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.

A feather fallen from a wing is not lost, Gil had told her, but free.

“You are the strongest person I’ve ever known, Castor Achilleos, and it wasn’t because of how fast you ran or how hard you hit. It was because even when you got knocked flat on your back, you fought your way back up. You have to do it again now. Whatever you’re feeling, you have to leave it on the mat and get back up.”

some people get so used to looking out at life from the edge of their cage that they stop seeing the bars,”

Strong or weak—I hated those were the only things we were allowed to be. I wanted to be defined by the life I lived.”

“You are no monster. You are a warrior,”

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

It wasn’t that anger was inherently good or bad. It could lend power and drive and focus, but the longer it lived inside you unchecked, the more poisonous it became.

“I was born knowing how to do three things—how to breathe, how to dream, and how to love you.”

Power does not transform you, he’d said. It only reveals you.