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comparativelysuperlative · 2 months

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What was the book? With the Definitely Real Banishment

Spoilers (obviously) but it's the Lightbringer series. That villain was pretty good! The word-by-word writing is fine! The plot is, for several books' worth, aimed at being Very Generic Fantasy (for reasons that will make sense later). Incoming long post about its philosophy, with even more spoilers.

It's not often that I read a book and immediately go "I can tell you what kind of middle school this author went to." In this case, it was drawing on the author's experience of exactly the theology I grew up with, which was almost eerie.

(I read book one years and years ago, and didn't retain much other than "cool magic system." Probably everything in this post is true about book one as well, but I wouldn't know.)

Google will tell you that the series gets gradually very Christian, to the point where the climax of the last book contains a sermon. But it's more specific than that. These books scream "Protestant, American, classically educated, does not travel internationally very often, male, straight, probably white, the kind of person who would vote straight-ticket Republican until that meant Trump at which point all bets are off." I did not bother confirming most of those. They're just obvious.

The loudest part--to me at least--was the "classically educated." (If you're not familiar, it's this thing.) The series would mention quotes from fantasy medieval Catholics or fantasy ancient Greeks or whatever, and I'd recognize the quotes or the names because they'd be real people I ran across in school. Sure enough, author went to Hillsdale.

Lightbringer is interesting for having an actual vision of a conservative society, not just about hating the right/wrong people. Not being on that team anymore I don't actually like this vision very much, but compared to current conservatives, credit for having one at all.

Differences between people obviously don't affect your value as a person, they just might make it easier or harder or mean you have to specialize differently to accomplish as much For The Group.

(That opinion makes perfect sense for characters in an elite military unit/training for that unit. But that context is mostly specific to book two, and the philosophy really isn't.)

This applies to everything. Physical condition, including strength/weight/gender. Color-blindness. Superpowers. Being straight. (I'm genuinely not sure if that part was intentional. Characters kept getting distracted at terrible times, and the narration outside their head sounded exactly the same as when someone can't run a mile without Trying Very Hard.)

It does not matter whether your mental illness turns out to be literally demons in your head. Either way you've still got to either work through it or specialize around it.

Tradition matters, even when we don't understand the reason behind it.

If you happen to be in a fantasy book and have access to magic, consorting with demons is evil but fancy physics is fine. You can just BET this author got into fights with other Christians about whether Harry Potter was anti-Jesus.

"Irredeemably bad" isn't really a thing. "Not in fact going to be redeemed" is, but it's worth trying to show mercy if you have the chance. If you don't have the chance, kill 'em. Don't enjoy it, though.

Forgiving people for actually-bad things is hard, can't just go "idk, they're good guys now," but it's also important. (I do think this is underrepresented in secular fiction, where it's either depicted as "how could you work with THEM" or "come on, get over it already and team up against the whatever.")

One of the big reveals at the end is "the Christian God is real." The answer to the problem of evil is indeed the popular answer in the denominations I grew up with. Human choices something something mumble free will.

Very incrementalist. You do as much good as you can as fast as you can, but obviously without overthrowing the entire order or anything. Only evil opportunists would want to do that. Yes, even if the existing order is corrupt all the way through.

Speaking of which, you know that organization/political entity claiming to represent God? Corrupt all the way through. God is more personal than that. Protestantism!

Personal morality matters. Your leaders absolutely must be good people, or at least trying to be, or you're screwed.

Personal morality matters. It is safe to assume you'll end up as exactly what your peers expect of you, so pick good peers.

A man should be faithful to one (1) wife. Viewpoint characters speedrun figuring out the philosophy behind this.

(IMO monogamy was a legitimate human rights win by early Christianity, relative to what came before, and I think something similar applies in this setting. But since the real-life alternatives today are so much better than women being property, giving this a lot of screen time sounded like the book is fishing very hard for things historical Christianity did right.)

Also, once you are married you Are Married. It's not that changing that would be unthinkable, just that if you do treat it as an option you're obviously doing it wrong.

