Kindle Notes & Highlights
She thought at first if she waited long enough, some glimmer of light would appear, or someone would come. Yet no matter how long she waited, there was nothing.
Remembered that she’d been placed there as a prisoner, kept preserved, but someday, someone would come for her.
She had to endure. To stay alert. That way she would be ready. She had to stay ready. She would not let herself fade away.
vivimancer. Necromancy’s inverse twin, wielded on the living rather than the dead.
“This is elaborate, beautiful, professional work. A vivimancer manually rewiring the human consciousness.”
By its nature, lumithium bound the four elements of air, water, earth, and fire together, and in that binding, resonance was created.
Usually, resonance was channelled into the alchemy of metals and inorganic compounds, allowing for transmutation or alchemisation. However, in a defective soul which rebelled against Sol’s natural laws, the resonance could be corrupted, enabling vivimancy—like what the woman had used on Helena—and the necromancy used to create necrothralls.
All she knew was that as long as those manacles remained locked in place, she wasn’t an alchemist at all.
“The war is over. What is it you think you’re protecting in that brain of yours?”
She realised sluggishly that he was in her mind, looking at himself through her eyes.
“Why all this sudden interest in me?” he asked. She shrugged. “You don’t make sense.” He raised an eyebrow. “Oh, is that all? And here I was hoping you were plotting to seduce me.”
“You’re full of surprises.” “Do you say that to every girl?”
Morrough lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him. Morrough seemed shrunken somehow from the immense distorted being he’d been. Now he looked as though the skin was rotting off him.
“The Undying. You’re his source of power, and the Resistance—we figured that out, didn’t we? How to kill him. How to kill all of you.”
“Ferron always comes for me,” she whispered.
“Oh, Marino.” His thumb trailed along her neck, following the scar below her jaw. “If I’d known what pain you’d cause me, I never would have taken you.”
“But at this point I suppose I deserve to burn. I wonder if you’ll burn, too.”
“I have warned you, if something happens to you, I will personally raze the Eternal Flame. That isn’t a threat. It is a promise. Consider your survival as much a necessity to the Resistance as Holdfast’s. If you die, I will kill every single one of them.”
“I must admit,” he said in a low voice as though making a confession, “if anyone had told me you’d become so lovely, I would never have come near you. I was rather blindsided when I saw you again.”
“You’re like a rose in a graveyard,” he said, and his lips twisted into a bitter smile. “I wonder what you could have turned into without the war.”
“You didn’t save me,” he said when he was finally capable of speech. “You just put us in hell for two years.”
“Every time you asked, I promised I was yours. Always. There aren’t any exemptions or expiration dates on always.”
“Every day. I’ll choose you. That way you’ll know it’s still what I want.”
“Love isn’t as pretty or pure as people like to think. There’s a darkness in it sometimes. Kaine and I go hand in hand. I made him who he is. I knew what that array meant when I saved him. If he’s a monster, then I’m his creator.”
