Lore

by Alexandra Bracken

This was the thing with boys like him. What he was feeling just then, that rage, wasn’t the world falling in on him. It was an illusion shattering, the one that told him he deserved everything, and that it was owed to him simply because he existed.

In that moment, the past became the present, and the present the past, and it was just the two of them in the shadows of their city, the way it had always been. The way it should have been forever.

“Fear is a foreign land I shall never visit and a language that will never cross my tongue,”

“It’s not always the truth that survives, but the stories we wish to believe. The legends lie. They smooth over imperfections to tell a good tale, or to instruct us how we should behave, or to assign glory to victors and shame those who falter. Perhaps there were some in Sparta who embodied those myths. Perhaps. But how we are remembered is less important than what we do now.”

Sometimes, he’d said, the braver thing is to accept help when you’ve been made to believe you shouldn’t need it.

A person alone could be controlled, but a person loved by others would always be under their protection.

“Lore.” He kept that same soft tone. “I was born knowing how to do three things—how to breathe, how to dream, and how to love you.”