Summer in Orcus

by T. Kingfisher

Her dress was gray and shapeless and she wore a tall purple hat like a top hat, with a live salamander on top of it.

goals

“You’re dangerously ignorant, girl,” she said. “It is not your fault at the moment, though if you grow much older, it will be.”

“The witch’s house lays eggs sometimes,” said the weasel. “I tried to eat one.” Summer wrinkled her forehead. “But it’s a house. Wouldn’t its eggs be—oh—enormous? Bigger than me?” “So maybe I’m ambitious,” said the weasel. “Nothing wrong with ambition, is there?

Occasionally, they will even go so far as to speak of “nymph tears sparkling on the grass” or some such. When it has gotten to this stage, they generally need to be sat down and given a stern talking-to, and perhaps a settling cup of tea.

“If I kill you,” said Glorious. “I can claim that the moon made me do it, or the sun, or a man in another land whom I have never met. But it is my teeth that have blood on them.”

“You don’t get into the sun’s shadow?” “Our sun doesn’t have a shadow,” said Summer. “Everything has a shadow,” said Glorious. “Perhaps your sun simply keeps it somewhere else.”

“Oh, well, albatrosses.” Reginald flipped his wing. “Prophets and poets, the lot of them. Not bad-hearted, but you ask one the time of day and he tells you time is an illusion, and how is that getting anything done?”

“Morning people should be shot,” said the weasel,

It did not seem right that something so large could be allowed to die.

“Come and sit, child. Tell me about your journey, and start a little before the beginning, because we are usually wrong about where things begin.”

There were too many sorrows in the world. She thought that if she felt any one too deeply, she might drown in it.

“The shape’s a bit unusual.” “It’s for cheese,” said Summer. The bird paused for an instant. “Are the cheeses very fierce in your world?”

The bird chirped again, closer. Then she actually saw it, a little dark shape hopping across the broken ground. It was wearing a tiny bowler hat.

i love them so much

The dragon was vast, impossible, ancient, built on the scale of whales and mountains. It would take a hero to slay one. I would not wish that on you, the Forester had said, and Summer understood why at last. How monstrous a thing it must be, to be that hero.

“It would be a good day for the world if I could not find a child who knew terrible adult things.

Hearts are complicated.