Gay people don't exist. Any variety of non-straight, really. Nobody says that it should be that way. It just doesn't come up. Characters are written in enough detail that I can tell you how they'd react if you asked them, and it's mostly the "not my business" + "prefer not to think about it" kind of low-grade homophobia. A few would be explicitly okay with it. But it does not come up. If there were a gay relationship depicted, I'd expect it to be "coincidentally" problematic in some other way.

(I guess there's that one slaver-antagonist whose sexuality is just "sadist." Yeah, one might call that problematic.)

Practically dripping with Great Man Theory of History. There's a scene where the protagonist has a self-affirming/emotional moment about not relying on his family name and meritoriously earning his first kingdom. This is played completely straight.

Don't worry, he uses it for good. At least as much good as he can without overthrowing the existing order etc.

If there are end times prophecies, they might well be true but you can't trust any specific interpretation so it's wiser to just do your best without reference to the prophecy. (This is an interesting take! And not heresy but also not common! I bet the author's reacting against some interesting strains of fundamentalism there.)

A cool idea where angels and demons can be anywhere in any world at any time in history, but are very reluctant to actually do that because they can't pick the same time twice. You can just tell it's the author's Christianity headcanon.

You win by doing your best and having faith in God. The villains are very much a sideshow.

(I think if everyone followed this book's philosophy more it would be a mostly bad thing. Let's not do that.)

(But wow, I wish modern conservatives were only this bad.)

It probably sounds like I didn't like this series. But I did read five doorstoppers' worth. This post is just about the opinions, and the opinions sucked.

Anyway. This has to be on purpose, right, and 10 or 15 years ago I was pretty much the target audience for this. Guess I'm old.

I used to explicitly think "I'm Christian, but atheist fiction is more interesting," and this book is the kind of thing that...tries...to counter that. Fails, because resolving major conflicts with divine intervention is tricky to make interesting. But you'll see why it's going for Every Other Book, But Christian. (Also, the amount of sex in these books is much higher than you might think, given everything. I wish I knew less about what body types the author is attracted to.)

Anyway, I can't really say I would recommend it. But if you're interested in what would happen if Card or Sanderson tried to be Evangelical Lewis for adults, Lightbringer isn't bad.

#brent weeks #the black prism #lightbringer series

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thesevro · 4 months

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[cassius bellona] us, and now

[HEAVY LIGHTBRINGER SPOILERS BELOW THE CUT] Cassius Bellona/Male Reader Word count: 3.8K words

A depiction of what it would be like to be Cassius's husband. What it would mean to go through what happens to him as the man who married him. Explicitly MLM. In part, you can imagine that Darrow is the husband in reference here.

Hermes: A spinal implant enabled by the technology of the Greens and Yellows of the Rising, empowering the user with the capacity to move at 2 trillion times the speed of light.

—

YOU GRAB HIM before he can leave, the metal in your spine triggering the muscles in your body fast. You reach for him, his arm in your grasp. He turns as you tug at him. Cassius meets your eyes with a nonplussed smile already coming to his face, always your man of golden smiles though utterly confused. His teeth end up meeting yours as you lean forward. The muscles and bones in your jaw clack together with his. You cannot hide your desperation, your fear. Your mouth is harsh as it touches his. Needy. For a moment he only stands there as if he can sense all that you wish to say to keep him here, with you. But you are loyal to him and will let him be loyal to himself in making this choice.

You feel the breath he steals from the air, from you as he inhales sharply in surprise. Then his hands clasp your body and bruise your waist as he drags you in close. You tip backward on your heels as his other hand comes to the middle of the muscles in your back and drag you from your center of gravity. You shiver at the feel of the tips of his fingers digging into the nape of your neck. He anchors you on your feet, because without the hold of his hands and the strength of his arms around you you would already be on the floor with him. You are not afraid to cling to him. You know you will have to let him go.

Your lips part to take a breath but Cassius does not let you. He searches for your mouth in those nanoseconds and catches the open part of your lips. His breathing is yours. Your fingers find his curls, rough now with oil and dust but still you will remember that this is him, that this is the man the universe let return to you after a childhood and ten years of wishing to be a man who could bask in his love. A war had come in between. Your blade has touched his throat before. His hands have flowed through movements made to kill you in the past. But those minutes of hatred, all that emptiness, are nothing for the moments that have been before this, and the full ache of love that you have for him now.

