Spiral Saw Quotes

And when he was suddenly gone -- no, not just gone, dead in every possible meaning of the word to me because of what he had done -- I found doubt. And what’s more than that, I found my own slow spiral downward into the depths of hell. A world where shadows scared me, and the thought of people with their eyes looking through me, seeing what I really was underneath all of this shine and polish. When one domino falls, others follow and that is where I was. That is where I’d been until yesterday morning, when suddenly I was in the rain, looking out at a sea of those same faces that terrified me and I saw you.

Behind my eyelids, I saw him dancing in spirals of coloured light, emerald, blue, and brilliant purple, enfolding him like the wings of an electric angel.

I face Aurae. “It’s been a journey,” I mumble. “I wanted to say thank you. For bringing us here. For giving me The Path to the Vale. I was spiraling. People have saved my life before, but I think you saved my soul.” “And you saved Cassius’s,” she says. “It wasn’t me that did it. I liked him very much. In another life, I might have loved him. But he didn’t need a woman’s love. He needed a brother’s. The way he talked about you. Well…” Her eyes swim with tears. “Lysander was an obligation. You were an aspiration. He was so afraid on our journey to the Core. So nervous to see you and be rejected. But when he saw you respected him, valued him, he shined like a star. His path led back to you, because you made him feel loved. That is all that matters, Darrow. When he died, he knew he was loved. So when you think of him, when you feel sad, remember that.” She kisses me on the cheek. “If we do not meet again, I will see you in the Vale with Cassius. You know the path.

It was the Tower. The Dark Tower. It stood on the horizon of a vast plain the color of blood in the violent setting of a dying sun. He couldn't see the stairs which spiraled up and up and up within its brick shell, but he could see the windows which spiraled up along that staircase’s way, and saw the ghosts of all the people he had ever known pass through them. Up and up they marched, and an arid wind brought him the sound of voices calling his name.

Mandelbrot saw a seemingly smooth boundary resolve itself into a chain of spirals like the tails of sea horses. The irrational fertilized the rational.

All lost, because one of the galaxy’s many life forms saw all the others as resources to be consumed. It was an attitude all life began with. Some grew out of it.

You do not know him, Alina.” It was the first time she had ever used my name. “But I do.” I stood there watching dark spirals unfurl around her, trying to comprehend what I was seeing. Searching Baghra’s strange features, I saw the explanation clearly written there. I saw the ghost of what must have once been a beautiful woman, a beautiful woman who gave birth to a beautiful son. “You’re his mother,” I whispered numbly. She nodded. “I am not mad. I am the only person who knows what he truly is, what he truly intends. And I am telling you that you must run.” The Darkling had claimed he didn’t know what Baghra’s power was. Had he lied to me? I

Seagulls dove among corpses and survivors alike. Turner later told his son, Norman, that he found himself fending off attacks by the birds, which swooped from the sky and pecked at the eyes of floating corpses. Rescuers later reported that wherever they saw spirals of gulls, they knew they would find bodies. Turner’s experience left him with such a deep hatred of seagulls, according to Norman, “that until his retirement he used to carry a .22 rifle and shoot every seagull he could.

Just then, Toot buzzed back into the apartment from somewhere. He zipped in frantic, dizzying circles, starting at the point he'd last seen Lacuna, until his spiral search pattern took him to the kitchen. Then he swooped down to Lacuna, landing neatly on the counter. I peered at the two little faeries. Toot held out to Lacuna a wrapped watermelon Jolly Ranger, as if he were offering frankincense and myrrh to the Christ child. "Hi!" he said brightly. "I'm Major General Toot-toot!" Lacuna looked up from her food and saw Toot's gift. Her eyes narrowed. And then she sucker punched Toot-toot right in the face. My little bodyguard flew back a couple of feet and landed on his ass. Both of his hands went up to his nose, and he blinked in startled bewilderment. Toot had dropped the Jolly Rancher. Lacuna calmly kicked it into the disposal drain of the kitchen sink. Then she turned her back on Toot, ignoring him completely, and went back to eating her meal. Toot's eyes were even wider as he started at Lacuna. "Wow!" he said.

Disbelievingly, Ben saw that they were canopied by a mass of stars, the Milky Way spiralling above them in the clear summer sky. Nikolas was kissing slowly around Ben’s ear and down his neck in time to their slow steps. In all the years he’d known Nikolas and all the things they’d done together, Ben wondered if this moment was the one he’d remember at the final count of days. It was an occasion for declarations of something, proposals perhaps…A time to say...

He had lived his life as a good father but now Oscar Mendoza saw again his life as a boy. A daughter was a battle between fathers and boys in which the fathers fought valiantly and always lost. He knew that one by one each of his daughter would be lost, either honorably in the ceremony of marriage or, realistically, in a car pointed out towards the ocean well after dark. In his day, Oscar himself had made too many girls forget their better instincts and fine training by biting them with tender persistence at the base of their skull, just where the hairline grew in downy wisps. Girls were like kittens in this way, if you got them right at the nape of their neck, they went easily limp. Then he would whisper his suggestions, all the things they might do together, the wonderful dark explorations for which he was to be their guide. His voice traveled like a drug dripped down the spiraling canals of their ears until they had forgotten everything, until they had forgotten their own names, until they turned and offered themselves up to him, their bodies sweet and soft as marzipan.

