How do you say I’m sorry your father didn’t love you enough to your own dad?
It felt like we were claiming the world for ourselves and our lives as our own.
Don’t fight the pain, that’s the key, my grandfather says. It’s telling you something. Welcome it, let it speak to you. The pain says: Hello, I am not other than you; I am of the hollow, but I am you also.
Even ymbrynes can’t touch them. In the stories, only special adepts called librarians can see and handle them – and a librarian hasn’t been born for a thousand years. If the library exists, all Jack would find there are empty shelves.
It was strange to think that one day I might have my own stack of yellowed photos to show skeptical grandchildren – and my own fantastic stories to share.
They were natural storytellers and beautiful singers; innately charming people who treated us like long-lost cousins.
In a cruel twist of irony, they achieved the immortality they’d been seeking. It’s believed that the hollows can live thousands of years, but it is a life of constant physical torment, of humiliating debasement – feeding on stray animals, living in isolation – and of insatiable hunger for the flesh of their former kin, because our blood is their only hope for salvation. If a hollow gorges itself on enough peculiars, it becomes a wight.
There were too many things to be terrified of, a hundred horror scenarios all vying for attention in my brain.
More fantastic still were his stories about life in the Welsh children’s home. It was an enchanted place, he said, designed to keep kids safe from the monsters, on an island where the sun shined every day and nobody ever got sick or died. Everyone lived together in a big house that was protected by a wise old bird – or so the story went. As I got older, though, I began to have doubts.
I’d always known I was strange. I never dreamed I was peculiar.
Only birds can manipulate time. Therefore, all time manipulators must be able to take the form of a bird.
Even under ordinary circumstances, I still might find a way to live an extraordinary life.
Doubt is the pinprick in the life raft.” She stepped close and we hugged. I could feel her trembling ever so slightly. She wasn’t bulletproof. I knew then that my shaky faith in myself was starting to dig a hole in hers, and Emma’s confidence was what held everything together. It was the life raft.
From the mouths of our elders comes a fountain of wisdom.
I suppose. Though I imagine we’re killing ourselves right now in all manner of ways that’ll seem insane to people in the future.
I love sad stories,” said Enoch. “Especially ones where princesses get eaten by dragons and everyone dies in the end.
It’s not that nothing else is possible, but nothing else was nurtured.
I wouldn’t leave her behind for anything. And not because I was noble or brave or chivalrous. I’m not any of those things. I was afraid that leaving her behind would rip me in half. And.
It was unconscious, immobilized, totally vulnerable. It would’ve been easy to climb onto the ice and drive the point of an icicle into the hollow’s skull – and if anyone else had known it was here, I’m sure they would’ve done just that. But something stopped me. It was no threat to anyone now, this creature.
Grandpa had told him some of the same stories when he was a kid, and they weren’t lies, exactly, but exaggerated versions of the truth – because the story of Grandpa Portman’s childhood wasn’t a fairy tale at all. It was a horror story.