Alfreien’s Reviews > Empire of Silence > Status Update

“It's not right, a man not talking to his brothers." Was that what we were?

—
Hearing that word, brothers, sparked a deep loneliness in the base of my soul of the sort I'd not felt since Cat died. Not because I was alone, but because I was not and perhaps deserved to be.

finally escaping the doom and gloom

fuck you

why is there no happiness to be found here

don’t kill cat. bring her to Luin. ALIVE. not ashes

“Fear is death to reason, I told myself, and again it was Gibson’s voice, quieting me with the familiar words. Reason, death to fear.”

“I dragged my hands down across my face, hoping to still the emotions there. Gibson’s voice rasped in my ear, so close I almost felt him at my shoulder. Joy is a wind, Hadrian. It will pick you up only to smash you against the rocks again. I latched onto the beginning of that statement, murmured, “Joy is a wind.”

“The poets speak of rage as a fiery thing, consuming, destroying, twisting a soul to mistaken action. They sing songs of revenge, of lovers killed in the night, of passions inflamed, of houses torn asunder. But there is little heat in rage. The scholiasts have it right. Rage is blindness. A red color blurring out the world. It is light, not fire. And light, when finely tuned, can cut as surely as steel.”

“Just as I had thought Devil’s Rest had always been Crispin’s, he had believed it mine. He had toiled in my shadow, and I in his, neither of us knowing the shadow was really just that of our Father, drowning us both.”

“Only my serenity was skin-deep, a layer of ice atop turbulent waters. ”