Nevernight (The Nevernight Chronicle, #1)

by Jay Kristoff

“Nothing is where you start. Own nothing. Know nothing. Be nothing.” “Why would I want to do that?” The old man crushed out his cigarillo on the boards between them. His smile made her smile in return. “Because then you can do anything.”

“One must give credit to the Ysiiri. I can think of no finer torture than to have power absolute over all but your own.”

This is a game, children. But a dangerous one.” He waggled his eyebrows. “The only kind worth playing.

How better to make us forget who we were, and shape us into what they want us to be?

Sometimes weakness is a weapon. If you’re smart enough to use it.”

“A shard of glass can slice a man’s throat. Pierce his heart clean. Open his wrists to the bone. But press it in the wrong place, glass will shatter. Iron will not.”

Iron or glass? they’d asked. Mia clenched her jaw. Shook her head. She was neither. She was steel.

“Enjoy yourselves, my dears. Laugh. Love. Remember what it is to live, and forget, if only for a moment, what it is to serve.”

“Our gift to you,” she said. “A reminder. Walk among them. Play among them. Live and laugh and love among them. But never forget, not for one moment, what you are.”

Black shelves reaching up to the ceiling, filled with ornate scrolls and dusty tomes, great thick albums and carven codexes. The voices of scribes and queens. Warriors and saints. Heretics and gods. All of them now immortal.

“Beauty you’re born with, but brains you earn.”

This place gives much. But it takes much more.

They give us one thing. Life. Miserable and shitty. And after that? They take. Your prayers. Your years.”

“The brighter the light, the deeper the shadow.”

for all the miles and all the years, vengeance wasn’t a good enough reason to become the monster she hunted.

“I mean it.” Ash squeezed her hand. “You never belonged here, Mia. You deserve better than this.”

“If you should see him in your wanders by the Hearth, tell Tric hello for me.” Swordbreaker’s eyes widened. The girl’s voice was soft as shadows. “Tell him I miss him.” The darkness rippled and the old man found himself alone. Only his screams for company.