Summer in Orcus

by T. Kingfisher

“Are you frightened?” asked the old woman. “You should be, you know. I am as old as sinning and twice as dangerous. I drink my beer from the skulls of heroes.”

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

Summer had read a great many books about magic and animals and changing your shape. Summer’s mother believed that books were safe things that kept you inside, which only shows how little she knew about it, because books are one of the least safe things in the world.)

—and then she stopped as if she had run into an iron bar herself, because it was exactly what her mother would have done. For one horrible moment, Summer felt as if she had gone down to the secret chamber of her heart and found her mother writing on its walls.

“Humans hoard up their fears as if the world might run out.” He huffed a laugh. “Still, you build cities with them—and towers and artworks and families and faiths.

She’d never been very good at knowing how people would act. It was as if she’d spent so much energy learning to predict her mother that she had very little left to spend on other people.

mythology is a truth that isn’t true,

“He can’t. The net’s silver-plate. Silver steals their voices if they touch it.” “I thought silver killed them!” gasped Summer. “You don’t have a voice, you’ll find yourself written out of life quick enough! Get the net off him!”

How monstrous a thing it must be, to be that hero. Like being the wasp that stung the Frog Tree to death. To be so small and to singlehandedly unmake a great and wondrous thing.

“Oh, I suppose it would make a better story if you arrived just as the wick was falling into the wax. Raise the stakes, they always say. Raise the stakes! We must always have the fate of the world in the balance, never one person’s happiness, and we must always arrive at the eleventh hour. No one wants the small stories any more. Bah.”