And Esme remembered in a rush – the wolfsong, the haunting, lyrical spirals of it in the dawn quiet and the feeling of euphoria that had attended it. Even in recollection the howling uplifted her like the crescendo at the end of a symphony and made her heartbeat quicken.
The senses have their limits, and we can never know how short they fall in revealing to us the truth of a vision, a scent, a sound.
You can be on the same side and have different ideas.
The goddess of assassins has tasted my blood, he thought, and he wondered if she liked it, and wanted more.
They fell into the stars in a rush of air and ether. They breathed each other’s breath. They had never been this close. It was all velocity and dream physics – no more need to stand or lean or fly, but only fall. They were both already fallen. They would never finish falling. The universe was endless, and love had its own logic. Their bodies curved together, pressed, and found their perfect fit.
Kitchens and women were both subjects that simply did not intrigue him.
The night felt very long, but it ended as all nights do.
His soul had flown on ahead of his body and left it stranded.
If you can kill it, or it can kill you, it’s real.
The monks kept a sharp eye on him, determined to keep him free of sin – and of joy, which, if not explicitly a sin, at least clears a path to it.
This, he never doubted, was magic.
And what’s the point of being young if you can’t ignore all advice?” Master.
Inside a mist, inside a dream, a young man and woman were remade.
He moved through his mind with the assuredness of an explorer and the grace of a poet.
There was always, among them, such a stew of envy and longing. They hated the humans, but they also wanted to be them. They wanted to punish them, and they wanted to be embraced by them. To be accepted, honored, loved, like someone’s child. And since they couldn’t have any of it, it all took the form of spite. Anyone who has ever been excluded can understand what they felt, and no one has ever been quite so excluded as they.
You’ve got to have, like, a lentil for a soul to hate wiener dogs.
It’s not easy having a paradox at the core of one’s own being.
She’d poured so much of herself into keeping it buried, sometimes it felt like any energy she might have had for joy or love or light went there instead. You only had so much to give.
Now more than ever she struck him like a fairy in a tale – a haunted one with shadowed eyes and a sting like a scorpion.
He listened like a cactus drinks the rain.