He closed his eyes. Found the ridged face of the power stud. And in the bloodlit dark behind his eyes, silver phosphenes boiled in from the edge of space, hypnagogic images jerking past like a film compiled of random frames. Symbols, figures, faces, a blurred, fragmented mandala of visual information. Please, he prayed, now- A gray disk, the color of Chiba sky. Now- Disk beginning to rotate, faster, becoming a sphere of paler gray. Expanding- And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity. Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of the military systems, forever beyond his reach. And somewhere he was laughing, in a white-painted loft, distant fingers caressing the deck, tears of release streaking his face.

with him. As Eragon closed the screen to the bedroom, he saw something in the corner that he had missed during his first inspection: a spiral staircase that wound up a dark wood chimney. Thrusting the lantern before him, he cautiously ascended, one

I would never forget the day you slipped away. A small lift of your chin and our eyes met. I only saw emptiness in a place where a wistful vulnerability used to collide with wonder. Now, a hollowness of a bottomless pit. In your eyes, I'd never seen your shade of green so dim. It caused my stomach to fall into the same somber eclipse, spiraling faster and faster with no end, no walls, only darkness.

She paused; her speech was ever thus. Spirals of deepening particulars, then pauses when she saw she'd strayed from the point.

It was Jaenelle's voice, but... She was medium height, slender, and fair-skinned. Her gold mane--not quite hair and not quite fur--was brushed up and back from her exotic face and didn't hide the delicately pointed ears. In the center of her forehead was a tiny, spiral horn. A narrow strip of gold fur traced her spine, ending in a small gold and white fawn tail that flicked over her bare buttocks. The legs were human and shapely, but changed below the calf. Instead of feet, she had dainty horse's hooves. Her human hands had sheathed claws like a cat's. As she shifted position to slip another shard into place, he saw the small, round breasts, the feminine curve of waist and hips, the dark-gold triangle of hair between her legs. Who...? But he knew. Even before she walked over and looked at him, even before he saw the feral intelligence in those ancient, haunted sapphire eyes, he knew. Terrifying and beautiful. Human and Other. Gentle and violent. Innocent and wise. *I am Witch,* she said, a small, defiant quiver in her voice. *I know.* His voice had a seductive throb in it, a hunger he couldn't control or mask.

The glow lasted through the night, beyond the bar's closing, when there were no cabs on the street. And so Mathilde and Lotto decided to walk home, her arm in his, chatting about nothing, about everything, the unpleasant, hot breath of the subway belching up from the grates. 'Chthonic', he said, booze letting loose the pretension at his core, which she still found sweet, an allowance from the glory. It was so late, there were few other people out, and it felt, just for this moment, that they had the city to themselves. She thought of all the life just underfoot, the teem of it that they were passing over, unknowing. She said, 'Did you know that the total weight of all the ants on Earth is the same as the total weight of all the humans on Earth.' She, who drank to excess, was a little bit drunk, it was true, there was so much relief in the evening. When the curtains closed against the backdrop, an enormous bolder blocking their future had rolled away. 'They'll still be here when we're gone,' he said. He was drinking from a flask. By the time they were home, he'd be sozzeled. 'The ants and the jellyfish and the cockroaches, they will be the kings of the Earth.'... 'They deserve this place more than we do,' she said. 'We've been reckless with our gifts.' He smiled and looked up. There were no stars, there was too much smog for them. 'Did you know,' he said, 'they just found out just a while ago that there are billions of worlds that can support life in our galaxy alone.' ...She felt a sting behind here eyes, but couldn't say why this thought touched her. He saw clear through and understood. He knew her. The things he didn't know about her would sink an ocean liner. He knew her. 'We're lonely down here,' he said, 'it's true, but we're not alone.' In the hazy space after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped like spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they draw near, casting off blue sparks, new stars until they spin past each other, and then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined, never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss, and then at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.

An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep.

Hi, Jared,” she said, leaning out of the window. “Are you brooding?” He was leaning back on the roof, looking up at the sky, at the gray clouds spiraling as if to make steps to climb up to the silver hook that was the moon. His hands were linked behind his head, his body one long lean line. “No, I was about to strip off all my clothes, stand on the edge of the roof, and shout, ‘I’m a golden god,’ ” Jared said. “That’s the cool thing to do at parties; I saw it in a movie. Except I’m afraid that in this town, considering I’m a Lynburn and the worst family trait we have besides the constant murdering is our crushing arrogance, people would take it seriously.” He paused. “Just kidding, I was brooding. Brooding’s my favorite.

It was through this odor that he saw the museums and discovered the mystery and the profusion of baroque genius which filled Prague with its gold magnificence. The altars, which glowed softly in the darkness, seemed borrowed from the coppery sky, the misty sunlight so frequent over the city. The glistening scrolls and spirals, the elaborate setting that looked as if it were cut out of gold paper, so touching in its resemblance to the creches made for children at Christmas, the grandiose and grotesque baroque perspectives affected Mersault as a kind of infantile, feverish, and overblown romanticism by which men protect themselves against their own demons. The god worshipped here was the god man fears and honors, not the god who laughs with man before the warm frolic sea and sun.

Please wait here. "Annoying yet romantic," she said aloud. She sat down on the folding chair and peered inside the paper bag. A handful of tiny jam-filled donuts dusted with cinnamon and sugar sent up an intoxicating scent. The bag was warm in her hands, flecked with little bits of oil seeping through. Luce popped one into her mouth and took a sip from the tiny white cup, which contained the richest, most delightful espresso Luce had ever tasted. "Enjoying the bombolini?" Daniel called from below. Luce shot to her feet and leaned over the railing to find him standing at the back of a gondola painted with images of angels. He wore a flat straw hat bound with a thick red ribbon, and used a broad wooden paddle to steer the boat slowly toward her. Her heart surged the way it did each time she first saw Daniel in another life. But he was here. He was hers. This was happening now. "Dip them in the espresso, then tell me what it's like to be in Heaven," Daniel said, smiling up at her. "How do I get down to you?" she called. He pointed to the narrowest spiral staircase Luce had ever seen, just to the right of the railing. She grabbed the coffee and bag of donuts, slipped the peony stem behind her ear, and made for the steps. She could feel Daniel's eyes on her as she climbed over the railing and slinked down the stairs. Every time she made a full rotation on the staircase, she caught a teasing flash of his violet eyes. By the time she made it to the bottom, he had extended his hand to help her onto the boat. There was the electricity she'd been yearning for since she awoke. The spark that passed between them every time they touched. Daniel wrapped his arms around her waist and drew her in so that there was no space between their bodies. He kissed her, long and deep, until she was dizzy. "Now that's the way to start a morning." Daniel's fingers traced the petals of the peony behind her ear. A slight weight suddenly tugged at her neck and when she reached up, her hands found a find chain, which her fingers traced down to a silver locket. She held it out and looked at the red rose engraved on its face. Her locket!

