Calcifire

“Empire needed extraction. Violence shocked the system, because the system could not cannibalize itself and survive. The hands of the Empire were tied, because it could not raze that from which it profited.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel

“Every time you come up against something difficult, you just want to make it go away, and you think the way to do that is self-flagellation. You’re obsessed with punishment. But that’s not how this works, Birdie. You going to prison fixes nothing. You hanging from the gallows fixes nothing. The world’s still broken. A war’s still coming. The only way to properly make amends is to stop it, which you don’t want to do, because really what this is about is your being afraid.”
― R.F. Kuang, Babel