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Hear now the tale of Kunlin Yeva. Hear now the truth of the guildknight of Mithrandon.
“You’ve always said blood doesn’t matter.” “It doesn’t,” he says. “Until it does.”
She has already decided that she likes Emory, who seems unbearably soft in this world of stone and hard angles.
“You have the strength of the earth in you,” she used to tell her daughters. “The rains can come and the ploughs can carve through you and still you will remain.”
Little by little, her mouth gets used to speaking her father’s language until it becomes second nature, until those syllables dominate even her thoughts and the language she spoke in her mother’s home fades and becomes brittle in her mind.
Taken from the soil and cradle of her home and placed in this hard land, full of stone and bright metal, she has fashioned a womb for herself from which she can safely navigate her new world.
Some even say that dragons might take on human form to give birth to live young.
Yeva crushes her sorrow into a seed smaller than the palm and buries it deep within herself. Perhaps later, when this is all over, she will allow it to sprout.
she has no words in any language to describe the heavy, golden feeling that settles in her chest. How can she explain what it’s like, what it means, or where it comes from?
The dance is also known as The Dragon’s Return. According to legend, the children of Chuan-pu, who themselves are half-draconic, would assume their sacred forms and wander the world and spirit realms for half a year, during which the kingdom of Quanbao would grow cold and its ground hard.”
the pale shape of Lady Sookhee’s body is so long and narrow she appears to be half-serpent,
there’s a pattern to the regularity of these two phenomena, the unrest in the caverns and Lady Sookhee’s illness. Don’t they always overlap? Doesn’t the girl-king always fall ill when some unknown calamity is striking the heart of the caverns, making it too dangerous for human passage?
something taken out of the universe.
She makes endings and she mustn’t forget.
The dragons she hunts are strangers to her but this one is not.
And then she sees it. Curving along the dragon’s side: a long, slashing scar. Distinct even in the unstable light of the cavern. Yeva recognizes its shape. She knows this particular knot of flesh.
A jolt does run up her arm then, but not one of electricity; she shudders with a sense of recognition, of relief, of elation. A potent mix of the three.
“I know who you are,” Yeva says. “You don’t have to hide from me.”
“I’d do anything to protect her.”
“Prayers are for the living. Not the dead.
“But sometimes our best efforts just aren’t enough.
