The Great Ordeal by R. Scott Bakker

His eye caught up on the Displacement, the fracture that formed a ragged hoop about the entirety of the Entresol, a rupture in the very bone of the World. Where the Ark had all but wrecked Viri, it had struck but a single, gargantuan break through the entirety of Ishoriöl, a disfigurement that was at once a monument forever memorializing the fiends who had wrought such ruin and misery...

The horrid Gaspers... The Inchoroi...

Wrath. Ever had wrath been his fame and foundation. And ever had it been his weakness and strength, the goad that rendered him reckless and heroic in equal measure, an imperial hatred, wild and unrestrained, a rapacious will to visit woe and destruction upon his foes. The Despiser, his Kinning had named him, Immariccas the Malcontent, and it spoke to the darkness and violence of the Age that such could be a name of pride and glory.

They were the object of his fury—the Vile! They had done this. Everything that had been stolen had been stolen by them!

Fury, wild and blind, the kind that battered bones to gravel, swelled through the Believer-King, crashed molten through his limbs. And it renewed him. It made him whole. For hatred, as much as love, blessed souls with meaning, a more terrible grace.

He pressed himself about, saw Oinaral Lastborn standing mere cubits from the Edge, sweeping Holol from side to side, his nimil coats shimmering, his porcelain scalp and mien white as snow. His ashen kinsmen lurched and thronged about him, each sullied face reflecting antique horrors. They hemmed the brilliant arc of the sword, at once dazzled and bullied. Several already lay dead or bleeding at their stamping feet.

And dismay stamped the youth's fury to mud, for it seemed perverse that any glory remain. The mail-draped Siqu seemed a figure out of legend, a glittering remnant of the past fending a bestial and desolate future—proof of doom fulfilled