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Being nice was nice. Being nasty got shit done.
Book characters were dangerously attractive in the safest way. You didn’t even know what they looked like, but you knew you liked it.
Reading a book was like meeting someone for the first time. You don’t know if you will love them or hate them enough to learn every detail, or skim the surface never to know their depths.
Rae wanted characters to have tormented backstories, she just wished they wouldn’t be annoying about it. The Emperor was Rae’s favourite character of all time because he never brooded over his dark past. He used his unholy powers and enormous sword to slaughter his enemies, then moved on.
Villainous characters had epic highs, epic lows, and epic loves. The Emperor loved like an apocalypse. In real life, people let you go. That was why people longed for the love from stories, love that felt more real than real love.
All great villains almost got redeemed, but instead plunged deeper into evil.
Is truth stone, or is it water? If enough people walk through a world in their imaginations, a path forms. What’s reality, except something that really affects us? If enough people believe in something, doesn’t it become real?”
Finding a favourite character was discovering a soul made of words that spoke to your own. He never held back and he never gave up. He was her rage unleashed. She didn’t love the Emperor despite his sins, she loved him for his sins.
Key’s face suggested no dramatics, only casual good humour, with an easy grin, ironic eyebrows and cheekbones so angled they were almost hexagons. His eyes were grey, not the emerald green or summer-sky blue of a main character, and his nose was too long for symmetry. He looked about twenty, Rae’s age and several years younger than Emer. He had black hair, but not a menacing mane of midnight. Chopped-uneven locks sprang straight from his head with the ends flipping down as if he were a cheery goth daffodil. He had a lean and restless look, and a general air of being charismatically
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A long-ago teacher had told Rae stories were created by villains. Their desires and evil deeds ignited the plot, while the hero only wanted to stop them. At least to begin with, villains were in charge.
“I’m a treacherous, power-hungry bitch, and honestly? It feels amazing. Don’t listen to stories encouraging you to be good, telling you to shine in a filthy world and patiently endure suffering. Screw suffering. It’s too hard to be good. Do the easy thing. Do the evil thing. Grasp whatever you desire in your greedy bloodstained hands.”
An anti-hero was just a villain with good PR. The Emperor might sympathize with Rae. She’d always sympathized with him.
“Have you never considered art grants us the impossible? Art opens a door into someone else’s imagination and lets us walk through. Art is the dreamed-of escape. Art lets the dead speak and the living laugh. Art takes you away from pain when no medicine can save you. Art is the first and last word. Art is the final consolation.”
Deliver me from the monster I might be.
Ambition is wicked, and I want so much. If I want to live that makes me a monster, if I want a man that makes me the harlot of the tower, if I want a throne that makes me an evil queen. Fine. I’ll be a wonderful monster.
“You don’t have to kill if you don’t like it,” Key promised. “I’ll kill them for you.” “Kill who?” Against her hair, she felt his mouth curve. “Everyone.”
“I love you as a knife loves a throat,” he murmured as the dead overwhelmed her. “I crawled out of hell to fall at your feet.”
