Nick Irving’s Reviews > The Strength of the Few > Status Update

“I will not delay my death so that you can join me in it.”

Stomach churning. Heart hammering in my chest. Everything flashes of nightmares and blood and fear.
. . .
I allow myself to be drawn into the darkness.

“What is it they say, again? What he needs of the many will always be loud. But in the end, it is only the strength of the few that matters.”

I wait until my stomach settles a little, then walk closer. I am here now. I may as well understand what in the gods-damned hell this horror actually means.

The Hierarchy is a monster that has to feed to survive. And inevitably, once it has eaten everything else, all that is left is to consume itself.
. . .
I’ve helped set off events that I have no control over anymore; I’m adrift on a river of violence, facing a broken dam that I can never build back. I barely notice the horror of the destruction this time. It’s a familiar backdrop, now.

“I do not know what shape the Republic will take when all of this is done, but it will need leaders made out of better stuff than our current ones.”

Fear is a lack of control, realized. Not the absence of control itself, but the understanding of it. The true, stomach-churning grasping of the fact that we have no significant way to affect what comes next in a given situation.

Fear is a lack of control, realized.

Grief never really leaves you, but at some point it becomes remembered rather than enveloping.

The oldest argument for doing something wrong is that everyone is doing it. To dismantle what they have built would have required the agreement of every man who had spent his life building it.
. . .
A society cannot make a man a monster, Diago. But it can give him the excuse to become one.