The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood Quotes

“I was no stranger to grandeur. I had watched my mother curve the water and shape the wind with spell craft. I had grown up in a vast underwater city at least as large as this one. But my mother’s magic felt natural, or at least supernatural”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“The hawthorn tree was right where Mother said it would be: in a clearing just off the road to Camelot, its long limbs reaching for the light, white blossoms falling gently to the forest floor. It looked quiet, innocuous, sleepy in the spring afternoon. But my blood stirred at the sight of it. There’s a trick to seeing through spells, a way of looking and not looking at the same time. I let my gaze unfocus, my vision blur, until I saw it. A glowing rune carved into the trunk. When I took a step closer, the leaves above quivered with a rustle like a human sigh.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“The blood of the Old Ones was unpredictable, Mother had told me once, but it tended to run stronger through the female line. I knew that my skin was pale, like my mother’s, but my hair was the warm brown of the earth above the Lake. And I knew that one day I would be sent to the surface of the Lake, to Camelot, to find Merlin and become his apprentice. I would gain his trust, and I would betray him. My name was Nimue, but Merlin knew the stories as well as my mother, and so he could never know me by that name. To him, I would be Viviane.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“Now that I know how many people there are in the world, I can see how it might have been lonely growing up under the Lake. We lived in the ruins of what must have been a vast civilization, long since sunk beneath the waves. We went to the surface rarely, and always under my mother’s guidance; even then, the nearest villages were many miles away, and in my entire childhood I saw them only a handful of times. But back then, I never thought of it. My whole world was the drowned city, with its crumbling chambers and flooded corridors”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood

“The Lake made a rippling ceiling over our heads, and I would lie dreamily watching the fractured moonlight through the water and the small fish that darted back and forth like the glint of a needle.”
― H.G. Parry, The Witch Below the Dreaming Wood