Light Bringer Quotes

"A man from the wilderness who has never heard music might come upon a city and hear through a window the song of a violin. It makes no matter if he knows the complexity of the piece, or the reverence culture has for the instrument, he will stop and listen because he can recognize the rarity of beauty. These Ascomanni would go into the house and beat the player to death for making a racket, enslave the children, break the violin, and burn down the house. All of them. They do not seek context, or assimilation, only domination. If it does not fit into their paradigm, they destroy it."

"Vae victis. Woe to the vanquished."

"War has never been my passion, only my profession, dominus"

"Do you think I enjoy the weight of this, Dominus Lune?” He pushes it toward me. “The worship of asteroid-dwelling savages? The slaughter of the Society’s civilians? The venal backbiting among Darrow’s Volk? No. A single day under the sun with sand between my toes is worth ten years on a throne. One performance of Giulio Cesare or Parsifal does more for my heart than ten thousand chanting my name. I need no honors. I crave no power. Let me be rid of it all."

"She might be a Valkyrie, but there’s a touch of that freelancer in her too.” He taps his ruined eye. “A worthy man. Oh, Atlas. I think that Gray would have been one of your favorite knives."

"The greater the trauma, the longer the peace."

"Seven hundred and fifty years ago, Akari stole a weapon called Eidmi from Silenius. Eidmi is a virus with a modular half-life capable of targeting any of the fourteen Colors without secondary transmission to the rest. It is a weapon that will mean the end of war and ensure obedience to the Morning Chair for a thousand years. What planet, what Color, would dare raise arms ever again if they knew we could prune rabble-rousers out with a snap of our fingers?"

"Really, Dominus Lune. What kind of monster would kill his own mother?"

"Breathe out, then in. Find the self, lose it again."

"The point of war is not to kill your enemies, but to come to an acceptable peace while losing as few people as possible."

"We are at war. The purpose of war is to kill your enemies."

"That is always the enemy you must fear the most. The unseen one who strikes from the shadows."

"I just wanted to see the Reaper in an open field,” he says. “The verdict is in. You’re a menace to savage and civilized alike."

"Yes. Certainly concussed. But not a bad bill for a good deed."

"You’d really die here with me? I just…well…I thought that was your and Sevro’s thing. Thank you, Darrow."

"Before you bothered with moons, you liberated planets in my name. How far you’ve fallen. You know me, Skarde. You all know me. Or have you forgotten the man who put the razor in Ragnar’s hands?"

"I did not come to judge you. I did not come to punish you. I came to remind you of the oaths you took! It is brothers who find us when we are lost. Brothers who guide us home to the hearth and halls of our mothers and fathers. Go now and tell the warbands what you have seen here. Tell them Tyr Morga has come to challenge Volsung Fá to single combat. Tell them Tyr Morga has come to lead you home as Ragnar would have wanted. But most of all, tell Fá to expect me."

"We are all freaks,” he says and shows his sigils. “They made us so."