The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,288

one of my least favorite people. “The Mirror. That lying bitch.”

“Are you so surprised a Mirror should deceive?”

“Did she lie to you?” I ask. “Or was I special in that, too?”

“Never to me,” Felia says. “She confirmed that I was right about you.”

“Right about what?” I ask gruffly.

“That you were unstoppable. That you would become the most powerful man in the world one day. That if any impediment stopped you from proving yourself peerless, you would smash it. That you would not be a Prism, but you would be a promachos one day. And that if you couldn’t rise within the structures of the Seven Satrapies, you would go outside them and rise regardless and take vengeance on all who stopped you. That you were a bad man, but one who had goodness in him. Goodness, we both hoped, that might grow.”

“You did tell me you were afraid of me, that night,” I say.

“ ‘Afraid’ was the most tepid and colorless word I could find for how I felt about you,” she says.

“Thank you for that, dear. That is a story I could have gone down to the grave not knowing. Lovely that you share it now. Thank you.”

“I fell for you soon after that,” she says mournfully. “I did. Even though I could never claim real ignorance about what I was doing. I didn’t know what awaited us, but I knew who I was getting into it with.”

“You believed in me. And you loved me from the beginning. This is the raving of an old woman. You’re losing your mind. I can’t hold it against you. I don’t. Age is a cruel matron. You’re saying things that have never been true.”

“You think me senile? Me?! I’m the mad one? Not you, the wight?”

“You wouldn’t have approved of the things we did if you hadn’t believed. You wouldn’t have joined me in them.”

“Andross, I didn’t love you so much I wanted to take over the world with you. I loved the world so much that when you did, I wanted to be there to keep you from destroying it.”

“You believed in what we’re doing. I know you did.”

“Maybe I did. For surely the Lightbringer must be a man unstoppable. And then I fell in love with you, and I justified everything. I made my reason a whore. If you were the greatest man ever, that made me the right hand of the greatest man ever. That made me special. That justified my sins, my suffering. Whatever was good for us was surely for the good of all. It is the same convenient deception the powerful so often believe. And for it, I know I’ll answer. But it didn’t matter what I believed. Not really. The Lightbringer might be greater than Lucidonius himself, so of course you would believe that person must be you. Lightbringer! Ha! You went to Lucidonius’s statue and wept, because by the time he was your age, he’d conquered the world. You think you’re the Lightbringer because you couldn’t bear to stand in another man’s shadow! You needed it. You need it still. The text of every prophecy was illuminated by that need in you. How many prophecies did we skip as incomprehensible or decide were clearly not authoritative or corrupted because they didn’t fit you?”

She’s trembling with rage that should be mine.

If there’s proof that breaking the halo doesn’t necessarily make one a wight, it is this: she raves; I listen.

“Look at you!” she shouts, despite those that might hear through these walls. “You’ve gone wight! You think that’s bringing light? It’s over! We deluded ourselves!”

“You think I don’t know that?!” I shout, flinging a crystal decanter to shatter against the wall.

But she goes on, heedless, voice cracking. “We sacrificed our boys for our ambition. We murdered our sons! Our own sons!”

“Felia, stop it! Stop it!”

“My sons, Andross. My sons. Better I had put them in pagans’ fires as babes. Sevastian! God curse me, all these years gone and I still see his sweet, trusting face every time I close my eyes!”

There is no answer.

“We sold our souls for this wretched dream. We sacrificed our sons with our own hands. Our beautiful boys. To our pride. Not just yours, Andross. Mine too. I thought I was part of something so important, but we’re nothing but schemers. We’re just like everyone else. You hold on to whatever you need to, but I’m finished. I deserve death, and I will have it. I will join the Freeing this