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October 14 - October 19, 2025
To tell a story is in some part to tell a lie, isn’t it?
Knowing I could hold so much pain without anyone being the wiser made me feel… Strong.
for a guest is always a kind of trespasser.
Divine in public, human in private.
Knights are shooting stars, Six. They come and go. But you and me, our sisterhood of Diviners—we’re the moon.” She smiled. “We’re eternal.”
what a happy thing to be indistinct from them.
“To tell a story is in some part to tell a lie, isn’t it? And I know only one story besides.” His voice quieted. “The one with the tragic beginning, and the desolate, interminable middle.”
and wondered as I often did how all that pain fit inside me.
“Which is more intricate?” he mused. “The designs of men, trying to reach gods, or that of gods, trying to reach men?”
“What is either to the intricacies of women, who reach both?”
I cannot remember it ever being proven that gods are more honest than anyone else.”
“It is all the same, then. Contentedness. Truth and honesty and virtue. Omens. They are all stories, and we”—he gestured to the Seacht’s climbing walls—“tread the pages within them.”
No honor among thieves, and even less among gods.
I looked down at his lips, and he up at mine, the distance between us eclipsing like a celestial movement, staggering and inevitable.
Loneliness touched everything. And the aching beauty of the peaks, the pools, the incomparable night sky, made it so much worse.
It is easier, swearing ourselves to someone else’s cause than to sit with who we are without one.”
Rory panted, and I, like a cathedral, echoed him.
“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 worried nothing was divine unless it arrived on the beckoning hand of pain.
“When a babe learns to walk. When friends gather around a sickbed, or deathbed, and sew a patch onto the family blanket. A couple’s kiss on their wedding day, and the night that follows. We do not look for love, or heartbreak, because they, like the truest god, are ever with us.” She smiled. “And it’s a privilege to know them.”
“If I am wonderful and wretched for learning the truth of the Omens, your hands are marked by the blood of my metamorphosis.”
“To the faithless, a god is a monster. And I am certainly a god.”
“You don’t need the signs anymore. You’ve seen this world for what it is. A tale of lurid contradictions—a true story, and also a lie. You’ve known coin, knowledge, strength, intuition, love, life and death—and beaten them at their craft. You’ve known everything, Diviner. And to be all-knowing…” The king of Traum smiled at me, his future queen. “What is a god, if not that?”
