by MSH
there is an old question that every system of power eventually forces on the people inside it, not whether you are strong enough to climb, but whether you understand, at the moment the cost comes due, exactly what you agreed to pay and who you agreed to pay it to. most people never get to answer it twice. corvus did. he returns to the bottom of the world at fourteen with the memory of a man who reached the second veil, who spent seventeen years learning the shape of a cage so precisely that he could feel where every bar was without touching them, who found a library nobody else could enter and read what was written inside it and came out different in a way he didn’t have language for and didn’t try to find language for, who died not from weakness but from the particular blindness that settles over a person who has been more right than everyone around him for long enough that he stopped distinguishing between being right and being ready. he isn’t the hero of this story in the way that word is usually meant. he is something the hollow throne has seen before and is already adjusting to correct again.
