You can’t play pretend forever.
Maybe like the bat in the birdcage, Gavriel had been waiting for dark, waiting to get out of the chains, drink Aidan’s blood, and escape. But when she showed up, he figured he could use them for a ride through daylight, so long as he seemed harmless enough to need saving. A chill crept up her spine.
I miss him, and the pain of it is a yawning chasm, one into which I yearn to let myself fall.
You whom I could not save Listen to me.” – CZESLAW MILOSZ, “Dedication.
We’ll get you another day,” Gavriel said, with such odd sincerity that she had to smile.
Three of them, dressed in silvery gray, on three horses – one black, one white, and the third red.
What does that mean?” The Thistlewitch smiled. “Time will tell. It always does.
Nothing can happen more beautiful than death – Walt Whitman.
Space is so dark that looking out at it confounds the brain. The more you stare at the vastness of it, at the hanging stars and the swirling galaxies, the more you start to notice how imprecise words like ‘dark’ and ‘black’ and ‘endless’ are. There are so many gradients of shadow, all of them terrifying to me. That’s why I keep the lights on.
Kaye wondered if everyone felt like there was a monster underneath their skin.
To family and Faerieland and pizza and stories and new beginnings and scheming great schemes. I can toast to that.
Little brother,” Balekin says without waiting to be acknowledged. He wears the chained cuffs on his wrists as though they are bracelets, as though they add to his status instead of marking him as a prisoner.
He had known only two rulers, both great and neither good. He did not know how to be any kind of King nor how to win, other than to be even more ruthless than they.
Some things exist whether you believe in them or not.
After spending months living in the orderly dorms of Wallingford, where they give you a Saturday detention if your room doesn’t pass semi-regular inspections, I feel the old conflicting sense of familiarity and disgust.
I could probably fake setting someone on fire... After last year I figured I’d better be prepared. – Sam.
That’s really paranoid,” I say admiringly. “I’m going with that.
I guess he’s used to suspicious people with crappy tempers. Or maybe I’ve never seemed as normal as I thought.
And to coddle your ego, I have made myself less. I have made myself small, I have kept my head down. But it wasn’t enough to make you leave Taryn and me alone, so I’m not going to do that anymore. “I am going to keep on defying you. I am going to shame you with my defiance.
We’re not going to be fine, Tana. We’re never going to be fine ever again.