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“The Emperor has requested that you arrive unmarred and healthy.” “The Emperor can go fuck himself, and you can join him.”
More later, but for now I must tell you that Odo Laroche and I, we’ve begun what you might call a resistance effort. Those who are loyal to Audric. You’ll think it rash, but you aren’t seeing what I’m seeing. We’ve named ourselves Red Crown.
From my own personal library. Novels with happy endings. If you bend or tear even a single page, we shall no longer be friends.
His grief and sorrow still lived inside him and always would, and he imagined there would yet be days when getting out of bed was an indescribable torment. But today, he was standing.
Monsters crafted from dragons and children forced into their magic. Monsters battering at the Gate. A monster who kissed her one moment and crafted abominations the next. And she herself, the most monstrous of them all.
A crow swooped down from the sky and pounced upon a small songbird. Jessamyn watched the crow stab the bird’s chest, rip at its throat, and shake it. With its great black beak, it tore away chunks of flesh and tufts of feathers.
“And what shall I do, when I go home with you?” She crouched in the dirt, her smile turning vicious. “Shall I parade through the streets, greeting my many admirers? Shall I compose a song to accompany the curses they will throw at me? Tell me, Tal, what rhymes with Kingsbane?”
He had seen the darkness in his father’s eyes, the secrets in his father’s palace, and so he began to craft secrets of his own.”
You can tear at me all you want. You’ll never find what you seek, and you’ll never see my mother again. She’s dead. I’m all you’ve got now, and I’ll fight you until one day you lose your temper and kill me. Then you’ll be alone forever.”
her heart a frantic bird in her chest,
And Eliana had no choice but to believe this strange friend whose face she still did not know and hope she wasn’t a fool for daring, yet again, to trust someone who lived behind a mask.
Navi would reject violence altogether if she could. But if she met Simon again, she would kill him.
“For even a kind master must sometimes beat his hounds to remind them who holds the chain.”
He would lose her a thousand times over if it meant he would first have the chance to love her.
Audric knelt at his mother’s side, making sure no one else could see his face. He didn’t trust it not to show his horror, how he loathed the destructive potential of his power and the fact that he had been forced to use it in such a way.
“Sometimes it’s strange to think of them together and in love, even after all the stories I’ve read—the Lightbringer and the Blood Queen. One kind, one cruel. One good, one evil. I wonder what their daughter would have been like, if she’d ever been born. I wonder which parent she’d take after.” —Journal of Remy Ferracora, dated May 24, Year 1014 of the Third Age
“I could say, ‘I forgive you’ until my throat bled, but it wouldn’t be true, even knowing what you’ve done to him.”
“There is too much hate in the world already,” Navi replied after a moment. “Why direct more of it at yourself?”
He smelled of salt and smoke, murmured her name until she wore the syllables on her skin.
“I don’t love you,” she whispered fiercely against his skin. A moment passed. Then she felt Simon’s hand cup the back of her head, cradling her to him. His lips touched her brow. “I know,” he replied, his voice choked with sadness. “I don’t love you either.”
“In the stars I draw your hair In the moon I find your eyes In my blood I hold your name In my bones I feel your lies.”
It was her arm itself that burned, a brilliant red spear of light, and as it plunged for his heart, Audric held her beloved face in his gaze and whispered, “Rielle, I love you.”
A weary laugh escaped her. “I don’t know how to be what I am, split in two like this. A queen of light, and a queen of darkness. I am Aryava’s prophecy, only I am but one queen. One queen with the desires of two. I cannot bear it.”
“I may be a monster,” Rielle said, the words thick with pain, “but I am no longer yours.”
Eliana. Eliana. Eliana. For of course, that would be her name.
The gentle burbling noises she made while waving her tiny wrinkled feet, hands clenched as if ready to punch.
And on a small terrace outside the finest suite of rooms in Baingarde, the king of Celdaria cradled his daughter against his chest, watching the horizon bloom bright with farewell.