In the hazy space after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped like spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they draw near, casting off blue sparks, new stars until they spin past each other, and then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined, never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss, and then at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole.

Well," he asked, "whaddya expect?" It was so obviously a rhetorical question that of course I answered it. My truth impulse seemed stronger around this boy,my impulse control way under par. "I would expect you to be dancing." His expression was unreadable in the limited light. "Is that an invitation?" "No. An observation." He shrugged. "Okay. I needed a break. It was either keep an eye on Chase while he pukes up a fifth of cheap rum in the guys' bathroom or follow the girls into the ladies' room." I almost smiled and told him about Willing's bathrooms and me. Instead, some truly horrific and irresistible impulse had me announcing, "Amanda looks really pretty tonight." "So do you." Bizarrely, I felt my breath catch in my chest, and for a long, awful second, I thought I might cry. I gripped the top of my pad tightly, concentrated on the spiral metal binding where it dug into my skin. "It's a cool costume," he said. "Water nymph?" "Sea goddess," I answered quietly. "Roman." "Hmm." Alex was staring out toward the garden now,looking so at ease that I went from pretzel to knot. Could it really be that easy for him? To say things like he did without thinking? Without meaning them at all? "Too many mermaids tonight. Not that I have anything against mermaids.Mermaids are hot. I mean,you saw my drawing." I nodded. "You know," he went on, "that day in the hall,you compared my stuff to two Japanese artists-" I nodded again,even though he was looking out into the darkened gardens now and not at me. "Suzuki Harunobu and Utagawa Kuniyoshi. They were eighteenth and nineteeth-century woodblock print masters-" "Ella," he interrupted. "I know who they are." "Oh." "In fact, I have a couple original Kuniyoshi prints." "Oh.Wow.Wow.

when he was engaged in blue-sky thinking, his science was not a separate endeavor from his art. Together they served his driving passion, which was nothing less than knowing everything there was to know about the world, including how we fit into it. He had a reverence for the wholeness of nature and a feel for the harmony of its patterns, which he saw replicated in phenomena large and small. In his notebooks he would record curls of hair, eddies of water, and whirls of air, along with some stabs at the math that might underlie such spirals. While at Windsor Castle looking at the swirling power of the “Deluge drawings” that he made near the end of his life, I asked the curator, Martin Clayton, whether he thought Leonardo had done them as works of art or of science. Even as I spoke, I realized it was a dumb question. “I do not think that Leonardo would have made that distinction,” he replied.

Have you ever been in a place where history becomes tangible? Where you stand motionless, feeling time and importance press around you, press into you? That was how I felt the first time I stood in the astronaut garden at OCA PNW. Is it still there? Do you know it? Every OCA campus had – has, please let it be has – one: a circular enclave, walled by smooth white stone that towered up and up until it abruptly cut off, definitive as the end of an atmosphere, making room for the sky above. Stretching up from the ground, standing in neat rows and with an equally neat carpet of microclover in between, were trees, one for every person who’d taken a trip off Earth on an OCA rocket. It didn’t matter where you from, where you trained, where your spacecraft launched. When someone went up, every OCA campus planted a sapling. The trees are an awesome sight, but bear in mind: the forest above is not the garden’s entry point. You enter from underground. I remember walking through a short tunnel and into a low-lit domed chamber that possessed nothing but a spiral staircase leading upward. The walls were made of thick glass, and behind it was the dense network you find below every forest. Roots interlocking like fingers, with gossamer fungus sprawled symbiotically between, allowing for the peaceful exchange of carbon and nutrients. Worms traversed roads of their own making. Pockets of water and pebbles decorated the scene. This is what a forest is, after all. Don’t believe the lie of individual trees, each a monument to its own self-made success. A forest is an interdependent community. Resources are shared, and life in isolation is a death sentence. As I stood contemplating the roots, a hidden timer triggered, and the lights faded out. My breath went with it. The glass was etched with some kind of luminescent colourant, invisible when the lights were on, but glowing boldly in the dark. I moved closer, and I saw names – thousands upon thousands of names, printed as small as possible. I understood what I was seeing without being told. The idea behind Open Cluster Astronautics was simple: citizen-funded spaceflight. Exploration for exploration’s sake. Apolitical, international, non-profit. Donations accepted from anyone, with no kickbacks or concessions or promises of anything beyond a fervent attempt to bring astronauts back from extinction. It began in a post thread kicked off in 2052, a literal moonshot by a collective of frustrated friends from all corners – former thinkers for big names gone bankrupt, starry-eyed academics who wanted to do more than teach the past, government bureau members whose governments no longer existed. If you want to do good science with clean money and clean hands, they argued, if you want to keep the fire burning even as flags and logos came down, if you understand that space exploration is best when it’s done in the name of the people, then the people are the ones who have to make it happen.