His bottom lip is insistent. He drives his mouth into yours as if it would let him take more of you in, let your breaths replace the oxygen he needs. His head tilts. Mouth moves over yours. You let yourself be weak. Let yourself indulge in sharing this love.

This is the only time Cassius has allowed himself to be greedy in asking for your love. With his chest to yours his heartbeat encompasses every other sense. The pounding rhythm of his heart matches all else in this moment—the desperation of your mouth on his, the fingers you dig into his shoulders.

You allow yourself one last nudge of your bottom lip to his. Every inch of your mouth meets every nanometer of his, raw from the kiss and chapped from the blistering dust outside. For one final breath, you bask in and fall deeply into the scent of him, the raw musk of his perspiring skin, the tones of lavender in his hair and the heady scent of sandalwood in the shirt beneath his armor. You send out a promise to the worlds. Let this just be another time you get to breathe him in. There will be more.

You pull away from him. Your eyes remain closed, but already you hear his lashes flutter as he opens his eyes.

“Why are you crying?” he murmurs in a throaty voice. “Is the man I love so disgusted by my kisses?”

Your laughter is pained. Cut short as the fear grips you again.

The fear you rip away from you like a physical thing. You will savor Cassius as he is in this moment, not as what he could be in the future that follows. Here, now, you are his, and he is yours.

Your eyes open as his forehead comes to yours. You drink him in. You have no wishes, no words, no protests—only so much love for the man you’ve hidden and held love for all your life.

With his gaze bearing yours, he makes a promise to you. “I will return to you, my love. My lover. My (Name). Do not be afraid for me, for I am only a man of love for you.”

Your heartbeat echoes against his chest. You feel a whisper coming through as your words and strengthen your voice. There can only be strength in the truth you will give him. “I love you, Cassius.”

He makes a noise of pain. As if he can sense that there will be too much coming between the next time he and you get to share these words. “And I, you, (Name). I love you.”

Your hands linger, linked together, as he leaves. The look you share shows a promise.

And even with all the years you had full of love for him, all the time in between, all the words shared, the burdens passed between you, the wounds stitched by the hands of the other, the hours spent trading stories and living the parts you failed to wander through together in each other’s lives, the worlds move on, move forward, and shatter his promise. The worlds continue without him.

Even with your eyes closed against the glow of the holo, the image burns across your retinas, and you know that you are more a ghost than he is now. You trigger Hermes and leap backward.

—

LYRIA, an outsider's perspective on how Cassius's husband reacted to his death

“Lyria, twelve spidervenom rounds,” Sevro orders then takes off after (Name). “Volga!”

Volga looks at me. I don’t understand Sevro’s panic. Then the clatter of armor shatters our confusion. Volga bolts from her chair.

“Volga!” Sevro calls again. Something slams into the wall in the adjacent hallway. I rush to the weapons room. Can’t see for the tears. Instinct guides me. All the things Cassius taught me through, helped me learn, maneuver my hands and lead my eyes.

He can’t be dead. The Lune would never be able to manage. But there he hung, limp and lifeless on our screen. The warmth of him has left the worlds.

A scream from the hangar grips me. I sprint down the halls, following the noise. Grunts and desperate shouts bounce off the wall of Cassius’s ship.

“Let me go! I need to get him back!” (Name) screams, metal boots slamming into the floor. “I need to get him back!”

Sevro jerks against his friend as (Name) pulls and strains. The veins in Sevro’s neck pop from his skin. Volga’s eyes are wide with focus, desperation. She understands, as I only just did, what it would mean to let (Name) leave this ship. He’d get himself killed trying to reach the Lune’s moonbreaker, if not mowed down by Lunese soldiers who’d cry with laughter at the chance to have the Marooner’s head.

He has been a friend to Volga and me from the start. Golden goodness, his heart worse in its purity even compared to Cassius’s. We won’t let him go. I don’t think he knows it yet. For (Name), the logic in his actions clicks perfectly like pieces in a puzzle.

