City of Miracles (The Divine Cities, #3)

by Robert Jackson Bennett

He does not mind their chatter. Better to think less of him than too much. Too much attention draws eyes.

It is a fool who lives his life believing the waves upon which he sails shall remember him. The seas know nothing. This makes them beautiful. And this makes them terrible.

My definition of an adult is someone who lives their life aware they are sharing the world with others. My definition of an adult is someone who knows the world was here before they showed up and that it’ll be here well after they walk away from it. My definition of an adult, in other words, is someone who lives their life with a little fucking perspective.

“You, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson,” says Olvos, tapping out her pipe, “are a man that a miracle mistook for a god.”

“When you touched the stone, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson, it was a curious moment in your life. You hated yourself. You hated your failures, your impetuousness, your brutish thoughtlessness. These things, you felt, had cost you everything. So you did something the Finger of Kolkan did not expect—you embraced it. You invited it. You felt you had earned its pain. And in doing so, you defeated it. “The horrid miracle in that stone was not prepared for this—when Kolkan made it, in his utter ignorance, he did not tell it what to do if a mortal actually passed the test. So the miracle, being small and simple, made an assumption: the being that had just defeated it had to be no one but Kolkan himself. So it changed: it migrated to you, thinking you to be its maker. And ever since, it has been bound to you, worshipping you, giving you many things and altering your very reality. And it has changed in turn.”