Watch," he whispered hoarsely. "Watch me make love to you." No power in the heavens could have made her look away as he withdrew- all the way so that she saw the passionate sheen of her body's juices glazing his rod. Her eyes widened. Coarse dark hair mingled with soft, chestnut curls, a sight that was incredibly erotic. Even more erotic was when he plunged again, gliding deeper this time, harder. She couldn't tear her gaze away. She was both amazed and stunned at the way male joined female, feeling the walls of her passage yield- soft tender flesh clinging tight and wanton to hard male steel.Everything inside her went wild. Every part of her was melting, every fiber of her being. With a helpless little moan she caught the sides of his head. She wanted to tell him how wonderful he made her feel. But the power of words had once again deserted her. The pleasure was climbing, spiraling high and fast, taking her by storm. Unable to hold back, her hands slipped to his shoulders. She clutched at him; sensation gathered there, in the very center of her body, the place he possessed so fully. Had she surrendered? Or had he? she wondered vaguely. Eyes closed, she flung her head back. Release was close. She could feel it coming, shivering throughout her body. His head dropped low. He kissed the arch of her throat. "Fionna," he said, his tone almost raw. "Fionna!" Her nails bit into his shoulders. The walls of her channel contracted around him, again and again and again, sending spasms of release hurtling through them both.

President Carter’s re-election campaign in 1979 commenced amid spiralling global oil prices. With Bandar’s help, Carter drafted a letter to Fahd requesting Saudi Arabia to put more oil on the market.69 Fahd responded: ‘Tell my friend, the president of the United States of America, when they need our help, they will not be disappointed.’70 He promised to do ‘anything in his power externally or internally to ensure your re-election’, since this was ‘essential if there was ever to be a just and lasting peace in the Middle East’.71 This assistance, which saw Saudi oil trading $4–5 a day below other suppliers, cost the kingdom $30m to $40m a day. In gratitude, Carter invited Bandar to the White House in early December 1979, where they discussed Middle East politics and the US–Saudi relationship.

When I opened my eyes, we were still surrounded by darkness. A lantern, standing on the ground, showed a bubbling well. The water splashing from the well disappeared, almost at once, under the floor on which I was lying, with my head on the knee of the man in the black cloak and the black mask. He was bathing my temples and his hands smelt of death. I tried to push them away and asked, ‘Who are you? Where is the voice?’ His only answer was a sigh. Suddenly, a hot breath passed over my face and I perceived a white shape, beside the man’s black shape, in the darkness. The black shape lifted me on to the white shape, a glad neighing greeted my astounded ears and I murmured, ‘Cesar!’ The animal quivered. Raoul, I was lying half back on a saddle and I had recognized the white horse out of the PROFETA, which I had so often fed with sugar and sweets. I remembered that, one evening, there was a rumor in the theater that the horse had disappeared and that it had been stolen by the Opera ghost. I believed in the voice, but had never believed in the ghost. Now, however, I began to wonder, with a shiver, whether I was the ghost’s prisoner. I called upon the voice to help me, for I should never have imagined that the voice and the ghost were one. You have heard about the Opera ghost, have you not, Raoul?” “Yes, but tell me what happened when you were on the white horse of the Profeta?” “I made no movement and let myself go. The black shape held me up, and I made no effort to escape. A curious feeling of peacefulness came over me and I thought that I must be under the influence of some cordial. I had the full command of my senses; and my eyes became used to the darkness, which was lit, here and there, by fitful gleams. I calculated that we were in a narrow circular gallery, probably running all round the Opera, which is immense, underground. I had once been down into those cellars, but had stopped at the third floor, though there were two lower still, large enough to hold a town. But the figures of which I caught sight had made me run away. There are demons down there, quite black, standing in front of boilers, and they wield shovels and pitchforks and poke up fires and stir up flames and, if you come too near them, they frighten you by suddenly opening the red mouths of their furnaces … Well, while Cesar was quietly carrying me on his back, I saw those black demons in the distance, looking quite small, in front of the red fires of their furnaces: they came into sight, disappeared and came into sight again, as we went on our winding way. At last, they disappeared altogether. The shape was still holding me up and Cesar walked on, unled and sure-footed. I could not tell you, even approximately, how long this ride lasted; I only know that we seemed to turn and turn and often went down a spiral stair into the very heart of the earth. Even then, it may be that my head was turning, but I don’t think so: no, my mind was quite clear. At last, Cesar raised his nostrils, sniffed the air and quickened his pace a little. I felt a moistness in the air and Cesar stopped. The darkness had lifted. A sort of bluey light surrounded us. We were on the edge of a lake, whose leaden waters stretched into the distance, into the darkness; but the blue light lit up the bank and I saw a little boat fastened to an iron ring on the wharf!” - Chapter 12: Apollo’s Lyre

Hang on, Levon,” said Elf. “Hang on. Are you saying you want to sack Griff because his brother just died in a horrific car crash and he’s too full of grief to play? Seriously?” “I am laying out the facts. Because somebody has to. Or there is no band. Of course we give Griff time. Of course. But you heard Griff. You saw him. It is entirely possible he won’t be back.” “Drummers like Griff don’t grow on trees,” said Elf. “You think I don’t know that?” asked Levon. “I chose him! But a drummer who can’t drum isn’t a drummer. Jasper. Speak.” Jasper drew a spiral on the steamy glass. “Eight days.” “Speak English, not Cryptic Crossword. Please. I have a headache as big as East Anglia.” “My Dutch grandfather used to say, ‘If you don’t know what to do, do nothing for eight days.’ ” Dean asked, “Why eight?” “Less than eight is haste. More than eight is procrastination. Eight days is long enough for the world to shuffle the deck and deal you another hand.” Without warning, the train shuddered into motion. The passengers raised a weary ironic cheer.