“You need to let me go. Sevro!” His face is wet. Tear tracks slide from (Name)’s cheeks to his chin. “Please! You need to let me get him back. We can’t leave him there!”

Sevro and (Name) lock eyes. (Name) reels away from him, almost shocked by the grim set to his best friend’s expression. He pants with exertion worth fighting against a warlord of the Rising and a battle-hardened Obsidian. He pulls again. Sevro and Volga are lifted clean off their feet, but Sevro hauls him down with a hard grunt. (Name)’s knees buckle. His eyes fall on the floor. Then he turns and meets Volga’s gaze. I hear Volga gasp.

“Volga! Volga, you need to let me go,” he says, screaming again as he begins to recognize that they won’t let him leave. “They killed my husband, Volga, please! Let me get him back!”

Volga breaks open, and whether she knows it or not her grip on him loosens. (Name) launches forward, leaving Volga at the entrance to the hall. Sevro hangs on, yelling at (Name).

“Stop it (Name)!” he yells. “You’ll get yourself killed up there, you bloodydamn bastard!”

Sevro plants his feet, heels practically slamming into the floor. (Name) strains against him. A broken cry claws through the air, leaving (Name) as he pulls and pulls against Sevro. He drags Sevro forward three meters at a time, practically glitching before my eyes as he activates Hermes again and again. Volga sprints. I move faster than her, for once. Finally at the hall, I leap towards them, momentum carrying me past Volga.

I drive the syringe into the back of (Name)’s neck. Holding the needle pushing enough poison to knock four griffins unconscious into his bloodstream. He barely even seems to feel it, still swimming against mine and Sevro’s tide as he lurches toward the exit of the Archimedes.

Then his arm goes limp in Sevro’s hold. Sevro clings tighter to him, arms around the front of his torso. (Name)’s eyes flutter. Sevro watches the floor as his best friend slowly slumps into his arms. Then he falls to the floor with (Name)’s body.

Sevro cradles (Name)’s head, his forehead coming to the back of his neck. He holds the man to his body. They’re so close, in mind and soul, that I know Sevro feels just as much of (Name)’s pain as he feels his own for Cassius’s death. Sevro clears his throat.

“Set coordinates for Sungrave. We need to get Darrow,” he says, taking charge. His eyes are dead. We say nothing of the man who just died in the skies above us.

I head to the cockpit to pilot Cassius’s ship.

—

There are cracks in you that grow further fissured on the day his ship passes through your scanners. The three in your party are men of silence. You more than the two standing next to you as you await boarding permission. There is nothing to share in words. Only in grief.

Your body remains in another time, in other moments, with each step you take through the ship. You smell the coffee Cassius likes from the percolator in the sparse kitchen area. The machine has been dead for days. All you can remember are his hands turning the knobs, grinding coffee, guiding you through a technique you cannot for the life of you remember. You brace yourself on the counter as you approach the coffeemaker, nearly driven to your knees at the pull of memory and in knowing that you will never share another morning, another smile, another breath with him. He is but a memory, even if he was everything to you.

His fingerprints remain on the percolator. Your own fingers trace over them, sharing a final touch that will be lost to the eternities ahead because he is dead.

Darrow and Sevro let you take your time. In reality, you are simply too familiar with yourself. You cannot handle the other body that lies aboard the ship.

The Lune had mangled him. Torn your golden boy to pieces. Hanged him from a rope and let his body sway. You cannot imagine the heavy flop of his corpse as they cut the body from the rope to bring it here.

You do not want to remember him as that dead body. He was Cassius Bellona for his soul. His body has left the worlds, but the man he was will remain with you.

For an hour, you sit in his bedroom. You don’t visit the holos saved on the ship. Those recordings are only digital, borderline fakes of the actual memory of being with him. You will only be an outsider watching those moments in the bedroom, looking in through holographic glass as you kiss your husband, write a story for him while he rests with his head on your chest. You will have to bear witness to a life you will never live again because your husband is dead.

There are photos on the wall. Printed versions, not holographic renditions. Slowly, you take your eyes off the floor and bring your gaze to the pictures. A broken sob leaves you.

