The Priory of the Orange Tree (The Roots of Chaos, #1)

by Samantha Shannon

And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain. He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years. He threw him into the Abyss, and locked and sealed it over him, to keep him from deceiving the nations any more until the thousand years were ended. —Revelation 20.1–3

The best first page of a book EVER

Cloud steamed from its scales—scales of moonstone, so bright they seemed to glow from within. A crust of gemlike droplets glistened on each one. Each eye was a burning star, and each horn was quicksilver, agleam under the pallid moon. The creature flowed with the grace of a ribbon past the bridge and took to the skies, light and quiet as a paper kite. A dragon.

She was part poet and part fool when it came to telling stories.

Art. Art is not one great act of creation, but many small ones. When you read one of my poems, you fail to see the weeks of careful work it took me to build it—the thinking, the scratched-out words, the pages I burned in disgust. All you see, in the end, is what I want you to see. Such is politics.”

When Tané saw Ginura Castle, her breath caught. The roofs were the color of sun-blanched coral, the walls like cuttlebone. It had been designed to resemble the Palace of Many Pearls, where the Seiikinese dragons entered their slumber each year and was said to bridge the sea and the celestial plane.

“You have not seen death, my lord. You have only seen the mask we put on it.”

“Rain is water, and so are we,”

What is below must be balanced by what is above, and in this is the precision of the universe.

He did love the delicious onset of a good idea.

Her voice was war conch and whale song and the distant rumble of a storm, all smoothed into words like glass shaped by the sea.

“All of us have shadows in us,” he said. “I accept yours.”

her face was so lovely that every butterfly wept in envy.”

Her gaze was in the past.

“You will make a path,” Nayimathun said, gentler. “Water always does.”

“I would live alone for fifty years to have one day with you.”