Sunyi Dean

Something of vengeance I had tasted for the first time; as aromatic wine it seemed, on swallowing, warm and racy: its after-flavour, metallic and corroding, gave me a sensation as if I had been poisoned.

Reading was a shameful thing. We consume written knowledge, her aunts and uncles had said so many times. We consume and store and collect all forms of paper flesh as the Collector created us to do, clothed as we are in the skin of humankind. But we do not read, and we cannot write.

Mind eaters destroyed themselves with their own hunger, for the process of feeding consumed them even as it fed them. An ouroboros was the perfect representation of that bleak concept. Even if given Redemption, which enabled mind eaters to feast on books instead, the desire for mind eating never went away.