Perhaps she herself is a page that was torn from a story and folded into a star and thrown in the shadows to be forgotten.
Good and evil are a great deal more complex than a princess and a dragon, or a wolf and a scarlet-clad little girl. And is not the dragon the hero of his own story?
This is a typical Tsukiko response, one that does not truly answer the question. Isobel does not pry.
Because everything requires energy, we must put effort and energy into anything we wish to change.
I love you but I will not sit here and wait for the story to change – I’m going to make it change.
There are no longer simple tales with quests and beasts and happy endings. The quests lack clarity of goal or path. The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are. And there are never really endings, happy or otherwise.
Do you know why I gave my daughter permission to marry your father? Because she would have run off with him regardless. Follow your dreams, Bailey,” she says. “Be they Harvard or something else entirely. No matter what that father of yours says, or how loudly he might say it. He forgets that he was someone’s dream once, himself.
The beasts take different forms and are difficult to recognize for what they are.
My train was late that day. the day I saw you drop your notebook. Had it been on schedule we never would have met. Maybe we were never meant to.
It bothers him most at times like this, in the bottom of the brandy bottle and the quiet of the night.
There are girls in feathered costumes who spin at various heights, suspended by ribbons that they can manipulate. Marionettes that control their own strings.
A language you cannot speak yourself is not necessarily a god-awful mess.
It is a flowing waterfall of alchemical and astrological symbols, ancient marks for planets and elements all emblazoned in black ink upon her fair skin.
The snow-white angel alone remains, hovering over Tara Burgess’s fresh grave, holding a single black rose in one hand. She does not move, does not even bat an eyelash. Her powdered face stays frozen in sorrow. The increasing rain pulls stray feathers from her wings and pins them to the mud below.
The circus left him behind, sailing forth, and yet he cannot turn away from the shore.
As you walk farther into the room it becomes a field of endless streetlamps, the stripes repeating in fractal patterns, over and over and over.
Sharing secrets, real secrets, important ones, with even one other person, will change them.
You may tell a tale that takes up residence in someone’s soul, becomes their blood and self and purpose. That tale will move them and drive them and who knows what they might do because of it, because of your words. That is your role, your gift. Your sister may be able to see the future, but you yourself can shape it, boy. Do not forget that.” He takes another sip of his wine. “There are many kinds of magic, after all.
Is it the way it is in the book? He aches to know but he also suspects real places are never properly captured in words. There is always more.
And so Time goes on as it should and events that were once fated to happen are left instead to chance, and Chance never falls in love with anything for long.