He is so young in the picture. The golden boy you became brother and best friend to and wholeheartedly bloom with love for. And so are you. The weight of war and broken planets does not hang in your laughing eyes. In his, you are his planet, his universe. The affection in his bright eyes leaves you breathless, as if he were standing before you now, gazing at you with that same love. Across time, across the worlds, past his death, his love remains.

You remember asking about this picture. Cassius told you this was one of his favorites.

“I can’t believe you couldn’t tell then,” he said. “You were much like a brother to me, sure. But I loved you for more than that.” He gesticulated wildly at the photo. “Bloodydamn, imagine that! I was looking at you this way for an entire year!”

You also recall the lovely jest he’d made after to let you slip his hand in your underwear. “My most favorite is the one where I have you reaching climax as I ride you.”

Your body leads where your mind cannot. You come close to the pictures, brushing your fingers over the image of your beautiful husband in his youth. It comes to you as instinct, not as a memory. Your fingers move from his chin to his cheek. If he were here now, he would tilt his head into your palm as you reached to cradle his cheek. And for him, that too would be instinct.

“We were supposed to grow old together,” you murmur to the boys in the picture. “We’re only thirty-four, Cassius.” The sob in your chest punches through your throat. Warmth floods down your cheeks as you begin to cry. “I wanted to have you until a hundred. You promised me a hundred and forty three. Impossible bastard.

“Gods, you promised.” Your knees give out and you hit the ground, hard. And in his bedroom, where he and you once shared love with one another as married men, you unleash your grief. Your sobs leave you as screams.

—

Your best friend sits with his arms propped on his knees at the door to the room Cassius’s body is held in. He leans on the wall, eyes opening as your footsteps fill the room. There is more weight to him now, more even than when he received news of Pax’s kidnapping or Virginia’s capture. You cannot imagine his burden, what the weight of all of his combined grief would feel like. He stands as you enter.

Darrow doesn’t move towards you. He knows that to touch you would invite hell upon himself. But he is wrong. You reach for him, and he must see something on your face, something more than the grief, something that only he and you share. He moves to you and grips you in a hard embrace. And the tears leave you to stain the home of your lone beloved with your pain once again.

“I—” There is no sense to you. Could there ever even be now, when your husband is gone? “I shouldn’t have let him go. I was right there. I let him go. I let him leave. It's all my fault.”

Darrow stops you before you can continue to blame yourself. He holds you tight against him.

“(Name),” your best friend, your brother in everything but blood; ArchImperator of the Republic you have given your life to; the man whose son you are third-in-line as godfather to speaks, more solemn than you have ever seen him, “This is not your fault.”

You hope he can promise you that.

—

He lies there on the cold metal. His eyes are closed. And he is dead. Reds like Lyria or your regular Gray would not be able to smell it. But you know Cassius’s smell, and you know what rot tastes like in your nostrils. It is faint. But it comes from him. You swallow the vomit that races up your throat.

“I’ll leave you two be,” Darrow murmurs from behind you, speaking as if Cassius is still alive. He squeezes your hip, hand lingering. You do not ask him to stay. And he understands there are conversations only you and Cassius should share.

Even when he has left, you do not break. Seeing Cassius again, even in death, has brought you clarity, though you cannot comprehend it.

You approach him. Part of you expects him to bolt upright on the table and greet you with a smile. You lurch forward, expectant. But his lips are blue now. Being sent straight into the sun to burn would hurt so much less than this.

“Cassius,” you murmur. Your voice reaches only your ears. A dead body does not hear.

The feel of him is the same, just a little bit heavier as you grip his hand. He is cold. Limp. Still his fingers are as rough as you remember, hardened by years of wielding the blade he was born to be and manipulate. But to you, these hands held nothing but all the love you’ve felt in your life as his husband.