Killing a human can’t be that hard!” Cress shouted back. “I just need to speak her real name and command her to die!” His boots thundered down the hall until he reached the crystal spiral staircase. He travelled down three levels into the dark pits of the Silver Castle where the cold morgue prepared faeborn bodies for candlelight ceremonies. When Cress burst into the room, he found it empty of servants. But he saw Whyp. He saw the body of the golden-eyed fairy. His brother assassin. Mor jogged in behind him. “Cress—” “Steal his memories for me,” Cress said. “Just this once, Mor. Do this for me.” “You know I can’t do that.” Moisture filled the Prince’s turquoise eyes when he looked at his friend. “Have you ever done it before?” he asked, and Mor looked like he’d turned to faestone. “Yes. Once,” he said. Cress nodded and marched over to Whyp. “Good,” he said. “Do it, Mor. Please. I’ll never tell a soul that you used your Shadow Fairy gift. I want to see Whyp’s last moments. I want to feel what he felt as his faeborn heart stopped.” “You can’t do anything about it, Cress,” Mor said quietly. “Promise me.” Cress laid his hands along Whyp’s temples. “I can’t even take a breath anymore without the whole North High Court watching me. How could I do something about this?

A ghost curled like a blue snail inside her chest, and it was so tiny! It burned through the lace of her old-fashioned dress like a second heart. A musical staff wound in a thorny crown around the Spiritist's forehead, so that notes ran down her cheeks in a loose mask of song. Her eyelids were blacked out---and I saw this again and again in nightmares about my sister. Her eyelids had the polish of acorns. But her ears: that was the truly scary part. Great fantails of indigo and violet lights spiraled into her earlobes in an ethereal funnel---what the book called the Inverted Borealis. The caption read: 'A ghost sings its way deeply inside the Spiritist.

Whatever the reason, Díaz knew it could wait. At the moment, he had only one task. Apprehend the shooter. As Díaz arrived at the site of the telltale flash, he found a slit in the fabric wall and plunged his hand through the opening, violently tearing the hole all the way down to the floor and clambering out of the dome into a maze of scaffolding. To his left, the agent caught a glimpse of a figure—a tall man dressed in a white military uniform—sprinting toward the emergency exit at the far side of the enormous space. An instant later, the fleeing figure crashed through the door and disappeared. Díaz gave pursuit, weaving through the electronics outside the dome and finally bursting through the door into a cement stairwell. He peered over the railing and saw the fugitive two floors below, spiraling downward

Jd_O wti d-d- God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. -GENESIS 1:31 As we look at life, are we bound to the idea that bad things happen to people? Look at all the bad news on television and radio. The newspapers are full of disasters: people dying of illness, accidents, drownings, fires destroying property, uprisings in countries abroad, and on and on. Do you sometimes ask God, "Why me?" As we look around, we get the idea that everything is falling apart, and our whole world is in a spiral downward. Charles L. Allen expressed this idea about our perspective: Our glasses aren't half-empty; they are really half-full. He says, It seems to be a general belief that the will of God is to make things distasteful for us, like taking medicine when we are sick or going to the dentist. Somebody needs to tell us that sunrise is also God's will. In fact, the good things in life far outweigh the bad. There are more sunrises than cyclones. His glass was certainly half-full. There's a story of a young boy who was on top of a pile of horse manure digging as fast and as hard as he could. His father, seeing his son work so hard on a pile of smelly waste, asked, "Weston, what are you doing on that pile of horse manure?" Weston replied, "Daddy, with this much horse manure there must be a pony here somewhere." This son certainly had his glass half-full. You, too, can choose to be positive in all events of life. There is goodness in everything-if we will only look for it. PRAYER Father God, thank You for helping me be a positive person. I appreciate You giving me

The shadow-Saphira looped over the city, lighting several buildings on fire. As she did, a flock of arrows shot up from archers stationed on a nearby rooftop. The apparition swerved to avoid the darts and, seemingly by accident, crashed into one of the six green elf towers scattered throughout Urû’baen. The collision looked perfectly real. Eragon winced with sympathy as he saw the dragon’s left wing break against the tower, the bones snapping like stalks of dry grass. The imitation Saphira roared and thrashed as she spiraled down to the streets. The buildings hid her after that, but her roars were audible for miles around, and the flame she seemed to breathe painted the sides of the houses and lit the underside of the stone shelf that hung over the city. I would never have been so clumsy, sniffed Saphira. I know.

IN THE HAZY SPACE after he died, when she lived in a sort of timeless underground grief, she saw on the Internet a video about what would happen to our galaxy in billions of years. We are in an immensely slow tango with the Andromeda galaxy, both galaxies shaped as spirals with outstretched arms, and we are moving toward each other like spinning bodies. The galaxies will gain speed as they near, casting off blue sparks, new stars, until they spin past each other. And then the long arms of both galaxies will reach longingly out and grasp hands at the last moment, and they will come spinning back in the opposite direction, their legs entwined but never hitting, until the second swirl becomes a clutch, a dip, a kiss. And then, at the very center of things, when they are at their closest, there will open a supermassive black hole. —

That means we don’t exist in one place. Instead, everything we do is left in … like a trail out there, a big ring of decisions. Every action we take—” “And mistake.” He nodded and dabbed at his forehead with his sleeve. “And every mistake. But every good thing we do as well. They are immortal, every single touch we leave behind. Even if nobody sees them or remembers them, that doesn’t matter. That trail will always be what happened, what we did, every choice. The past lives on forever. There’s no changing it.” “Makes you not want to fuck up,” Juliette said, thinking on all the times she had, wondering if this box between them was one more mistake. She saw images of herself in a great loop of space: fighting with her father, losing a lover, going out to clean, a great spiral of hurts like a journey down the stairs with a bleeding foot. And the stains would never wash out. That’s what Lukas was saying. She would always have hurt her father. Was that the way to phrase it? Always have had. It was immortal tense. A new rule of grammar. Always have had gotten friends killed. Always have had a brother die and a mother take her own life. Always have had taken that damn job as sheriff. There was no going back. Apologies weren’t welds; they were just an admission that something had been broken. Often between two people. “You okay?” Lukas asked. “Ready to go on?” But she knew he was asking more than if her arm was tired. He had this ability to spot her secret worries. He had a keen vision that allowed him to glimpse the smallest pinprick of hurt through heavy clouds. “I’m fine,” she lied. And she searched her past for some noble deed, for a bloodless tread, for any touch on the world that had left it a brighter place. But when she had been sent to clean, she had refused. Always have had refused. She had turned her back and walked off, and there was no chance of going back and doing it any other way. ••••

