Greywaren (Dreamer Trilogy, #3)

by Maggie Stiefvater

Concluding paragraph describing what the reader just learned and why it is important for them to have learned it: He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine. He will be fine.

Adam was a speck beside them. An odd speck, shaped unlike everything else here, clearly out of his world. He was a creature of round, intense feelings, a finite creature, a fragmenting creature.

“Ronan?” Adam said suddenly. “Are you Ronan?” Relieved, Ronan replied, “Yes.” “Can you be smaller? Or tell me where to look? You’re everywhere.” But Adam began to laugh, a big, disbelieving laugh ragged with his newly extinguished fear, turning to look all around himself.

“No, I was just, you were just— You sound like a jackass. But you look like energy. It’s breaking my brain. Is it … is it really you?” His expression darkened. “Or is it just showing me what I want …”

And yet when Adam’s consciousness touched his, Ronan recognized him. It was Adam’s footstep on the stairs. His surprised whoop as he catapulted into the pond they’d dug. The irritation in his voice; the impatience in his kiss; his ruthless, dry sense of humor; his brittle pride; his ferocious loyalty. It was all caught up in this essential form that had nothing to do with how his physical body looked.

Ronan. Ronan, it is you. I did it. I found you. With just a sweetmetal. I found you. Ronan didn’t know if Adam had thought it or said it, but it didn’t matter. The joy was unmistakable.

Ronan and Adam could not hug, because they had no real arms, but it didn’t matter. Their energy darted and mingled and circled, the brilliant bright of the sweetmetals and the absolute dark of the Lace. They didn’t speak, but they didn’t have to.

They were happy and sad, angry and forgiven, they were wanted, they were wanted, they were wanted.

It looked as if the apocalypse was still a go.

And weren’t dreams sort of a psychoactive substance? Bryde’s fancy little orbs had been. And certainly this bomb had been, too.

No, Declan was not going to love him. Even more frustrating was the knowledge that everyone else would.

Declan’s understanding was dark with nightwash. Claws dug for his heart, only to find it gone.

He went to Ronan’s body. There was no new nightwash on his face. Just two very ordinary tears leaking from his closed eyes. Ronan had always worn his feelings on his sleeve.

“Find whoever killed him, Ronan,” Declan told him. “Find whoever killed Matthew and make sure they are never happy ever again.”

He and his brother never hugged, but Declan put his hand on Ronan’s warm skull for a second. Declan said, “Be dangerous.”

“Jordan, it was always going to be this way. Our story was always a tragedy.” “Pozzi, it wasn’t,” she said. “Not yours,” Declan said. “The Lynch family’s. The Lynch brothers’. It was written before I was born.”

Ronan was very comforted by a god, capital G. The world got more and more senseless as he grew, with rules seeming to contradict each other left and right, but the knowledge that there was someone out there who knew how it all fit together was relieving.

this varied party, with their diverse shadows cast across these fields he loved, coming to celebrate with him—his heart thought, of course, of course. He just hadn’t found all these pieces while he was alive, but in death, he had access to and knowledge of all the things that had been too far-flung or hidden for him to find before. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Ronan thought. He could cry from it, such relief, such relief.

Here in the land of the dead, Ronan was a king. Someone seized Ronan’s hand, firmly lacing fingers with his, and he looked down at this gesture, this claim of possession. It was a boyish hand, all knuckles and veins, and it fit perfectly against his. He heard a voice in his ear: “Numquam solus.” In the dream, he knew what it meant: Never alone. How Ronan wanted to be dead.

He made up the task of guarding the world, which meant nothing to him, instead of guarding his family, which meant everything to him.

Declan had said Matthew wouldn’t want one if he’d seen a city rat. Matthew had replied the only thing that was different about a city rat was that no one loved it.

he was obsessed with what Magritte had said about it, which was that the viewer desperately longed to see the man’s face not because it was necessarily more interesting than the apple but because, unlike the apple, it was hidden.

He and Matthew would be talking about something entirely different and then suddenly Bryde would break off and be all consciousness is a map to every place we have ever been and ever will be and yet no one here will consult it and thus is lost and Matthew would ask, “Have you ever read anything about clinical depression?”

does that make sense?” “No,” Bryde said morosely. This was the problem with getting Bryde talking. He either got boring or sad.

