Zoe

“I think…I am more than content—no, I am joyful—to be in the place I find myself. And I don’t think I could have come to this place by any road but the one I’ve traveled. If there are limits to what this body can do—” She gestured to take it in. “—they are limits made by others, not my limits. No, I wouldn’t choose to be other than what I am.”
― Heather Rose Jones, Mother of Souls

“This work can never satisfy, Din, for it can never finish. The dead cannot be restored. Vice and bribery will never be totally banished from the cantons. And the drop of corruption that lies within every society shall always persist. The duty of the ludex is not to boldly vanquish it but to manage it. We keep the stain from spreading, yes, but it is never gone. Yet this job is perhaps the most important in all the Iyalets, for without it, well… the Empire would come to look much like Yarrow, where the powerful and the cruel prevail without check. And tell me - does that realm look capable of fighting off a leviathan?”
― Robert Jackson Bennett, A Drop of Corruption