The Burning White (Lightbringer #5) - Brent Weeks Page 0,375

forget. And the next year, he did it again. Over and over.

What would the Spectrum have done if instead he’d stood up on Sun Day and used his platform to declare, ‘This ends now! I will not kill in your name. This is evil. It is finished!’

What if he’d spent his life trying to find some other way? Things had been different before Vician’s Sin; they all knew that. What if Dazen, who routinely did the impossible, had turned himself to the impossible task of fixing the Chromeria and the Seven Satrapies?

Instead, Gavin had spent all his charisma on himself. He’d hidden when he could have fought.

The blood reached the bottom of the mirror. It poured out onto the obsidian of the tower’s top, rushed past his feet, sticky.

He could smell it.

He’d been made for more than this. With his natural gifts, Dazen could have been more. Should have been more.

He’d secretly dared to be a god? He’d not even been a man! Alone, isolated by his own secrets and shame, he’d become a monster.

I have nothing to give you, Dulcina Dulceana had said at the Freeing, but my time. Take my five minutes, and rest. She’d been so quiet, so still yet welcoming, her presence had been an enveloping peace, like the warmth of hot springs on a chill night.

He’d taken her five minutes. Her action: her offer, her sacrifice, and her love, had been beautiful, pure. Where time was the measure of wealth, he, the rich man with many flocks, had taken a poor woman’s last beloved lamb—and devoured it before her eyes.

And then he’d slaughtered her. He’d cast from this world that young woman whose very presence was healing. He’d cost the whole world all she could have done.

He regarded the broken thing in the Great Mirror. Here was ‘Gavin’ Guile. Any accusation he could level against his father, any sin of which he could accuse the Spectrum, any cupidity and vice he hated in others, all that he despised, lay living and breathing and strong in him.

The climb up the tower was supposed to purge his sins? It had only revealed them. He’d held on to a core of himself, an ambition, a pride. He’d held on to the sword, thinking: Judge me, O God? You dare? I am broken, but I will rise in bitter triumph. I submit to the truth of Your every accusation, but soon . . . I will be God!

He looked at the mighty blade in his maimed left hand and transferred it to his thorny, strong right. He felt a gathering darkness in the blade that echoed the gathering darkness of the night and within him. Gavin was not a holy man; he was a man wholly dark. The black sheathing the blade was the same black that had become his left eye, that had burrowed deep. Perhaps it wasn’t hiding, as he had thought. Perhaps it was incubating.

Woe to the world when it hatched.

It had spread from his heart throughout his body, reaching even to his hands, to the black blade.

Or perhaps, seed crystal that it was, the black eye had simply titrated all the darkness that was already within him, latent. It wasn’t foreign, alien, other. The black was his true self.

What if it is yourself that you fear? Your power?

His vision shivered once more, and in the blood mirror through his truth-seeing black eye Gavin saw great wings sprouting from his back, unfurling with a crack. He saw his form swelling with power, growing invincible. He would take, and punish, and live. Live forever. What could he not do, given time? He would make all things right. Fix all he’d broken. Even himself.

But visible from his mortal eye, the self remained, aghast, ashamed at him.

Take the blade, and strike—or they will take everything from you! Strike! Be the god you really are! You’ve suffered enough. You deserve this! All can be healed! Rise from ashes, glorious!

Closing his left eye, he looked once more upon the man in the mirror. Lips cracked, skin burnt, hair lank, eye patch leering, his whole aspect a shadow of a shadow of the glory of his former self. There were only skeletal remains of Dazen Guile. He’d killed him. He’d killed everything good. And why? In order to extend an existence he hated?

Why would you kill an innocent to give another day to a person you despise? He had failed in every good thing he’d tried to do. He was loathsome. Everyone