The Knight and the Moth (The Stonewater Kingdom, #1)

by Rachel Gillig

I told myself it was better sharpening the qualities that made me divine than those that made me human, even if, in a deep, ugly place, I worried I’d made that choice because I did not know how to be human.

Coin. The only portent, the only prosperity—the only god of men—is coin.

Loneliness touched everything. And the aching beauty of the peaks, the pools, the incomparable night sky, made it so much worse.

I was losing my faith in everything. But the two of us meeting… it felt almost divine.

The last of them, the great behemoth birke, fell—the monster slain. But if the creature was a monster, it was because it was made that way.

“It’s hard to see who I am when I am lost in what’s expected of me.”

“When you do the right thing for the wrong reason, no one praises you. When you do the wrong thing for the right reason, everyone does, even though what is right and wrong depends entirely on the story you’re living in. And no one says they need recognition or praise or love, but we all hunger for it. We all want to be special.”

“I cannot decide which I like best. The sunrise, or the sunset. They are like life, and her quiet companion, death.”

“To live again after death is strange magic, and an even stranger fate. Would that things were different, Bartholomew. Would that we had never been reborn. But if we hadn’t… well. I have wondered, and pondered, and now I am sure. For better, for worse— “The rest of the story could not exist without us.”