Theodora’s Reviews > Lullaby for a Lost World > Status Update

Blood and pain and sacrifice and the power of the house—the only true things in a dying world, and what does it matter if not everyone pays them? Only the sick and the weak, or the innocent, or the powerless?

There is no rest. There is no forgiveness. And never, ever, any safety.

“There is always a price to be paid for safety. Don’t you know this, Charlotte?”

“You’ve lived forever.”

Your master grimaces. “It’s not life,” he says at last. “Just . . . a continuation—a stretching of time.”

You are dead, and there are no words left; and no lies that will hold.

She doesn’t want to let go because, when she’s knelt in the blood-spattered mud of the gardens, she will have to get up, she will have to go back, to move on, as though everything she does from now on does not stand in the shadow of your death.