Dannii Elle > Recent Status Updates

"They might permit a king to burn their fields, or rape their daughters, as long as payment was made. But you did not touch a man's sons."

"The tragedy of death was distance. Death cleaved the world in two, leaving the living and the dead standing on either side of some impassable chasm."

"The tragedy of death was distance. Death cleaved the world in two, leaving the living and the dead standing on either side of some impassable chasm."

ANOTHER PLOT TWIST???

TALK ABOUT A PLOT TWIST!!!

"propaganda was as much a weapon as any blade"

"He had spent years in the presence of the otherfolk. He knew what drew their attention: the sound of human song, the cry of ravens, a child's laugh, the smell of ripe blackberries, and the rust-cold poison of iron."

"She was always smiling, no matter her mood. Smiling seemed to unnerve people, to make them think she had the upper hand. She would go to her death smiling, if only to spite whoever managed to slide the knife in."

I am really loving this one. The magic is intriguing, it is infused with Welsh mythology, and a heist is at the heart of the story.

"A city could be judged by three things: its food, its sewers, and its thieving guild."

"He knew the tales. He'd heard mention of changeling children, of monsters, of creatures immortal and terrible. But he also had heard tales in which bowls of milk and trinkets were traded for favors. Of heroes who had gone to the otherfolk and been given magical swords. So he went - because there was nothing else he could do."

"A person with a knife was one thing. A person with a knife and a cause could topple kingdoms."

"We will rebuild... We will survive. It's what we're best at."

"She favored careful, quiet planning, like a spider who spun a web for days on end to attract the perfect fly."

"I craved you like maidens crave the grave, the way Death burns for human touch: inconsolably, unrelentingly, aching for the annihilation in your kiss"

"Love makes monsters of us, Constanta, and not everyone is cut out for monstrosity."

"Like Christ, I had become intimately acquainted with violence and the sins of the world, but I had not come away unblemished. Only violence felt like holiness to me anymore."

"Now I understood why you were so enamoured with her. She was as cunning as you were, and as cold as a Transylvanian winter. Beneath the fripperies and the giggles there was a girl made of steel, one who would do whatever it took to survive.
You could never resist a survivor. Or a mirror."

"Plague drains not only victims but whole cities of life. It freezes trade, decays parishes, forbids lovemaking, turns childrearing into a dance with death. Most of all, it steals time. Days spent boarded up in houses, sick or clean pass in a swirl of flat grey. Plague time is different, it stretches and looms"

"I had never experienced the kind of agony that leaves the mind coiled and poised to lash out at the first opportunity. I would carry that viper inside me for years, letting it out intermittently to rip the wicked to pieces. But that day I had not yet befriended the serpent within. It seemed to me a strange interloper, a frightening thing, demanding to be fed."

"I never dreamed it would end like this, my lord: your blood splashing hot flecks onto my nightgown and pouring in rivulets onto our bedchamber floor. But creatures like us live a long time. There is no horror left in this world that can surprise me. Eventually, even your death becomes its own sort of inevitability."

What a first paragraph!

"This land has always been quick to show us what fools we are to fancy ourselves a power greater than the unbending leviathans in this vast ocean. We do not matter to this world; we never have. That we survive here is more a testament to stubbornness than dominance.

And I’m nothing if not stubborn."

"The hour of midnight on Ophir is special; the creatures born in this world own the night. Some say it’s the hour of the Water Horse, a leviathan spirit in the Panthalassan Ocean, so huge that its head and its tail are always on the opposite ends of the world.
At midnight, the Water Horse gets restless. All bad things are afoot at this dark hour."

This is reminding me a little of The Scorpio Races, and I'm loving it!

"That’s the strange nature of this world; the viciousness creeps up on you. What the ocean can’t do to itself, it unloads onto us, the encroachers."

"We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates... Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us."

"But God is only a white cold eye, a quarter-moon poised above the smoke, blinking, as the city is gradually pounded to dust."

"who will cave, who will tattle, who will be the bravest. Who will lie on her back and let her last breath curl up to the ceiling as a curse upon the invaders."

"Artillery has stopped for the moment, and the predawn fires inside the walls take on a steady middle life, an adulthood. The western edge of the city has become a holocaust of crimson and carmine... From afar, the smoke appears strangely solid, as though carved from luminous wood. All along its perimeter, sparks rise and ash falls and administrative documents flutter: utility plans, purchase orders, tax records."

“Radio: it ties a million ears to a single mouth. Out of loudspeakers all around Zollverein, the staccato voice of the Reich grows like some imperturbable tree; its subjects lean toward its branches as if towards the lips of God. And when God stops whispering, they become desperate for someone who can put things right.”