Kingdoms of Death

Always accuse the enemy of what you’re doing.

We are all shaped by our suffering. That we are only what we are is ever our chiefest sin.

Your friends loved you, as I do—as your Valka does. That is why they saved you. And that love, I told you, is a mighty thing!

I would have gone with you to the end, Had,” he said. “The very end.

There is pain always, and ugliness, but the light and beauty of the world shine always above and beyond the powers of darkness to destroy.

Standing among my final friends in all the universe, I raised my sword and laughed.

It was a privilege fighting for you, Hadrian.

But despair is the deepest sin, and the final failure.

I found rain in that cloudless sky.

Pain, I have said, forms the basis of all morality, for no man who suffers pain doubts that it is evil. No one who experiences pain can even question it.

Good rulers—in my experience—listen more than they speak. It had been so with Raine Smythe, and indeed with my father, who for all his callousness ran his prefecture with the ruthless efficiency of a thinking machine.

TIME IS THE MERCY of Eternity, or so the poets say. But the mind makes Eternity of Time.

Those who wreak destruction and call it progress are ever enemies of eternity . . .” I said, and spared another glance for my host. “And truth.

Absurdly, Pallino smiled. “Then I’ll be . . . be seeing . . . be seeing Elara sooner than I thought. See Ghen, too, and Switch and the rest. I’ll tell them, tell them Hadrian said hello.” His eyes focused on some point beyond my shoulder, and his lips hardly moved. “You give them hell now,” he said.

Those who wreak destruction and call it progress are ever enemies of eternity

You cannot become more than human by making yourself less human in the first place.

Not even if I had been whole. And I knew I would never be whole again.

They are quiet moments, private moments, moments which belong to us and to memory, not to history and you.

I escaped the kingdoms of death and returned to that great empire of silence, and in silence lived for years.

If, as some believe, time is without end, then in time all things are made true. I believe there must be a final end, as there are endings for so many lesser things: empires, planets, men. But even the centuries of a man’s life are time enough to make truth of mistruth.

I am only what you see,” I said.

How could they be anything but a nation of book burners founded on a book?

Blood ran from the back of his head. His eyes were glassy and dull, and every fiber of him gave the impression that here was a man held together by nothing but sheer force of will. That, and pure—if righteous—rage.

Art, great art, serves as a reminder of invisible things and of their manifestation in things visible.

Even from the air

Men are base creatures, my father countered. What is justice compared to hunger? Compared to fear? Nothing.

But there are no gods. There is no magic, only

’Tis about time!” came the bright, familiar voice. “I thought I was going to have to come out there and drag you here myself.

The Mandari patrician officer leaned heavily on an ashwood cane and grimaced as he limped nearer. The man had broken nearly every bone in his body battling the vayadan-general Bahudde on Berenike, and not even the best Imperial medicine could put him back together as he was. That he was back together at all was a testament to medical science. That he was still in service was a testament to Bassander Lin.

In writing I dissolved my madness and my sorrow both, for it is the peculiar nature of words to trap feelings larger than themselves, and so reduce those forces and passions which might overthrow us to objects we can handle and name. Sorrow. Grief. Fear. Pain. I called them each by name.