I'm sorry I looked. Or saw, I guess. I didn't go digging through your book. The pages fell out." "Yeah. I kinda figured that might have been what happened." He scuffed one heel against the cement. "The book fell out of my bag again...and,well..." And,well, there he was,forgiven. "Zippers," I said. "One of mankind's better inventions. Your bag has one; I've seen it." "You see much, Grasshopper." I blinked at him. "C'mon. Kung Fu?" He let go of his knees and sliced both hands through the air in a choppy spiral. "Shaolin monk fighting against injustice while searching for his long-lost brother in the Old West?" I shook my head. "Nope.Sorry."" "Sad. I bet you wouldn't recognize 'Live long and prosper,' either." "Nope." "How did I know? My dad got me into seventies TV.It's awfully brilliant. Or brilliantly awful, maybe." He had relaxed and was looking monumentally pleased with seventies television or himself or something. You're awfully beautiful, Alex Bainbridge. I managed to keep that one to myself,but... "You're really good." That one got away from me. "Your drawing, I mean.

Finally, he allowed me to turn the key in the lock and the front door, with its porthole-shaped window, swung open. I don’t know what I’d expected. I’d tried not to conjure up fantasies of any kind, but what I saw left me inarticulate. The entire apartment had the feel of a ship’s interior. The walls were highly polished teak and oak, with shelves and cubbyholes on every side. The kitchenette was still located to the right where the old one had been, a galley-style arrangement with a pint-size stove and refrigerator. A microwave oven and trash compactor had been added. Tucked in beside the kitchen was a stacking washer-dryer, and next to that was a tiny bathroom. In the living area, a sofa had been built into a window bay, with two royal blue canvas director’s chairs arranged to form a “conversational grouping.” Henry did a quick demonstration of how the sofa could be extended into sleeping accommodations for company, a trundle bed in effect. The dimensions of the main room were still roughly fifteen feet on a side, but now there was a sleeping loft above, accessible by way of a tiny spiral staircase where my former storage space had been. In the old place, I’d usually slept naked on the couch in an envelope of folded quilt. Now, I was going to have an actual bedroom of my own. I wound my way up, staring in amazement at the double-size platform bed with drawers underneath. In the ceiling above the bed, there was a round shaft extending through the roof, capped by a clear Plexiglas skylight that seemed to fling light down on the blue-and-white patchwork coverlet. Loft windows looked out to the ocean on one side and the mountains on the other. Along the back wall, there was an expanse of cedar-lined closet space with a rod for hanging clothes, pegs for miscellaneous items, shoe racks, and floor-to-ceiling drawers. Just off the loft, there was a small bathroom. The tub was sunken with a built-in shower and a window right at tub level, the wooden sill lined with plants. I could bathe among the treetops, looking out at the ocean where the clouds were piling up like bubbles. The towels were the same royal blue as the cotton shag carpeting. Even the eggs of milled soap were blue, arranged in a white china dish on the edge of the round brass sink.

And then she caught the song. She fell upon it and music poured from the fiddle’s hollow, bright and liquid like fire out of the heart of the earth. Pierre-Jean drew back and stood mesmerized. The room around Fin stirred as every ear bent to the ring of heartsong. It rushed through Fin and spread to the outermost and tiniest capillary reaches of her body. Her flesh sang. The hairs of her arms and neck roused and stood. She sped the bow across the strings. Her fingers danced on the fingerboard quick as fat raindrops. Every man in the room that night would later swear that there was a wind within it. They would tell their children and lovers that a hurricane had filled the room, toppled chairs, driven papers and sheets before it and blew not merely around them but through them, taking fears, grudges, malice, and contempt with it, sending them spiraling out into the night where they vanished among the stars like embers rising from a bonfire. And though the spirited cry of the fiddle’s song blew through others and around the room and everything in it, Fin sat at the heart of it. It poured into her. It found room in the closets and hollow places of her soul to settle and root. It planted seeds: courage, resolve, steadfastness. Fin gulped it in, seized it, held it fast. She needed it, had thirsted for it all her days. She saw the road ahead of her, and though she didn’t understand it or comprehend her part in it, she knew that she needed the ancient and reckless power of a holy song to endure it. She didn’t let the music loose. It buckled and swept and still she clung to it, defined it in notes and rhythm, channeled it like a river bound between mountain steeps. And a thing happened then so precious and strange that Fin would ever after remember it only in the formless manner of dreams. The song turned and spoke her name—her true name, intoned in a language of mysteries. Not her earthly name, but a secret word, defining her alone among all created things. The writhing song spoke it, and for the first time, she knew herself. She knew what it was to be separated out, held apart from every other breathing creature, and known. Though she’d never heard it before and wouldn’t recall it after, every stitch of her soul shook in the passage of the word, shuddered in the wake of it, and mourned as the sound sped away. In an instant, it was over. The song ended with the dissonant pluck of a broken string.

