The Book Eaters

We can only live by the light we're given, and some of us are given no light at all. What else can we do except learn to see in the dark?

For here was the thing that no fairy tale would ever admit, but that she understood in that moment: love was not inherently good. Certainly, it could inspire goodness. She didn’t argue that. Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the heart to keep you warm. Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn; love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive. And the other thing, the real bloody clincher of it all, was that the good and the bad didn’t get served up equally. If love were a balance of electric lights and electric jolts, two sides of an equally weighted coin, then fair enough. She could deal. That wasn’t how it worked, though. Some love was just the bad, all the time: an endless parade of electrified bones and drowned lungs and hearts that burned to a cinder inside the cage of your chest. And so she looked down at her son and loved him with the kind of twisted, complex feeling that came from having never wanted him in the first place; she loved him with bitterness, and she loved him with resignation. She loved him though she knew no good could ever come from such a bond.

None of us are truly good,” the vicar said, at last. He put a hand on her shoulder, so gently, so kindly, and she almost threw up on the spot. “All we can do is live by the light we are given.” “Some of us don’t have any light,” Devon said. “How are we supposed to live, then?

Love doesn’t have a cost. It’s just a choice you make.

Maybe, Devon thought, that was the best anybody could hope for in life: to be missed when gone, however one had lived.

It was always the same story, she thought tiredly. Just small, angry men, clinging to fading power. They feared living without privilege because they’d abused it against others, and were now terrified of suffering the same cruelty they’d routinely dealt out.

Hate was losing its emotional edge, becoming a common thing she lived with instead of a treasure she nursed.

Like Nycteris, she thought, and cringed. There was an old fairy tale called The History of Photogen and Nycteris that she still carried a copy of. The main character in it was a young woman who had been raised by a cruel witch, inside a cave beneath a castle. The girl had grown up knowing only darkness, which at the time hadn’t seemed much of an issue to child-Devon. But the general idea was that Nycteris’s world was narrow: she thought the lamp in her cave was a sun, and that the universe was just a tiny series of rooms. She knew nothing of society and had very few books. A relatable situation, for a book eater woman. One day, Nycteris escaped her cave by following a stray firefly. She ended up in the castle garden. But her reactions in the story were strange and unexpected. Upon espying the moon for the first time, Nycteris decided that it must be a giant lamp, akin to the one in her cave. She saw the sky, and likewise decided it must be another kind of roof. And when she looked at the horizon, she saw not a limitless world, but merely another room, albeit with distant walls. The concept of outside didn’t exist for one such as Nycteris, nor could it ever. Her upbringing had given her such a fixed perspective that, even when encountering something new, she could only process it along the lines already drawn for her. The story’s complexity had baffled Devon as a child, but she understood it well enough now. The truth was, Nycteris never really escaped. Oh, she got a prince and a castle and the cruel witch died at the end. But Nycteris could not ever leave the cave, because the cave was a place in her mind; it was the entire way she thought about reality. Princesses like that couldn’t be rescued.

I should have run sooner,” Devon said, voice cracking a little. “But I didn’t. Know what really stopped me? My lack of imagination, the same one that all ’eaters suffer from. I could not imagine a better or different future, Hes, and because I could not imagine it, I assumed it didn’t exist.” Her throat was lumping up. “I was wrong. Life can be different.

Her children were fires who needed fueling; she would burn anything and everything to keep them going.

Some love was just the bad, all the time: an endless parade of electrified bones and drowned lungs and hearts that burned to a cinder inside the cage of your chest.

Hope was a thing you lost when simply trying to imagine better days became so exhausting, overwhelming, and depressing a task, that one opted for despair out of sheer weariness. Giving up brought a kind of peace.

I have always done the best I can for the people that I loved. There's nothing else anyone can do

You will never have to fear what you have mastered.

Love doesn't have a cost. It's just a choice you make, the way you choose to keep breathing or keep living. It's not about worth and it's not about price. Those concepts don't apply.

Devon certainly did understand. Ramsey was like a CEO trying to shore up a dying company, or a dictator refusing to surrender. It was always the same story, she thought tiredly. Just small, angry men, clinging to fading power. They feared living without privilege because they'd abused it against others, and were now terrified of suffering the same cruelty they'd routinely death out.

Self-hate was intrinsic to the entire human race. He’d come to that conclusion after his various dealings with humans. When they could not find enough to dislike in their own selves, human folk went looking for flaws in their neighbors. Delicious, that tendency.

Memory was an anchor. It could ground you in a storm, keep you from drifting. But anchors could also weigh you down and keep you from sailing free.

The lesson is in the story, my dear.

There’s a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship.

Why do you think so few women run away? WHy do you think nothing really changes for book eaters, century after century?”…. “We lack imagination,” Devon said, relentless. “Even if we used dictaphone and scribes, we’d never be able to write books the way humans can. We struggle to innovate, are barely able to adapt, and end up stuck in our traditions. Just eating the same books generation after generation, thinking along the same rigid lines. Creativity is our world and yet we aren’t creative.”…… ‘Our childhood books always end in marriage and children. Women are taught not to envision life beyond those bounds, and men are taught to enforce those bounds. We grow up in a cultivated darkness and not even realize we are blind.”……. “I should have run sooner,” Devon said, voice cracking a little. “But I didn’t. Know what really stopped me? My lack of imagination, the same one that all ‘eaters suffer from. I could not imagine a better or different future, Hes, and because I couldn’t imagine it, I assumed it didn’t exist.” Her throat was lumping up. “I was wrong. Life can be different.

That tongue of yours. Lots of people commented on Devon’s tongue. She stuck it out, sometimes, inspecting it in the mirror. There was nothing special about her tongue that she could ever see.

Everyone is a monster to somebody.” Devon didn’t have to think for this answer; she’d prepared it long ago, in readiness. “But you are not, and never will be, a monster to me. The worst and best lie she’d ever told him.

But I do know we can only live by the light we're given, and some of us are given no light at all. What else can we do except learn to see in the dark?

Poets would tell you that love was electricity in your veins that could light a room. That it was a river in your soul to lift you up and carry you away, or a fire inside the hearth to keep you warm. Yet electricity could also fry, rivers could drown, and fires could burn; love could be destructive. Punishingly, fatally destructive.

Adam and Eve had nothing on Killock and Cai. Apples were for amateurs. Sons eating fathers: that was a truly forbidden feast.

Men who think they made the world out of clay and turned it into their safe place, men who think a woman wouldn’t flip the universe over and flatten them beneath it. I have enough bullets for all of them.