“You wouldn’t let me apologize, wouldn’t you?” If you were here. “So… so I won’t. In fact, this choice you made let you be loyal to who you are. Isn’t that it, Cassius? You’ve always been true to yourself. We called you a turncloak, two-faced, but everything you did, everything you said, was always honest. You’ve never lied to us. I’ll always be grateful for that.” When he helped kill Octavia, the Sovereign he swore his life to, he did it not because of Darrow’s influence or Virginia’s, but because he felt that it was right—that he would not only be avenging those in his family of Bellona who had been murdered by that Sovereign, but that he would be owning up to becoming a part of what is right. To most, he is the Betrayer. He destroyed figureheads of the Society and the Rising and knocked both off their feet. Though what most cannot comprehend is that Cassius was simply following what he thought was right. He believed Octavia could provide stability to the people, so he killed Ares. She did not, and so he killed her. All Cassius has ever done, he did in the name of honor. Through the grief in your eyes, you look at him with utter pride.

“My love. I wish you didn’t have to leave. You haven’t even met Pax or Sevro’s daughters yet.” You brush a thumb over the angular apple of his cheek. He is cold beneath your fingers. “We haven’t had our own children. There are so many things we weren’t able to do. We had so much ahead of us, and I can’t help but think that you abandoned me for the rest of it.”

Cassius lived a life of honor. Though he could not honor you and your dreams, the life you could see for the two of you as husbands, he died in the name of being true to what is right. That is why he spoke with Lysander. That is why he died for it.

In life and in death, you could not love him more.

“What did you say to him before you died?” you murmur, more to yourself. Maybe part of you has begun to accept that he is dead, and that none of your questions will be answered until you meet him again, somewhere else, at some other time. “I wonder. What did he tell you? What made Lysander feel that hanging the man who raised him for half his life would be right?

“Can I kill him, Cassius?” Would that avenge Cassius? Would it make losing your husband right? If it would, and if you knew for concrete fact it would, you’d put your blade in Lysander in a heartbeat. “He killed you. His brother. My husband. Would he even be able to work with us? Would he be able to see reason, as you did?

“Gods, I hate you. You gave your life to honor. I wish you could have given it to me.” You look away from him for the first time. “I imagined a quieter death for us, Cassius. Our children and Sevro’s and Victra’s and Darrow’s and Virginia’s would stand before Uncle Cassius’s bedside someplace in the woods on Mars, crying because they know that the best man they’ll ever know needs to go. Darrow would cry the hardest and I would have to be the one to pull him away from you. Then I and our children would carry you to our ship and send you to the sun in your last act of honor. Somehow, I would follow soon after.” You wish you could have lived the fullness of that life. Of being a father alongside Cassius and an uncle to the children of your best friends. You wish you could cherish mornings finally off a ship, finally sharing his favorite coffee with him amongst tall trees with grass between your toes, not the metal floor of a warship. To hear his jokes come sincerely as part of this scenery of peace, not with the tense edge of a man afraid of the death that would come for him aboard a ship heading to war or in a cell or on the field amongst soldiers desperate for a kill. You wonder what it would be like to laugh with him in peace, without his jests being a balm to your fear of losing one another in the war.

“I’ve never known peace with you, Cassius.” You nearly break all over again at the thought. But there is gratitude to be found in the life you had with him, a life rife with war yet made full by him. “And yet I’ve known you afraid, hateful, desperate, joyful, happy, content, peaceful. Hah. Honorable." You let yourself laugh for one last time with him. “I’ve known every side of you in war. Though we were never married in a time of peace, I still got to love every part of you.

“Thank you for that.” You press a kiss to his lips. To his cheek. To both his closed eyes. Then to his forehead, where the crest of everything that made him your beautiful husband used to reside. You kiss the golden band on his finger, the one thing that connected you to him as he died. It is your last act of love before you honor him with a Sundeath on your return to Mars. There will be no grave for you to visit. But a light to look up to, until the end of your own days. “I love you, Cassius.”

Fin.

Comment to mourn with me bro AKAKJAKJA I've been mourning since August... Thoughts and prayers for Cassius as well as your own thoughts on how I wrote this are very important to me les go bro 💌 Been rereading Light Bringer to pregame for Red God. Might we see Darrow ask Lysander about Cassius's last words while they fight yada yada? I even hashed out an entire playlist for that scene so I can play all these sad songs while he dies as such listen to "Skyfall" by Adele or the orchestral cover of "Salvatore" by Lana del Ray when you read that scene. This series has been with me since I was 10. I'm shittin' tears bro now your boy is in uni... Ronan out

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