All the Hidden Paths (The Tithenai Chronicles Book 2)

by Foz Meadows

“What’s Ralia like? It’s a place. It’s home. It was never home. It’s warm fires in winter, apples in summer, wine in spring, cider in autumn and dancing always. It’s beautiful and clever and violent and cruel. I love it, and it hates me, and I wish I hated it too, but I don’t. I’m not sure I can, without hating myself. I do hate myself. Ralia is a fist raised against itself in defence of itself. It’s my mother. It’s people, the same as anywhere else. Just people, and things, and the stories they use to justify treating the one as the other. I don’t ever want to go back, and I hate that I can’t. I do want to go back. Or maybe I just want to want to, I don’t know. It’s all the songs I’ve ever learned. It’s the only place I know how to belong, and I’ve never belonged there once.”

This one paragraph was worth reading that whole book. I'm still crying.