More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Take what you want, it said. I’ll hate you for it. But I’ll love you forever. I can’t help but love you. Ruin me, ruin us, and I’ll let you.
Oh, but history moved in such vicious circles.
She stood up, reached for Nezha’s hand, and curled his fingers around the handle of the knife. He stiffened. “What are you—” “Get their respect,” she said. “Tell them you killed me. Tell them everything they want to hear. Say whatever you need to to get them to trust you.” “Rin—” “It’s the only way forward.” He understood what she meant him to do. His eyes widened in alarm, and he tried to wrench his hand away, but she clenched his fingers tight. “Nezha—”
“You can’t do this for me,” he said. “I won’t let you.” “It’s not for you. It’s not a favor. It’s the cruelest thing I could do.” She meant it. Dying was easy. Living was so much harder—that was the most important lesson Altan had ever taught her.
He was awake, his face set in resolve. He gave her a grim nod. That was all she had to see. That was permission. She couldn’t release him. Neither of them knew how. But she knew, as clearly as if he’d said it out loud, that he intended to follow her to t...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“Rin.” Nezha looked so scared. It was a funny thing, how fear made him look so much younger, how it rounded his eyes and erased the cruel grimace of his sneer so that he looked, just for an instant, like the boy she’d first met at Sinegard. “Rin, don’t—” “Fix this,” she ordered.
the dirigibles descended toward Speer, she brought Nezha’s hand up to her chest and plunged the blade into her heart.
Nezha couldn’t register the choking gurgles in her throat, the glassy panic in her eyes, or the warmth of her blood as it spilled down his hands. He couldn’t, or he would shatter.
Kitay lay still beside him. He knew Kitay was gone, too—that Kitay had died a bloodless death the moment he plunged the blade into Rin’s heart,
because Rin and Kitay were bonded in a way that he could never understand, and there was no world where Rin died and Kitay remained alive. Because Kitay—the third party, the in-between, the weight that tipped the scale—had chosen to follow Rin into the afterlife and to leave Nezha behind. Alone. Alone, and shouldering the immense burden of their legacy.
He could hardly breathe. As he stared down at the tiny body in his arms—so limp and lifeless, so utterly unlike the vicious human hurricane he knew as Fang Runin—all he could do was ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Rin was a monster, a murderer, a destroyer of worlds. Nothing but blood and ashes ever trailed in her wake. The world was a better, safer, and more peaceful place without her in it. He believed that. He had to believe that. And yet. And yet, when he looked at that broken body, all he wanted to do was howl.
Rin, what the fuck? But he knew why. He knew exactly what choice she’d made and what she’d intended. And that made everything—hating her, loving her, surviving her—so much harder.
And yet, she’d laid a foundation for him. She’d burned away all that was rotten and corrupt. He didn’t have to reform the Warlord system because she’d destroyed it for him. He didn’t have to face backlash from the crumpling system of feudal aristocracy, because she’d already wrecked it. She’d wiped clear the maps
She was a goddess. She was a monster. She’d nearly destroyed this country.
He owed it to her to try. Nezha lowered Rin’s body to the ground, stood up, squared his shoulders, and awaited the coming of the fleet.
