Red Rising Saga Quotes

"Ah, my father’s favorite pet.” Aja examines Ragnar. “Has the Stained convinced you he’s tamed? I wonder if he told you how he liked to be rewarded after a fight in the Circada. After the applause faded and he cleaned the blood from his hands, Father would send him young Pinks to satisfy his animal lusts. How greedy he was with them. How frightened they were of him."

"Your father bought me, Aja. Shamed me. Made me his devil. A thing. The child inside fled. The hope vanished. I was Ragnar no more.” He touches his own chest. “But I am Ragnar today, tomorrow, forever more. I am son of the Spires, brother of Sefi the Quiet, brother of Darrow of Lykos, and Sevro au Barca. I am the Shield of Tinos. I follow my heart. And when yours beats no more, foul Knight, I will pull it from your chest and feed it to the griffin of the…"

"Never fight a river, and never fight Aja."

"We separate. Stumbling backward. Humorless smiles on our faces—a bizarre kinship as we remember we all speak the same martial language."

"I always dreamed of a good death.” He shudders as he realizes again that he’s dying. “This does not seem good."

"No, Sefi,” he says, dropping the axe and taking snow in his left hand, her hand with his right. “Live for more."

"I will make a house for you in the Vale of your fathers. It will be beside my own."

"He smiled in the end,” she says softly. “Do you know why? Because he knew what he was doing was right. He was fighting for love. You’ve made a family of your friends. You always have. It made Ragnar a better man to know you. So you didn’t get him killed. You helped him live."

"Who are you to bring the corpse of my best born to my spire?"

"I do not know the Abyss, oh, worldly warlord, but I know the ice. I know the serpents that slither in the hearts of men."

"Which would you fear more, Virginia au Augustus, a god? Or a mortal with the power of a god?” The question hangs between them, creating a rift words cannot mend. “A god cannot die. So a god has no fear. But mortal men…” She clucks her tongue behind her stained teeth. “How frightened they are that the darkness will come. How horribly they will fight to stay in the light."

"How sad, the dependability of greed to make men fools."

"She knew."

"Children of the Spires, the Reaper has called us to join him in his war against false gods. Do the Valkyrie answer?"

"Up and lead the dance of Fate! Lift the song that mortals hate… Tell what rights are ours on earth, Over all of human birth Swift of foot to avenge are we! He whose hands are clean and pure. Naught our wrath to dread hath he."

"Ride to kin and enemy alike and tell them Sefi speaks. Tell them Ragnar’s prophets told true. Asgard has fallen. The gods are dead. The old oaths have been broken. And tell all who will hear: the Valkyrie ride to war."

"They call me the Morning Star. That star by which griffin-riders and travelers navigate the wastes in the dark months of winter. The last star that disappears when daylight returns in the spring."

"The Shield of Tinos,” he echoes, voice catching. “He loved the name. I think he’d always thought himself a blade before he met us. We let him be what he wanted. A protector."

"Damn the world, so long as I have my mangy little guardian angel."

"He crosses his arms like he’s a kid in a fort looking down at the real world and wondering why it can’t be as magical as he is."

"You and I keep looking for light in the darkness, expecting it to appear. But it already has.” I touch his shoulder. “We’re it, boyo. Broken and cracked and stupid as we are, we’re the light, and we’re spreading."

"When Darrow was small, maybe three or four, his father gave him an old watch his father had given him. This brass thing, with a wheel instead of digital numbers. Do you remember it?” I nod. “It was beautiful. Your favorite possession. And years later, after his father had died, Kieran here got sick with a cough. Meds were always in short ration in the mines. So you’d have to get them from Gamma or Gray, but each has a price. I didn’t know how I was going to pay, and then Darrow comes home one day with the medicine, won’t say how he got it. But several weeks later I saw one of the Grays checking the time with that old watch."

"Family is all that matters,” Kavax says. “And you are family."

"If he knows how to play the game, if he knows the variables, he’ll sit in a corner for days running through the possible moves, countermoves, externalities, and outcomes. That’s his idea of fun. Before Claudius’s death and before we were sent to live in different homes, he’d stay inside, rain or shine, and piece together puzzles, create mazes on paper and beg me over and over again to try and find the center when I came back from riding with Father or fishing with Claudius and Pax. And when I did find the center, he would laugh and say what a clever sister he had. I never thought much of it until I saw him afterward one day alone in his room when he thought no one was watching. Shrieking and hitting himself in the face, punishing himself for losing to me. “The next time he asked me to find the center of a maze I pretended I couldn’t, but he wasn’t fooled. It was like he knew I’d seen him in his room. Not the introverted, but pleasant frail boy everyone else saw. The real him.” She gathers her breath, shrugging away the thought. “He made me finish the maze. And when I did, he smiled, said how clever I was, and walked off. “The next time he drew a maze, I couldn’t find the center. No matter how hard I tried.” She shifts uncomfortably. “He just watched me try from the floor among his pencils. Like an old evil ghost inside a little porcelain doll. That’s how I remember him. It’s how I see him now when I think about him killing Father."

"In his eyes I glimpse the loneliness, the longing for a life that should have been, and the glimmer of the man he wants to be underneath the man he thinks he has to be."