Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

Viv wasn’t a mad scientist. She just wanted to crush her enemies, and save the world.

The green woman’s strength was not a thing of muscle but a fact, like fear, and like fear it burned.

saw the ships. To call the scale of space overwhelming is to commit criminal understatement: space is overwhelming in the sense that a human sacrifice splayed on the altar while the moon eclipses the sun and the chanting priest raises the knife is having a bad Tuesday.

she took the part of herself that wanted to scream, gave it a big hug like her therapist recommended, drew it a nice hot metaphorical bath, and drowned it in the bathwater.

Energy spent regretting a decision was best redirected toward addressing its consequences.

Was this what they called growing up? She’d thought that meant maturity, weathering, endurance. But instead you gathered one terror after another to yourself, until you were a skin-clad skeleton cradling a self made up of wounds.