The Obelisk Gate

But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.

Being useful to others is not the same thing as being equal.

No, I'm telling this wrong. After all a person is herself and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one's being. I am me and you.

You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you—again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise—that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.

The way of the world isn’t the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too.

There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both - taken and taken and taken, until there's nothing left but hope, and you've given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing.

It's not hate that you're seeing. Hate requires emotion. What this woman has simply done is realize that you are a rogga, and decide that you aren't a person, just like that.

(It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are.) Lately

After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one’s being.

All that stuff about Father Earth, it's just stories to explain what's wrong with the world. Like those weird cults that crop up from time to time. I heard of one that asks an old man in the sky to keep them alive every time they go to sleep. People need to believe there's more to the world than there is.

Everyone _shouldn't_ have a say in whose life is worth fighting for.

There are many of us now. Enough to be called a people in ourselves and not merely a mistake.

The grief does not feel like what you feel about Uche, or Corundum, or Innon; those are rents in your soul that still seep blood. The loss of Alabaster is simply... a thinning of who you are.

If she hurts him because she loves him, is that still hurt? If she hurts him a lot now so that he will hurt less later, does that make her a terrible person? [...] Is that not how love should work?

You pretended to hate him because you were a coward. But you eventually loved him, and he is a part of you now, because you have since grown brave.

Complaining about nothing doesn't seem like coping to you, but okay.

They ask to touch her hair and she asks to touch theirs back. This makes them all realize how strange and silly a request that is, and they giggle and become instant friends without a head petted between them.

It's not your status as an orogene that bothers them. It's that you haven't yet proven yourself. (It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are.)

Love is no inoculation against murder.

Given a choice between death and the barest possibility of acceptance, they were desperate, and we used that. We made them desperate.

Just because they want to kill her is no reason to forget her manners.

But your ’mest is in there doing Evil Earth knows what, and I’m basically asking you if it’s okay to kill her, because that’s about where I am right now.

But it is one thing to resolve to die, quite another to actually carry out that resolve in the midst of dying. Something

[...] the kind of healer who knows that sometimes one must inflict terrible agony - rebreak a bone, carve off a limb, kill the weak - in order to make the whole stronger.

Daddy," she says again, this time putting more of a needy whine into her voice. It is the thing that has swayed him, these times when he has come near to turning on her: remembering that she is his little girl. Reminding him that he has been, up to today, a good father. It is a manipulation. Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.

But it is one thing to resolve to die, quite another to actually carry out that resolve in the midst of dying.

This understanding floats on the surface of Jija's mind for the rest of the day after Renthree leaves. The truth is beneath the surface, a Leviathan waiting to uncurl, but the waters of his thoughts are placid for now. Denial is powerful.

The way of the world isn't the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too.

You offered him a hand to help him up, not realizing he weighed of diamond bones and ancient tales untold.