is a fact of nature.
Coldness would be reprehensible, horrifying. Compassion is worse, because it cannot be dismissed as evil.
Bronca smiles sadly. “Kinda glad I’m not the only one visiting Weirdshitistan, though.
He blinks, then chuckles a little, relaxing as if Bronca calling a spade a spade has finally made him feel better about the whole thing. Probably gets laid a lot with that face, but no idea how to do an actual relationship. Also figures that the personification of Manhattan is two-spirit, too. She snorts a little at the thought. Maybe Stonewall was worth something after all. Anyway.
It’s also frustrating that you care, and that others can tell you care. You used to be such a steelheart.
I saw the hypocrisy in all the things the priest had taught me. It’s all very well to say the world values reason and compassion and justice, but if nothing in reality reflects those words, they’re meaningless.
Power is not a thing that can be given.
It is the lies he’s telling her – as he has been, Nassun understands suddenly, her whole life – that really break her heart. He’s said that he loves her, after all, but that obviously isn’t true. He cannot love an orogene, and that is what she is. He cannot be an orogene’s father, and that is why he constantly demands she be something other than what she is.
Maybe she’s a Canadian who has been driven mad by the cold and socialized medicine.
She knows in this moment that he will never falter, never not be there when she needs him, never devolve into a mere fallible human being, And she loves him more than life for his strength.
You’ve never really trusted him, though you don’t understand why. Something about the fact that he’s hidden all his life – which is hypocritical as hell after your ten years in Tirimo.