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1 " Right," Reilin said, and Ronoah looked up at him because his voice had changed again and suddenly it sounded clear and young, hushed with breathless anticipation. It made his own heart kick in a way that made him more excited than nauseous. The man rolled his broad shoulders in their sockets, gathering the reins in his hands. He was staring intent at the horizon, the blue canvas of the eastern sky, the rip and rupture of the sun. His face was unreadable, sort of like a question and sort of like an answer and sort of like a challenge and yet none of those things at all. "Off we go, into the glorious unknown. "
― Sienna Tristen , The Heretic's Guide to Homecoming: Book One: Theory
2 " Be clever. Be brave. Rebel against inertia. "
3 " There are two parts to growing as a person—well, no, there aren’t, there’s more, but you can simplify it down—the first is pinpointing problematic areas, the toxic parts, as you said, and cutting them out. You are immensely good at this,” he said, and it sounded a quite genuine compliment, “but it is only one half of the equation. The other part, once you have hollowed out all the offensive parts, is to replace them with healthy, constructive parts. New behaviours; new patterns of thought. Something to nurture those empty spaces back to whole. Because otherwise those holes stay open, and they beg to be filled, and they will collapse on themselves and cause even bigger problems than the things that once lived inside of them. And you, Ronoah? You are singularly lacking in imagination in this respect. You take half the bricks out of a veritable castle of behavioural instinct and you expect it to hold—you never put new ones back in. And I shall tell you why. “There is a difference between action and character. One you change on purpose, but the other, it changes clandestine, without your noticing, until one day you have to run to catch up with where it’s got to. There is a difference between making a mistake, and being a mistake,” he said, tapping Ronoah’s shoulder with one, and then two fingers. “Your problem, Ronoah, quite possibly one of the only problems I can offer that you have not already thought of, is that you are constantly conflating the two. To the everyday eye, character is immovable, immutable—how do you solve a problem when the problem is you? You cannot improve a broken system when the only tool you have with which to do the fixing-up is the system itself. You need new parts, better data—and it just so happens you are discarding a rather sizeable portion of the available data on yourself while you’re at it, which makes your calculations even more erroneous. Because, and get ready for this, it might come as a bit of a shock—because you are not actually broken. "
4 " The stars in me were still before," the man said, reaching again with one hand to smooth hit along the edge of the arch, caressing it. His gaze was soft, tender even. "But they have woken back up now, have begun to dance again across my galaxies. "
5 " Reilin only smiled, eyes ahead. Then he said something Ronoah never would have expected from him."You strain yourself trying to understand something before it is ready to reveal itself to you. Truth barely has time to set up her gauntlet before you are sprinting towards her prize. A piece of advice to you, Ronoah: wait it out. Enjoy the run. As I have already said, it is the unexpected things which impact us the most, and really, you do not want to know everything nearly as badly as you think you do. "
6 " We are all bigger than ourselves. We all contain multitudes. Mine are a tad more literal than yours," he allowed, tilting his head, "but yours exist nonetheless. You've said it yourself. You are Genoveffa. You are fire and hyenas and baboons and a thousand things besides. You are certainly complicated enough to be more than one thing at once, so let yourself be more. You have considered the bad, and that has given you the insight on what there is to fix - now for goodness' sakes, consider the good, and give yourself the tools to fix it. "
7 " The world is a high-maintenance creature, let me tell you: it whines for attention, it wants to be looked at. But when you turn those eyes of yours on it, with all their earnest concentration, their singular focus, the planet blushes beneath our feet. "
