Gallant

by V.E. Schwab

Home is a choice. Those four words sit alone on a page in her mother’s book, surrounded by so much white space they feel like a riddle. In truth, everything her mother wrote feels like a riddle, waiting to be solved.

How to exist in a world that does not want you. How to be a ghost in someone else’s home.

I am so happy. I am so scared.

Free—a small word for such a magnificent thing. I don’t know what it feels like, but I want to find out.

So much space, and yet, she was always looking for more. Always wandering. Always searching.”

But what is safe? Tombs are safe. Merilance was safe. Safe does not mean happy, does not mean well, does not mean kind.

All her life, she has wanted a house and a garden and a room of her own. But tucked inside that want was something else: a family.

Perhaps you are haunting me.

There is no rest in sleep. These dreams will be the death of me.

Home is a choice.

I don’t know how to make you better. I don’t know how to make you stay.

Stay with me. Stay with me. Stay with me. I would write the words a thousand times if they’d be strong enough to hold you here.

When people see tears, they stop listening to your hands or your words or anything else you have to say. And it doesn’t matter if the tears are angry or sad, frightened or frustrated. All they see is a girl crying.

“Some people are repelled by darkness. Others are drawn to it, to the static crackle of power in a place. To the hum of magic, or the presence of the dead. They can see these forces staining the world like ink in water. Our family was like that. I told you Gallant wasn’t built by Priors. The house was already here. Empty and waiting. And the Priors came. They felt called to the house, and when they arrived, they saw the wall for what it was—a threshold. A line between.”

“It is one thing to give death form,” he says, and the ashes coalesce into a chalice. “Another to breathe life back into it.”

When you came apart, I found the cursed bone. It was a molar, of all things, his mouth hiding inside yours.

He will never have the piece that was you. I hope he rots while worrying the hole.

“I am simply nature. I am the cycle. The balance. And I am inevitable. The way night is inevitable. The way death is inevitable.”