An oath was, after all, a curse you placed on yourself.
Anger was like a disease to the soul, and no aspect of it was more contagious than violence.
Building a new life, a better life, will keep you looking forward, until, one day, you’ll find you’re no longer tempted to keep turning back toward everything you’ve lost.
The names we gave ourselves would always have more meaning than the labels others forced on us.
Her mother had told her that the only way to truly know someone was to fight them.
She repeated the thought until it became like armor only she could see.
You could only convince yourself something was prey until it turned around and showed you its teeth.
You may deny the fates, but they will not deny you.
In that moment, the past became the present, and the present the past, and it was just the two of them in the shadows of their city, the way it had always been. The way it should have been forever.
Breaking a bad cycle can sometimes break a system. But breaking a system will always break the cycle. It’s only a difference in the degree of certainty.
You still fight like a Fury.
It’s not always the truth that survives, but the stories we wish to believe. The legends lie. They smooth over imperfections to tell a good tale, or to instruct us how we should behave, or to assign glory to victors and shame those who falter.
With it, or upon it. It was what countless Spartan mothers had said to their sons and husbands as they handed them their shields before battle. For a society that loathed rhipsaspides – shield droppers who turned coward and threw them down to escape, or those men who lost them in the fight – there were two avenues for returning home: victorious, or carried home dead upon your shield.
The House of Perseus would rise again, and her name would be legend.
It felt as if he had been given to her by the gods, and she to him.
Ruby, what does the future look like?” Nico asked. “I can’t picture it. I try all the time, but I can’t imagine it. Jude said it looked like an open road just after a rainstorm.
Desperate times, I thought. When were they not though?
You were a safe place to hide my hope.
You are not what they tried to make you, or even what you tried to be for them.
Yeah, and I have a pain in my ass – and surprise, it’s you.