The Broken Kingdoms

When people questioned this, the priests simply said, The world has changed. We must change with it.

You can imagine how well that went over.

Very quickly I fell in with others like me—newcomers, dreamers, young people drawn to the city in spite of its dangers because sometimes, for some of us, tedium and familiarity feel worse than risking your life.

What happened when people who’d once possessed absolute power suddenly lost it?

There’s not such thing as magic that does no harm.

“They follow the creed of the Bright: that which disturbs the order of society must be eliminated, regardless of whether it caused the disturbance.” She rolled her eyes. “You’d think they’d get tired of parroting Itempas and start thinking for themselves after two thousand years.”

It’s all right to need help. All of us have things we can’t do alone.

“You can’t lose faith you never had to begin with.”

“Ah. So you never believed in the Bright at all?”

“Of course I believed. Even now I believe, in principle. But when I was sixteen, I saw the hypocrisy in all the things the priests had taught me. It’s all very well to say the world values reason and compassion and justice, but if nothing in reality reflects those words, they’re meaningless.”

I...regret...what I did. It was wrong. Very wrong. But regret is meaningless.

I knew as well as anyone that the priests taught what they wanted us to know, not necessarily what was true. And sometimes even when they told the truth, they got it wrong.

I understand that mutual dissatisfaction is a factor in their collaboration. I imagine it isn’t a far step from mutual goals to mutual respect, and from there to love.

I knew what it was at last—the visible manifestation of my will. My power, inherited from my god ancestors and distilled through generations of humanity, given shape and energy and potential. That was all magic was, really, in the end. Possibility. With it I could create anything, provided I believed.

They live forever, but many of them are even more lonely and miserable than we are. Why do you think they bother with us? We teach them life’s value.

Good intentions are pointless without the will to implement them.

I had never been able to truly hate anyone who’d suffered, no matter what evils they’d done in the aftermath.

Love betrayed has an entirely different sound from hatred outright.