You know how some people were absolutely never children, but just came from a catalog fully grown, while other people you don’t even have to squint to imagine them charging down the stairs on Christmas morning in superhero pajamas? Mik’s the latter. It’s not that he’s “boyish,” though I guess he is a little – but only a little – it’s just that there’s something direct and real and electric and pure that hasn’t been lost, the intense, undiluted emotion of childhood. Most people lose it.
Our priestesses have always taught that divinity, by virtue of its great power, must encompass both beauty and terror.
Her lips were still moving, whispering the same words over and over. “They were all I could carry. They were all I could carry.
It wasn’t even an alternate version of his life. He hadn’t gone back in time and done everything differently to get to this place. It turned out that sometimes it’s enough to start doing things differently now.
Many a choice is made in this way: by pretending it makes itself. And many a fate is decided by those who cannot decide.
The mind is good at hiding things, but there’s something it cannot do: It can’t erase. It can only conceal, and concealed things are not gone. They rot. They fester, they leak poisons. They ache and stink. They hiss like serpents in tall grass.
The youth are the spoils of war.
Every mind is a world of its own.
The terror-the terror, the terror-lingered, and there was something else. It came with the dream, every time, and didn’t recede with it but stayed like something a tide had washed in. Something awful-a rank leviathan corpse left to rot on the shore of her mind. It was remorse. But god, that was too bloodless a word for it,. This feeling the dream left her with, it was knives of panic and horror resting bright atop a red and meaty wound-fester of guilt.
For fifteen years, the people of Weep had lived with the certainty that the monsters were dead, and Eril-Fane had lived with the burden of it.
Some kinds of misery make you hate the world, but some kinds make you hate yourself, and – butter and cheese not withstanding – Neve had no question that Spear was the latter.
That was what had finally broken through her blindness. Her father had saved his people and destroyed himself. As strong as he looked, inside he was a ruin, or perhaps a funeral pyre, like the Cusp- only instead of melted bones of ijji, he was made up of the skeletons of babies and children, including, as he had always believed, his own child: her. This was his remorse.
Lazlo couldn’t have belonged at the library more truly if he were a book himself.
She may have been the one whose name meant music, but his sounded like it. Saying it made her want to sing it, to lean out a window and call him home. To whisper it in the dark.
There was no echo, no reverberation. If anything the room ate sound. It swallowed her voice, her words, and her eternal, inadequate apology. But not her memories. She would never be rid of those.
The end of wondering, he thought, but not of wonder.
His smiles had been pickled things, as though they’d been preserved in vinegar on some earlier occasion, to be pulled out to act as garnish to his artfully plated expressions.
Even if it was just walls and a roof with papers inside, it had bewitched him, and drawn him in, and given him everything he needed to become himself.
This wasn’t a person, Zuzana thought, this was greed wearing skin.
Here was the radical notion that you might help someone simply because they needed it.