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Like she’d been doing nothing but running and running all her life.
Ugly, like an ambitious one. Like one who chose to punish a good man for not being the right man, who left because staying was too boring, too painful, too hard. Like a woman who had to be a weapon because she couldn’t be anything else.
She’d put that knowledge in his hand, lighting it like a match. If it burned her now, that was her own fault. Such was the nature of intimacy. Of honesty, which she had never bothered with before.
rootlessness—her willingness to light a match because she loved nothing on this earth too much to watch it burn?
It was like she’d been born with a window to the world that nobody else could see, or that everyone else ignored, and it was a horror that she alone had lived with, like Cassandra and the fall of Troy.
He felt it somewhere small and sharp, like resting his heart or his entire sense of worth on the prick of a needle.
no way to eulogize the people they’d been before the words left his mouth.
“Maybe there’s a version where we end up together, Rhodes, but it isn’t this one,” he said. “Maybe that just means not yet, but it definitely means not now.
“I will spend my life orbiting yours,” Nico said, and the exhaustion in his voice, she knew it. She understood it. “I consider it a privilege. Does that mean less if we never sleep together? If we never have babies and hold hands, does that have to mean less? You’re in every world I exist in, your fate is my fate, either you follow me or I follow you, it doesn’t matter which and I don’t care. If that’s not love then maybe I don’t understand love, and that’s fine with me—
Magic is not the same thing as clarity. Knowledge is not the same as wisdom. That is the duality of man, in a way. A person can see everything and nothing all at once.)
To Gideon, time felt especially theoretical. Like something he would always chase and never really have.
Dread. Hope. Two sides of the same desperation.
(Maybe one where he never existed at all, which is the worst thing because it’s selfish. It’s wish fulfillment, the fantasy of a broken mind.)
People live and people die, and the why of it is never enough to make a difference.
It would be the unforgivable crime of living her life with her eyes shut tight.
What did it mean to be a soulmate? To know someone in every world, in every universe? To slip effortlessly between where they ended and you began?
Not the productive kind, the kind with goals, but sad, empty dreamers. Half-broken men who made plans because they could not make terror—the awestruck kind, like glimpsing an angel with flaming torches for eyes.
“I don’t care how hard it was!” There was an expulsion from Gideon, a thin blast of heat that threatened to scorch Libby’s fingertips. She recoiled like a child, stung. “Do you understand that? Do you understand that there is no world where I forgive you for this?”
He knew that face. It wasn’t rage. Not anger. It was anguish. Something deeper than pain, more silencing than fury. It was grief.
Tristan didn’t have to wish suffering upon her to know that it was coming. He cared enough about her to understand that the outcome of her choice had damaged her irreparably. He loved her enough to know that she was hurting unimaginably.
“Just because it’s futile doesn’t mean it’s not worth a try. Life is futile. By definition, its only outcome is failure. Invariably it ends.”
That it was most admirable to walk around in the world and choose not to break things just because you can.
reason for existence. It was lonely but tireless, cursed to know the exact shape of its vacancy, to perennially seek its other half. It had only one driving quality, which was a desperate need for validation that would never come.
He was sad, obviously, but he was also fine, and in another act of masochistic generosity, Gideon realized that Max had better things to do with his life than wander around aimlessly with his saddest friend.
Lots of people were depressed. Pain didn’t make Gideon special. It never had before.
“Real?” Nico shrugged. “Dunno. I never made a talisman, did you?” “No.” You were always my talisman.
The only diagnosis for life was death—
Though, as a matter of professional courtesy, one last cautionary tale from a dying man: the power you have will never be enough compared to the power you’ll always lack.
