Revenant Gun

The presence of atrocity doesn’t mean you have to put your life on hold. You’ll arguably be better at dealing with the horrible things you have to witness, or even to perpetrate, if you allow yourself time to do the small, simple things that make you happy. Instead of looking for ways to destroy yourself.

In Inesser’s experience, being distracted by shooting pains in your ass never improved your decision-making ability.

The first rule of any game was to assume you could win, even if you had to hunt through the universe’s cracks for a strategy, even if you had to turn the pieces inside-out, even if you had to tell so many lies to the opponent that they couldn’t figure out which way was up.

But that didn’t mean those things weren’t worth doing. Someone had to carry on with the small acts that kept civilization moving. And this time it was her turn.

It hadn’t helped that Mikodez had casually mentioned that his assistant Zehun had named their latest calico kitten Jedao, apparently continuing a long tradition of naming their cats after notorious Shuos assassins.)

I wish I could stop caring. And the day after that, scrawled in the margin in jagged, shaky letters almost entirely unlike his usual handwriting: I know how to do that.

I’ll keep going,” Brezan said. “I have to. If it means becoming more like you, then so be it.

It would be a shame to let all that hostile intent go to waste.

According to some law of fuckery and bad luck, enemies always arrived at the most inconvenient time, by chance if not by design.

Learning the language of her mother’s people wouldn’t bring back all the Mwennin who’d been slaughtered, and teaching mathematics to schoolchildren wouldn’t unknot the centuries of damage the high calendar had done to society. But that didn’t mean those things weren’t worth doing. Someone had to carry on with the small acts that kept civilization moving. And this time it was her turn.

The songweave of moths and more than moths: other creatures besides, whole ecologies that dwelled in gate-space and intersected with invariant space, where humans lived, only when monstrous engines like the threshold winnower invited them in.

standing at his side like a shadow in search of morning.

The hexarchate and its successor states were about dates, times, irreplaceable moments.

His existence was a performance already.

Did you think of them as being planets while you were on them? He had a notion of them as spinning spheres, like a child’s toys caught in the enveloping drift of the void. But they must seem different when you stood on them, looking up past the not-ceiling into the sky. How far up could you see?

We’ll fix the world and return it to the way things ought to be, and you’ll never have to endure the things I endured.

Brezan was starting to wonder if some team of engineers had constructed her from fire and gunsmoke and metal uncrushed from the hearts of dead stars.

He couldn’t undo any of the past. All he could do was act honorably moving forward, knowing all the while that no penance would suffice.

Everyone from the past was inaccessible, not just Ruo, dust-words in too many histories to read. But he wasn't the only one thus severed. All the Kel in his swarm had been torn from their comrades, families, friends. What they had left was each other.

He imagined what it must feel like to have mouths opening in your very flesh, gaping in a tongueless susurrus. When the eyes boiled out of the gashes, could you see what they saw? Did they give you a new appreciation of the lethality of light?

the unassuming ones were always agents of revolutionary change.

The most maddening part of any battle was the waiting.

their vocabulary for fixing problems is mainly limited to shooting them.

Mikodez had casually mentioned that his assistant Zehun had named their latest calico kitten Jedao, apparently continuing a long tradition of naming their cats after notorious Shuos assassins.)

Crying was something it had only seen humans do in dramas, and in dramas they did it much more prettily, at dramatic moments, with swelling music in the background. Instead, the girl was getting mucus on her sleeve, and Hemiola didn’t understand the context, and it doubted she would appreciate it providing swelling music on her behalf.

What the fuck did I do so wrong that a bunch of kids are killing themselves to become corpse pamphlets?

All across the hexarchate were people like his older sister: loyal citizens, decent people in their day to day lives, many of whom had benefited even from a system that ran on regular ritualized torture.

In the Compact, there’s a nascent democratic state backed by High General Kel Brezan. The Kel are having fits trying to figure out the mess.” “‘Democratic’?” Jedao said. “What’s that?” “They vote on everything from their leaders to their laws,” Kujen said. Jedao mulled that over. “It sounds dreadfully impractical