Aster

“And if you’ll let me, I’ll just put a little poison in her tea,” Mei was saying to Hugo as they entered the kitchen. Apollo sat next to her, ear flopped over as he looked between the two of them. “Not enough to kill her, but still enough for it to be considered a felony for which I’ll absolutely accept jail time. It’s a win-win situation.” Hugo looked horrified. “You can’t ruin tea like that. Every cup is special and putting poison in it would ruin the flavor.”
― T.J. Klune, Under the Whispering Door

“Hadia looked confused. “Then why are we going to the basement?” “Because that’s where the library is located.” “Right. And we’re going to the library because…?” Fatma fixed her best blank look. “Because it has all the books.”
― P. Djèlí Clark, A Master of Djinn

“It was the single central argument that the universe had made to her through her whole life, and she was only now seeing it clearly: Wars never ended because one side was defeated. They ended because the enemies were reconciled. Anything else was just a postponement of the next round of violence.”
― James S.A. Corey, Tiamat's Wrath

“In the years following daysdeath, most of the green places of the empire had withered, starved of the sun that had once gifted them life. But that wasn’t to say nothing grew in Elidaen anymore. There’s no end of successors waiting for old monarchs to fall, and in the breach left by those towering giants in their robes of whispering green, a new king had risen. “Fungus. “Luminous flowers of maryswort. Long, strangling tendrils of asphyxia. Bloated pustules of beggarbelly and jagged, crawling runs of shadespine. These were the new sovereigns of the forest, the grand lords of decay, building castles on the rotting tombs of the kings who’d come before. Mushroom and toadstool, moldweave and whitespore, running thick across the ground or flowering on the still-standing corpses, so thick you could barely see the shape of the tree beneath.”
― Jay Kristoff, Empire of the Vampire