Morning Star: Book III of the Red Rising Trilogy

razor goes rigid.

PulseWeapon shudders and whines, priming.

Body trembles. Mouth full of ashes. Wear the mask. Hide the man. Feel nothing. See everything. Move and kill. Move and kill. I am not a man. They are not men.

In war, men lose what makes them great. Their creativity. Their wisdom. Their joy. All that’s left is their utility. War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them. And woe to those who have no use in war except to feed the machines.

“I know you,” Ragnar continues. “I would know you if the world were dark and we were withered and old.” He shudders in pain. “If the ice was melted and the wind quiet.”

“How do sheep kill a lion? By drowning him in blood.”

How many mothers have prayed to see their sons, their daughters return from war only to realize the war has kept them, the world has poisoned them, and they’ll never be the same?

“This is always how the story would end,” he says to me. “Not with your screams. Not with your rage. But with your silence.”

Once I thought that writing this book would be impossible. It was a skyscraper, massive and complete and unbearably far off. It taunted me from the horizon. But do we ever look at such buildings and assume they sprung up overnight? No. We’ve seen the traffic congestion that attends them. The skeleton of beams and girders. The swarm of builders and the rattle of cranes…
Everything grand is made from a series of ugly little moments. Everything worthwhile by hours of self-doubt and days of drudgery. All the works by people you and I admire sit atop a foundation of failures.
So whatever your project, whatever your struggle, whatever your dream, keep toiling, because the world needs your skyscraper.
Per aspera, ad astra!
—Pierce Brown

Everything is cracked, everything is stained except the fragile moments that hang crystalline in time and make life worth living.

what do you say when a seven-and-a-half-foot-tall woman walks into a room with a battle axe and tongues on a hook? Absolutely nothing.

War is not monstrous for making corpses of men so much as it is for making machines of them.