Rai (is hard to please) > Recent Status Updates

“I thought of Eugenia’s smiling face—that doesn’t look anything like her—and thought of the vendors hawking my blood and hair and clothes and wondered who she had truly been, if she had thought of herself as a saint or just a girl, if she had been glad to immolate herself so that the only thing people could take from her was the one she could control.”

(2/2)

The revenant was very quiet. “You would have died,” it said at last. “All of you.”
Where my emotions should have been, there was a hard black lump inside my chest, burning like a coal. “Maybe we should have.”

(1/2)

“I don’t care about the magic. That isn’t what made it wrong. Destroying spirits—that has to be done. But trapping them in a relic is different. It’s cruel. I didn’t know that before, but I do now.”

“Me, the goat, the revenant, we weren’t very different from each other in the end. Perhaps deep down inside everyone was just a scared animal afraid of getting hurt, and that explained every confusing and mean and terrible thing we did.”

(2/2)

“The revenant stopped speaking in words. It started shrieking instead, howling wordlessly and tearing at me with its claws. It hurt, but it was a familiar pain, the same pain I had inflicted on myself so many times in the shed. I knew then that we really were going to be all right, because I had survived it before, and I would survive it again.”

(1/2)

“‘I’m not going to let anyone hurt you again.’
It was an absurd thing to say to a creature like the revenant, but it also wasn’t, because I was certain that no one had ever said anything like that to it before in all the long centuries of its existence. And it worked.”

“Perhaps this was how history treated saints. It didn’t matter what was real, what had truly happened. Even as they lived, their lives passed into legend.” (…) “They would martyr me themselves to satisfy their hunger for a saint.”

“I could devour their souls for you,” the revenant proposed. “It would be fun. Don’t pretend you aren’t tempted.”

Alright. Where can I get one? I want one.

“The real Artemisia could have slipped away, and I was just some bystander she’d left behind. That was how I felt, like an imposter at risk of being mistaken for myself.”

“The revenant noticed me sizing up an escape route. You had better not, nun. Ideally the priest won’t be looking for you at all, but he certainly won’t be looking for a version of you that’s voluntarily socializing with a group of humans. Also, I want to try a pastry. I felt obscurely betrayed.”

“You look different.”
“I’m having fun,” I said sepulchrally.
He coughed. “I meant your hair. It looks nice.”

The dry humor is peak

“I had the bleak suspicion that this was Marguerite’s equivalent of trying to hand me a spider. I needed to participate in this activity to secure our friendship, which for some reason was something I wanted.”

“When I ran away, I knew I might die, or worse. But it would have been worth it. Worth it to live for a week, a day, even a minute outside those miserable gray walls. Being stuck there was like dying already, except so slowly that I barely noticed.”

An angsty cancer.
- an angsty cancer

“I know what you’re probably thinking, and it isn’t like I do it on purpose. I don’t want to go around crying all the time. But usually, I’m not even feeling that emotional when it happens. I just leak more than most people.”

Marguerite’s a cancer

“Before, I couldn’t figure out how to protect myself from possession when I ran away. But then I realized a spirit can’t possess you if you already have another one taking up room inside your body, even if it’s just a shade.”

… JUST HAVE EVERYONE COHABITATE WITH A SHADE, THEN FFS

“Jean’s own hands reached out very slowly to cradle mine, holding them as though they were something precious that might break. No, not that. As though they were unbreakable—the one thing in the world that he knew he couldn’t hurt.”

🥹

“It wore a half-melted crown, the gold dripping in shining rivulets down its skull. At the bottom, letters read CIMELIARCH THE BRIGHT.”

Maybe the Revenants were former royalty????

“After what they had lived through, I couldn’t blame them for being afraid. Some of them had seen groups of possessed soldiers ransacking their towns, killing people they loved. I knew what it felt like when something reminded you of terrible things that had happened to you. But more than that, I knew what it felt like to be Jean.”

🥺🥺

“‘And so the silent bell wakens to herald the Dead; and the last candle is lit against the coming night….’
I strained to hear more, but their voices had dwindled as they passed outside the hall, leaving a cold lump in my stomach and the lingering image of a single, steady candle flame slowly burning itself down, the only remaining light to hold off the dark.”

… no pressure

“I understood now, away from my convent for the first time since I had arrived there, that the longing I had felt that day and many days since was homesickness. Homesickness for a place I had never been, for the answers to questions I carried in my heart but for which I had no words. I hadn’t recognized it then, because I hadn’t understood what it felt like to have a home.”

“I had been quiet, wondering whether having an evil spirit inhabiting my body might turn me into a halfway normal person.”

“Sometimes, if you want to save other people, you need to remember to save yourself first.”

Not an evil spirit having a healthier outlook than me 💀

“I used to know someone like him,” I said. “He just needs time.”
Charles’s face brightened. “They got better?”
I remembered hiding under the bed from Marguerite. Jerking away whenever the sisters tried to touch me. Sitting alone in the refectory while the other novices whispered. “Mostly,” I said at last.”

“I bent over the puddle, watching my reflection materialize in the shallow water. Gray eyes, stark against a filthy face smeared with dirt and dried blood. The skin underneath ghastly in its pallor, surrounded by a tangled curtain of long black hair, snarled like a bird’s nest with burrs and leaves. Overall, not the worst I had ever looked first thing in the morning.”

HAH

“No one had ever bound a wisp to a relic.”

Well now I feel like the wisps are somehow gonna save the day

“He’s a good horse. He carried me all day. He doesn’t deserve to suffer because of the things I ask him to do.”
“Have you ever considered that your body carries you?”

Oop-

“Sleeping on a bed of nails couldn’t be much worse than sharing a room with Marguerite.”

(…) “But it was right. Perhaps I hadn’t realized the worst part after all. Back when I’d made the offer, I hadn’t known the revenant would talk so much.”

As a traumatized INFJ… I felt that 💀

“You idiot! You have no idea what you’re doing. If you die while I’m still in your body, our souls will become entangled—you’ll be imprisoned with me in the reliquary!”
“Then I pity you, revenant.”
“What?” it seethed.
“You’ll be trapped with me forever. After a few days, you’ll beg for your relic’s destruction just to get away from me.”
“You’re insane!”

Pff-

“But more than this place, I don’t deserve you. If there was any justice in the world, I’d never have met you, much less have even a scrap of your regard. And for a while… I thought maybe I’d cheated fate to have you near me. That I was bending the rules—forcing some impossible streak of luck—and any moment, you’d find out who I really was, and then you’d be gone.”

“She saw in Tandri’s face, composed though it was, that she was awaiting some judgment. Preparing herself for it, to be struck, ignored, or accepted.
And terrified of all three.”

🥺🥺