Seven Faceless Saints

How strange it was, to be alive. To feel at once important and so incredibly insignificant.

That was what it meant to have power, wasn't it? You could simply destroy that which didn't serve you.

Aren’t you going to tell me my rights? Oh, wait - you’re controlled by a broken system, and I don’t have any. I nearly forgot.

When you don't have any power, you get off your ass and take some.

Roz,” he said, and his thumb brushed her bottom lip. She shivered. “When I was up north and felt I would lose my mind among the dead... When I thought I would be the next to die, and on the worst days, when I hoped I would be... I thought of home. I thought of midnights beside the river, and the way the houses in Ombrazia are so close together, it makes the world feel small. I thought of running through the alleys, of sneaking out to the Mercato, of treading water in the summers. Those memories kept me sane. And you know what?” His eyes were endlessly sad. Dark and infinite. “You were in every single one of them. Everything that reminded me of home—everything that reminded me of happiness—centered around you. Every time I looked up at the moon, I remembered when we were nine and I asked what would happen if it fell from the sky. How you laughed yourself silly at me, and said that although space was infinite, the moon never stopped circling earth. How it couldn’t stop even if it wanted to. And even back then, I knew which one of us was the earth.” [...] “I wanted to be your earth,” Damian said, more softly now. “Just once. Just for a moment.

She looked like she knew a thousand different ways to kill a man, and he found it didn't bother him.

Everything that reminded me of home - everything that reminded me of happiness - centered around you.

In those moments, in the space between frantic heartbeats, Roz was no longer just his earth. She was his universe, his sun, the atmosphere from which he drew breath.

Once you have known true grief, you don’t get better. You don’t recover – you only grow stronger. You learn to bear the things that seem unbearable. You find a way to rebuild yourself, even with crucial pieces missing.

That was how people loved, wasn’t it? By giving away pieces of themselves, little by little? For too long Roz had tried to keep all her pieces to herself. But what good had that done?

I don’t think,” he murmured into her ear, “that it’s possible to get as close to you as I want to be.

Every time I looked up at the moon, I remembered when we were nine and I asked what happened if it fell from the sky. How you laughed yourself silly at me, and said that although space was infinite, the moon never stopped circling earth. How it couldn’t stop even if it wanted to. And even back then, I knew which one of us was the earth.

Because that was the central function of faith, wasn't it? To act as a stand-in for one's own agency. To be pointed to when other explanations faltered

Sometimes his entire body felt wrong, as though he’d fallen apart and been put back together in a manner that was careless and haphazard.

The fear that he might one day feel that way again was more terrifying than any nightmare. It was a hopelessness, a misery so deep that, should he ever find himself back there, he didn’t trust himself to make it out a second time.