Her despair may have gone, but it had left its heaviness draped over her, thick and bleak.
Death is permanent,” said Less Ellen, “while flesh very much is not.
Feelings. Were. Stupid.
Magnets collide, and swiftly align.
When all else fails: explosions.
I have scuppies in my pocket and lust in my heart. Tonight’s the night.
There is intimacy in pain.
Karou was plagued by the notion that she wasn’t whole. She didn’t know what this meant, but it was a lifelong feeling, a sensation akin to having forgotten something. She’d tried describing it to Issa once, when she was a girl. “It’s like you’re standing in the kitchen, and you know you went in there for a reason, but you can’t think of what that reason is, no matter what.
An alien landing would unify the world, just like in a science fiction movie. But “angels” had the potential to splinter humanity into a thousand sharp shards.
Unlike those many dead because of him, he had life, and life wasn’t a default state – I am not dead, hence I must be alive – but a medium. For action, for effort. As long as he had life, who deserved it so little, he would use it, wield it, and do whatever he could in its name, even if it was not, was never, enough.
I have no strategy. I just want to skip all this and get to the part where he’s my boyfriend. Not to mention, you know, the part where he’s aware I exist.
She keeps her eyes closed but smiles, giving herself away. “Shush, I’m having a dream.” “It’s not a dream. It’s all real.” “How would you know? You’re not even in it.” She feels playful, heavy with happiness. With rightness. “I’m in all of them,” he says. “It’s where I live now.
Just because the power is mine, it doesn’t follow that all the choices are.
Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees.
Have I told you that the moment I first stepped into your dreams I knew there was something special about you?
I am a link in a chain.
Never before had time seemed so like currency, each moment a coin that could be well- or ill-spent, or even, if one wasn’t careful, wasted and lost.
There were two mysteries, actually: one old, one new. The old one opened his mind, but it was the new one that climbed inside, turned several circle, and settled in with a grunt – like a satisfied dragon in a new cozy lair. And there it would remain – the mystery, in his mind – exhaling enigma for years to come.
Oh, Astrae, we have kept you too safe if it is us that you fear.
He would recognize this later as the moment his center of gravity shifted: from being one of one – a pillar alone, apart – to being half of something that would fall if either side were cut away.