Forbid a man from something and he craves it like his soul’s salvation, all the more so when that something is the source of incomparable riches.
She never would, either, unless she earned it, and she knew too well how humans earned wishes. Chiefly: hunting, graverobbing, and murder.
She was out there, a brief shimmer of radiance in the all-encompassing dark.
He held a goddess in his mind as one might cup a butterfly in one’s hands. Keeping it safe just long enough to set it free.
She had been innocent once, a little girl playing with feathers on the floor of a devil’s lair.
Let’s not forget gold. Kings wanted it. Alchemists promised it – had been promising it for centuries–, and if they achieved purity and perfection in anything, it was the purity and perfection of their failure to produce it.
People with destinies shouldn’t make plans.
The old one opened his mind, but it was the new one that climbed inside, turned several circles, and settled in with a grunt – like a satisfied dragon in a cozy new lair. And there it would remain – the.
There was no drawer she could put them in to give herself a rest, no hook she could tie their tethers to, to keep them in the world.
It was a new idea for him, that happiness wasn’t a mystical place to be reached or won, but something to carry doggedly with you through everything.
But just because the past is blood doesn’t mean the future must be, too.
There was a kind of euphoria, he had discovered, in nearly dying and then not.
Even after all these years, the thought of Isagol the Terrible stirred such a storm in him- of rancor and longing, desire and disgust, violence and even affection- all of it seething and bleeding and writhing, like a pit of rats eating one another alive.
Sathaz: The desire to possess that which can never be yours.
Well. We are all children in the dark, here in Weep.
She was all dark-eyed intensity. Something was lost in her. Karou saw it and mourned. War does that, nothing for it. Reality lays siege. Your framed portrait of life is smashed, and a new one thrust upon you. Its ugly, and you don’t even want to look at it, let alone hang it on the wall, but you have no choice.
The scenario made her hyperaware of her powerlessness. If, some day, the door didn’t open, she would be alone.
Lazlo’s chances came without warning, and when they did, he didn’t dither, and he didn’t stop to pack.
She might have lived her life in this effulgence of mountain light.
Maybe they had existed, all of them: Gabriel and God, Samyaza and his crew and all their enormous biting babies. Who knows? The Elioud dismissed the Book of Enoch as absurd, which was kind of the pot calling the kettle black, Eliza had always thought, but wasn’t that what religions did? Squint at one another and declare “My unprovable belief is better than your unprovable belief. Suck it.