The Atlas Paradox

Olympus was empty and so was hell. The devils were all here, in this house.

“Forcing something to exist that has no choice over the matter,” he said, “is an act of pure selfishness.”

Luckily, if people could be counted on for anything, it was a narcissism of sorts. Everyone was somewhere on the spectrum of self-obsession, and under the circumstances,

“We cannot control what the world chooses to do with knowledge. It is not ours to possess.”

Who lived without guilt? No one. What Libby could not live with was regret. She knew too much. That was the trick of it all, the knowing.

“Libby Rhodes is not your goodness, Tristan,” she cautioned. Steadying him, as if for disappointment. “She’s her own open flame.”

This was just the world. You trusted people, you loved them, you offered them the dignity of your time and the intimacy of your thoughts and the frailty of your hope and they either accepted it and cared for it or they rejected it and destroyed it and in the end, none of it was up to you.

Sequestering his dangerous parts, his appetite for power, was enough to trick sentience, but not life. A person was only ever himself. So much of what they became, who they were, was inseverable, irreversible. If to others that meant irredeemable, then so be it.

This was the danger in playing with a person’s conscious mind, because nobody was made from only strong materials.

mask of his virtues wouldn’t last. Not that this version of him was strictly evil and the other version good, or that any person could contain all of one inside themselves without the other.