They were all joking about the party at my place when they walked away. As I uncapped my drink, I noticed Michael was hanging back a bit. “Got something on your mind?” I called out, gesturing at him with my chin. He was a good player, he worked hard on the field, and I respected him. I got the feeling, though, that I wasn’t going to like what he wanted to say. I could tell by the hesitation in his face and body language. He probably disagreed with some of the plays I wanted to try tonight and didn’t want to piss me off in fear I would freeze him out on the field. But I wasn’t like that. I left personal shit in the locker room. There was no room for drama in the game. He walked back over in front of me as he adjusted the strap on his shoulder. “I’m not sure I should say anything.” “Just say it, man. It’s cool.” “I saw your girl this morning.” He started, and everything in me went cold. This wasn’t about football. This was personal. “You looking at Rimmel?” I asked, my voice calm and low. His eyes widened a little, but he shook his head. “No, man. I probably wouldn’t have known it was her, but she was wearing your hoodie.” I nodded for him to continue. “She was in the hall, outside her class,” he said, glancing at me. He needed to get to the fucking point already. I was losing patience. “That guy Zach was with her. It looked pretty intense.” I jerked upright. “What?” I growled. What the fuck was Rimmel doing with Zach? Why was he talking to her? “He was grabbing her arm. Jerking her around pretty good.” Red tinged my vision and adrenaline started pumping in my veins. “What did you just say?” Michael nodded grimly. “It’s why I noticed them. He grabbed her and she cried out. She told him to let go, but he just jerked her more. She almost fell.” A noise rumbled out of my chest and anger so swift and hot that it hurt filled me. “Tell me you pulled him off her,” I intoned. “I was going to. I called out to them and started forward, but that’s when he let her go and walked away.” I was going to kill him. Dead. “I asked her if she was okay. I don’t think she knew I’m on the team with you.” “Probably not,” I muttered, still trying to control the anger spiraling out of control inside me. “She said she was.” He continued, but I heard the doubt in his voice. “But?” The word came out harsher than I intended, but he didn’t seem to notice. “But her wrist was pretty red. Looked like it was going to bruise.” Thought ceased in my head. Rationality evaporated. “Thanks for telling me,” I said and rushed away in the opposite direction of my next class.

Tub full, she stood back to regard the mound of ice. Already the heat of her home fought to melt it. A rap came again at the entrance, more like an impatient pounding, and she cursed. The clock showed her only a few minutes away from her torture. I need whoever it is to go away. She ran to the door and slid open the peek-a-boo slot. Familiar turquoise eyes peered back. “Little witch, little witch, let me come in,” he chanted in a gruff voice. A smile curled her lips. “Not by the wart on my chinny chin chin,” she replied. “And before you try huffing and puffing, Nefertiti herself spelled this door. So forget blowing it down.” “So open it then. I’ve got a lead I think on escapee number three.” A glance at the clock showed one minute left. “Um, I’m kind of in the middle of something. Can you come back in like half an hour?” “Why not just let me in and I’ll wait while you do your thing? I promise not to watch, unless you like an audience.” “I can’t. Please. Just go away. I promise I’ll let you in when you come back.” His eyes narrowed. “Open this door, Ysabel.” “No. Now go away. I’ll talk to you in half an hour.” She slammed the slot shut and only allowed herself a moment to lean against the door which shuddered as he hit it with a fist. She didn’t have time to deal with his frustration. The tickle in her toes started and she ran to the bathroom, dropping her robe as she moved. The fire erupted, and standing on the lava tile in her bathroom, she concentrated on breathing against the spiraling pain and flames. I mustn’t scream. Remy might still be there, listening. Why that mattered, she couldn’t have said, but it did help her focus for a short moment. But the punishment would not allow her respite. Flames licked up her frame, demolishing her thin underpants and she couldn’t help but scream as the agony tore through her body. Make it stop. Make it stop. Wishing, praying, pleading didn’t stop the torture. As the inferno consumed her, her ears roared with the snap of the fire and a glance in her mirror horrified her, for there she stood – a living pyre of fire. She closed her eyes against the brilliant heat, but that just seemed to amplify the pain. Her knees buckled, but she didn’t fall. Something clasped her and she moaned as she sensed more than saw Remy’s arms wrap around her waist. It had to be him. Who else was crazy enough to break down her door and interrupt? Forcing open her eyes, eyes that wanted to water but couldn’t as the heat dried up all moisture, she saw the flames, not picky about their choice her own nightmare, she knew enough to try and push him away with hands that glowed inferno bright. He wouldn’t budge, and he didn’t scream – just held her as the curse ran its course. Without being told, once the flames disappeared, he placed her in the ice bath, the shocking cold a welcome relief. Gasping from the pain, she couldn’t speak but remained aware of how he stroked her hair back from her face and how his arm rested around her shoulders, cradling her. “Oh, my poor little witch,” he murmured. “No wonder you’ve been hiding.” Teeth chattering as the cold penetrated her feverish limbs, she tried to reply. “Wh-what c-c-can I say? I’m h-h-hot.” -Remy & Ysabel

I glanced over and saw Wyatt glaring at me. Journey’s “Lovin’ Touchin’, Squeezin’” was playing on the radio. “What?” I asked. “You secretly hate me, don’t you.” He gestured toward the radio. “You can’t stand the thought of me taking a much needed nap and leaving you to drive without conversation. You’re torturing me with this sappy stuff.” “It’s Journey. I love this song.” Wyatt mumbled something under his breath, picked up the CD case, and started looking through it. He paused with a choked noise, his eyes growing huge. “You’re joking, Sam. Justin Bieber? What are you, a twelve-year old girl?” There’s gonna be one less lonely girl, I sang in my head. That was a great song. How could he not like that song? Still, I squirmed a bit in embarrassment. “A twelve-year old girl gave me that CD,” I lied. “For my birthday.” Wyatt snorted. “It’s a good thing you’re a terrible liar. Otherwise, I’d be horrified at the thought that a demon has been hanging out with a bunch of giggling pre-teens.” He continued to thumb through the CDs. “Air Supply Greatest Hits? No, no, I’m wrong here. It’s an Air Supply cover band in Spanish.” He waved the offending CD in my face. “Sam, what on earth are you thinking? How did you even get this thing?” “Some tenant left it behind,” I told him. “We evicted him, and there were all these CDs. Most were in Spanish, but I’ve got a Barry Manilow in there, too. That one’s in English.” Wyatt looked at me a moment, and with the fastest movement I’ve ever seen, rolled down the window and tossed the case of CDs out onto the highway. It barely hit the road before a semi plowed over it. I was pissed. “You asshole. I liked those CDs. I don’t come over to your house and trash your video games, or drive over your controllers. If you think that will make me listen to that Dubstep crap for the next two hours, then you better fucking think again.” “I’m sorry Sam, but it’s past time for a musical intervention here. You can’t keep listening to this stuff. It wasn’t even remotely good when it was popular, and it certainly hasn’t gained anything over time. You need to pull yourself together and try to expand your musical interests a bit. You’re on a downward spiral, and if you keep this up, you’ll find yourself friendless, living in a box in a back alley, stinking of your own excrement, and covered in track marks.” I looked at him in surprise. I had no idea Air Supply led to lack of bowel control and hard core drug usage. I wondered if it was something subliminal, a kind of compulsion programmed into the lyrics. Was Russell Hitchcock a sorcerer? He didn’t look that menacing to me, but sorcerers were pretty sneaky. Even so, I was sure Justin Bieber was okay. As soon as we hit a rest stop, I was ordering a replacement from my iPhone.

