I value my integrity.’ The abbess smiled. ‘Which is why it has a price.’

Money doesn’t matter when you’re bleeding.

I know plenty. I’ve seen plenty. More than you can see from up here in your nice warm convent, paid for by all the people working down there in the city and out in the Corridor growing your food from the mud. What good is holy if it can’t feed and clothe itself? This is a place to turn children into old women, praying for the sins of the world and never seeing them.’ Some of the words were her father’s but she owned all the anger. ‘What good is holy if it watches my friend die – not because she did something wrong but because her blood wasn’t good enough?

There is, in the act of destruction, a beauty which we try to deny, and a joy which we cannot. Children build to knock down, and though we may grow around it, that need runs in us, deeper than our blood.

Violence is the language of destruction, flesh so often the subject, fragile, easy to break beyond repair, precious: what else would we burn to make the world take note?

Some truths are better left implied.

Think of the face of a childhood friend,” the Abbot says. “Hold that image in your mind and write a description of it, giving as much detail as you can marshal. “Now think of that face again. It has changed subtly in your memory. The words you used to describe that face has replaced some portion of your memory of it. The act of remembering is an act of retracing, and by doing so we erase and change the stencil.

The fight matters. But in the end it is never truly won or lost, and victory lies in discovering that we are bigger than it is.

Who will know our names in a hundred years? Who built the forest of stone upon the doorstep of Sweet Mercy? Change runs through everything. Perfection is the only constant.’

To sow knowing that you will not reap is an old kind of love, and love has always been the best key for unlocking the future.’

Moons might rise and fall, empires wax and wane, even the stars come and go, but there are constants too, and though the story of our kind is ever-changing it is also always the same.