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There was an intimacy to all violence, she supposed. The better you knew someone, the more terribly you could hurt them.
Ew????
The only enemy is the sea’?”
Underneath it was a second, unspoken question: What gives them the right?
“It’s terrifying,” Effy confessed. “Most beautiful things are,”
Fear could make a believer of anybody.
But didn’t all drownings begin with a harmless dribble of water?
“A tragic one, but still a romance.”
That’s not a romance then?
“You’d be surprised how much cognitive dissonance people are capable of.”
She wondered if you could love something out of ruination, reverse that drowning process, make it all new again.
It is theorized that the goddesses Acrasia and Amoret were once a single female figure, rather than the two-headed goddess worshipped in Llyr today. When did Llyrians begin to see love as strictly dichotomic, rather than of a vast and multitudinous quality?
“Challenging me isn’t pestering. I’m not always right. Sometimes I deserve to be challenged. And changing your mind isn’t foolish. It just means you’ve learned something new.
Even the past isn’t guaranteed. You can lose that, too, slowly, like water eating away at stone.”
All women are either an Acrasia or an Amoret.
Oh my god. Virgin mary or a whore. Mammy or jezebel.
Fear and pain could be endured if you knew that eventually, they would end.
There were a thousand dark creatures in it. There were a thousand ways to drown.
“The only reason anything matters is because it ends,” he says. “I wouldn’t hold you so tightly now if I thought we could be here forever.”
That things are only beautiful because they don’t last.
“Some things are constant,” Effy said. “They must be. I think that’s why so many poets write about the sea.”
“Maybe the idea of constancy is what’s actually terrifying. Fear of the sea is fear of the eternal—because how can you win against something so enduring.
love you,” Preston said, voice wavering. “I’m so sorry it’s ruined us both.”
The Fairy King can sense weakness and wanting in men. It’s like a wound, a gap that he can use to slip inside.”
Well—I was a woman when it was convenient to blame me, and a girl when they wanted to use me.
The weight of a memory is one thing.
The danger was as ancient as the world. But if fairies and monsters were real, so were the women who defeated them.