“Dudifer, you are the saddest dude I have ever met,” Matthew told him. “It’s like you’re always wet.

“What’s a chinchilla?” “You’re sort of a funny person,” Matthew told him. “You know a lot of stuff but you’re also pretty stupid.”

“I wasn’t going to touch—” she started, but then Hennessy used her wrist to pull her close. Hennessy kissed her.

“Ronan Lynch,” Hennessy said. “We need to talk.”

In a way, she thought, Ronan had been screaming since she’d met him. She just hadn’t been able to hear it, since she’d been screaming, too.

She could feel his body quivering. Like a pencil sketch, it conveyed misery with the smallest of gestures.

There was a strange sort of magic to being a person holding another person after not being held by someone for a long time. There was another strange sort of magic to understanding you’d been using words and silence the wrong way for a long time.

“No,” Niall corrected her, holding it tightly despite everything. Warmly, despite everything. It seemed very, very important that it feel loved, too. “Ronan.”

“He was lonely,” Declan explained. “How do you know?” Niall asked. Declan carefully moved away from the child to join his parents. “He was crying.” Niall put his hand in Declan’s curls, trying to sound light, unfettered. “I didn’t hear anything.” Declan’s voice was somewhat haughty. “He was very quiet about it.”

A Niall to go off with Mór. A Mór to stay here with Niall. Perhaps a bag to keep their old memories in, so that they never did it (manifest a god, fall in love) ever again.

“It was important for Ronan to know he was just as loved as you,” the new Fenian said. “The consequences of something like that feeling wronged … It was important he be raised a son, not a monster or a pet.”

All this time, the biggest lie Declan had told himself was that he hated his father. What he’d really meant, every time he thought it, every single day, was: I miss him.

On the threshold was a pair of open scissors, pointed directly at her. Oh, Hennessy thought, shit. A moment later, two bombs exploded.

Sound kills from the inside out. All around the museum, things died. Scuttling mice, sleeping squirrels, and roosting pigeons dropped dead, their insides liquefied. At the heart of this explosion was a portentous vision, but only one person was alive to experience it.

Declan had been practicing secrecy his entire life. He had never practiced trust.

“I shot him,” Mór said, from behind the wheel. “And I’ll do the same to you unless you answer the question.” Farooq-Lane’s voice was aghast. “Is he hurt?” “Of course he’s hurt,” the new Fenian replied. “Have you ever been shot?”

A world of tilting green hillsides, purple mountains, agonizing crushes, euphoric grudges, gasoline nights, adventuring days, gravestones and ditches, kisses and orange juice, rain on skin, sun in eyes, easy pain, hard-won wonder.

A tourist to humanity, he would seize joy and victory where he could manage it, until the world beat him. Humans only lived for decades, but it turned out, when you were human, that felt like a long time.

human lives were so short, so urgent— “Where’s Adam?” Hennessy asked, “What?” “Adam. My Adam. Adam!”

“Nathan has Adam and Jordan.”

It didn’t matter how they’d parted ways before. Jordan was ill imagining Hennessy dying alone, slowly, like the murdered girls. She said, “I lose track.” Nathan gestured to all the steel-gray bombs in the building as if to say, I know what you mean.

Nathan looked at his sister. “And you—I just wanted to see if you would ever do a thing for yourself.” Farooq-Lane felt the sting of the words even before she parsed them for truth. This had been their relationship for years; her constantly trying to win his respect, him never giving it.

“When I was younger, we did a ritual to wake a ley line. We had to make a bargain with the … thing … the entity that could wake the ley line.” He lifted his chin, and the anger bubbling in his eyes would have made anyone other than Nathan step back. “And you can speak to one of those things now?” Farooq-Lane asked faintly. “That can wake ley lines?” He said, “I am one of those things.”

Does any part of you still look at the sky and hurt?

It’s the stuff between stars, the space between roots, the thing that makes electricity get up in the morning. It fucking hates us.

When something was really important to him, he always fucked it up.