#pale lights

Chapter 37

That machine, it was coin. It was labor and all that the labor made – swords and cloth and wool, it was cannons and wheat and tobacco. It was fleets and guns, it was all the men that were fed by the wheels and those that were ground to meat by them. And it was so fucking enormous that nobody wanted to touch it, to meddle with it, because if it broke all the many people it had made rich and powerful would want you dead. You couldn't reform that machine, you couldn't bargain with it or somehow make it honorable: its purpose was to eat up people and spit out power. That was all it could do. Either you broke it or you let it eat. The clarity of that choice was a dreadful relief. It was two roads, pared down to the dirt path the rest grew on. It was a breath Angharad let out, and it felt awful but it also felt unclouded. It was another piece of ballast she had put inside herself, and she had carried its weight all her life without noticing it. And now that she knew it was there, she couldn't unknow it. It was a choice now, to carry it or to set it down.

"I do not threaten your life, Morcant. I will not kill you," Angharad said. "What I will do is find you, every single day, and brutalize you just like this." He choked, scrabbled at her boot. "You will learn to know the sound of your bones breaking as well as your mother's voice," she said. "I will cut off your fingers and your ears, pluck out your eyes, shoot out your toes one by one." The boot eased off. In his eyes was a ragged, terrified thing. "I will drag you out of your bed in the middle of the night," Angharad told him. "I will walk into your classrooms and smash your teeth on your desk, toss you through restaurant windows. If you hide in holes I will smoke you out. If you buy thugs, I will cut off their limbs and nail them to your stomach."

Chapter 48

Pale Lights is a webnovel that a friend recommended to me the other week and it has Eaten my *Mind* for the last half month or so.

It's a DEEPLY character-driven dark fantasy story about people, backed into a corner in a hostile world, showing the best and worst of themselves.

The deuteragonists of the first book are Tristan Abrascal, a thief contracted to the goddess of Luck and Long Odds, and Angharad Tredegar, a swordmistress and last scion of a murdered noble house whose contract with an enigmatic elder god grants her limited precognition, each find themself forced to take a perilous Test to join the Watch, a powerful organization of ruthless peacekeepers who are tasked with keeping international laws related to abuses of supernatural powers and divine contracts. They hunt monsters, they kill gods, and if you strike one down the entire organization will hunt you to the ends of the world. Earning membership with them may be the only thing that can keep either of them alive in the face of all the people who want them dead.

This book is *phenomenally* written, making incredible use of the multiple points of view to showcase the differences between the two leads and highlight the world around them and the other characters by painting them in the shadows of what the *other* lead does or does *not* notice about them.

The world itself is fascinating in an "I want to set a tabletop game here so badly it *burns*" kind of way. The world of Vesper does not have a Sun or Stars the way *we* know those things to be, instead it is shrouded in the Gloam, supernatural darkness that roves and storms like clouds, and above it all rests a Firmament, a physical barrier through which the Glare occasionally has formed cracks, resulting in patches of growth and life, though far too few to provide for Everyone. In addition to the cracks in the Firmament, there are ancient wonders of the peoples who came before, great engines of whirling lights and "Stars" hung far above that shine some light below to Navigate by.

Pale Lights - Think of The Story

Song, Angharad and Maryam

Pale Lights book 3, chapter 61

“One was too many,” Izel bluntly replied.

“Spoken,” Tupoc Xical said, “by a man raised in the light of candles, fed on bread come of servile wheat fields, clothed in robes of cotton picked by their hands and whose tutors were paid with foreign treasures. What is left of you, without the flowers? Not much that I can see.”

Tupoc had spoken the way he always spoke: a bullfighter, twirling his cape to draw the eye before he sank barbs into flesh. Tristan could see it in those pale eyes, the expectation of the twitch and roar. That the other man would lower his horns and charge, that the familiar old game would play out down in the sand. Only Izel looked into Tupoc’s eyes as well, and whatever it was he found there caused in him no anger.

That look on Izel Coyac’s face, the thief thought, looked terribly like grief.

“You were Leopard Society,” he said.

Something like unease flickered on Tupoc Xical’s face, but it passed.

“No such society exists,” Tupoc grinned, a slice of ivory and mockery. “Careful, Coyac, you’ll say too much where the foreigners might hear. What would your father think?”

“I do not care,” Izel said, and pushed back his seat to rise to his feet.

The grin turned expecting, almost eager – he leaned forward a bit and angled his chin to make the punch easier. Only the other Izcalli instead did something that wiped the smile right off his face.

He bowed.

Low, deep. Starkly enough it could not be mistaken for anything else. He straightened only after a long moment of utter silence had passed.

“I’m sorry,” Izel said.

“Pardon?” Tupoc mildly said.

The Izcalli’s perfectly even face looked like a ceramic mask, a solid thing only cousin to a man’s face.

“I am sorry,” Izel Coyac repeated, “for what we did to you, Tupoc Xical. For all that was stolen.”

“Soft-handed noble,” Tupoc smiled. “Nothing was stolen. I was given a gift.”

“We stole that too,” Izel gently said. “The ability to understand that what was done to you is evil. Fundamentally, inexcusably. That all who hold a stake in the rule of Izcalli have failed a thousand thousand children like you, and still do. That we ordered you snatched up in the night, raised to kill and die nameless, so that we might keep repeating the same old mistakes instead of learning.”

And it should have sounded pretentious, Tristan thought, or sanctimonious. A man raising himself up by apologizing. It would have, if not for the devastating weight of that sincerity. Izel meant every word, the thief thought, meant them completely. It was so painfully obvious that not even Tupoc was able to laugh him off and gods did he look like he wanted to

“I am sorry,” Izel Coyac said one last time, “that we taught you it was necessary, what they ordered you do to, because it isn’t. We can be better.”

His jaw locked.

“It’s just easier not to be.”

Tristan had seen Tupoc Xical afraid before. For all that the Izcalli was like a great cat, all death and shamelessness, he was not beyond flinching. It was not always all in his hands and when Ocotlan had dropped dead at the table next to him he’d been afraid. Almost fled. But there was a difference, the thief thought, between fear and being rattled. Ocotlan’s death had made him afraid, but it had not rattled him.

He looked rattled now.

Like someone had snatched the fire and the poison right out of him. And as Tupoc swallowed, answer shying from his lip, the Izcalli felt the gazes of all those around him staring at a naked part of who he was – and reacted the only way that came to him in that moment.