But that is a lie! Here we have been breaking our backs for years at All-Union hard labor. Here in slow annual spirals we have been climbing up to an understanding of life—and from this height it can all be seen so clearly: It is not the result that counts! It is not the result—but the spirit! Not what—but how. Not what has been attained—but at what price. And so it is with us the prisoners—if it is the result which counts, then it is also true that one must survive at any price. And what that means is: One must become a stool pigeon, betray one’s comrades. And thereby get oneself set up comfortably. And perhaps even get time off sentence. In the light of the Infallible Teaching there is, evidently, nothing reprehensible in this. After all, if one does that, then the result will be in our favor, and the result is what counts. No one is going to argue. It is pleasant to win. But not at the price of losing one’s human countenance. If it is the result which counts—you must strain every nerve and sinew to avoid general work. You must bend down, be servile, act meanly—yet hang on to your position as a trusty. And by this means . . . survive. If it is the essence that counts, then the time has come to reconcile yourself to general work. To tatters. To torn skin on the hands. To a piece of bread which is smaller and worse. And perhaps . . . to death. But while you’re alive, you drag your way along proudly with an aching back. And that is when—when you have ceased to be afraid of threats and are not chasing after rewards—you become the most dangerous character in the owllike view of the bosses. Because . . . what hold do they have on you? You even begin to like carrying hand barrows with rubbish (yes, but not with stone!) and discussing with your work mate how the movies influence literature. You begin to like sitting down on the empty cement mixing trough and lighting up a smoke next to your bricklaying. And you are actually and simply proud if, when the foreman passes you, he squints at your courses, checks their alignment with the rest of the wall, and says: “Did you lay that? Good line.” You need that wall like you need a hole in the head, nor do you believe it is going to bring closer the happy future of the people, but, pitiful tattered slave that you are, you smile at this creation of your own hands. The Anarchist’s daughter, Galya Venediktova, worked as a nurse in the Medical Section, but when she saw that what went on there was not healing but only the business of getting fixed up in a good spot—out of stubbornness she left and went off to general work, taking up a spade and a sledge hammer. And she says that this saved her spiritually. For a good person even a crust is healthy food, and to an evil person even meat brings no benefit.

Permanent Revolution THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. Today, the earth’s continents are home to billions of Sapiens. If you took all these people and put them on a large set of scales, their combined mass would be about 300 million tons. If you then took all our domesticated farmyard animals – cows, pigs, sheep and chickens – and placed them on an even larger set of scales, their mass would amount to about 700 million tons. In contrast, the combined mass of all surviving large wild animals – from porcupines and penguins to elephants and whales – is less than 100 million tons. Our children’s books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees – in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.1 Ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity. As we saw in the previous chapter, the resources available to humankind are constantly increasing, and are likely to continue to do so. That’s why doomsday prophesies of resource scarcity are probably misplaced. In contrast, the fear of ecological degradation is only too well founded. The future may see Sapiens gaining control of a cornucopia of new materials and energy sources, while simultaneously destroying what remains of the natural habitat and driving most other species to extinction. In fact, ecological turmoil might endanger the survival of Homo sapiens itself. Global warming, rising oceans and widespread pollution could make the earth less hospitable to our kind, and the future might consequently see a spiralling race between human power and human-induced natural disasters. As humans use their power to counter the forces of nature and subjugate the ecosystem to their needs and whims, they might cause more and more unanticipated and dangerous side effects. These are likely to be controllable only by even more drastic manipulations of the ecosystem, which would result in even worse chaos. Many call this process ‘the destruction of nature’. But it’s not really destruction, it’s change. Nature cannot be destroyed. Sixty-five million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, but in so doing opened the way forward for mammals. Today, humankind is driving many species into extinction and might even annihilate itself. But other organisms are doing quite well. Rats and cockroaches, for example, are in their heyday. These tenacious creatures would probably creep out from beneath the smoking rubble of a nuclear Armageddon, ready and able to spread their DNA. Perhaps 65 million years from now, intelligent rats will look back gratefully on the decimation wrought by humankind, just as we today can thank that dinosaur-busting asteroid. Still, the rumours of our own extinction are premature. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world’s human population has burgeoned as never before. In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens.

Ghost shook his head as he sat on the very edge of the bed, poised to take flight if need be. The spiral under his hair felt warm, almost painful, but he resisted the urge to rub it. It never helped when he did, and he was not sure what Gerry would do if the man saw it. The Witch had a symbol she called a triskele, the ink a vivid scarlet still, but no male that had ever come for healing bore a mark like hers, or like his. He had never found the words to ask the Witch about it, about why he was marked like a witch.

With gnashing, bloody teeth and bulging, dead eyes, she slithered toward me, one foot dragging behind the other. I screamed in horror as I plunged backward and dove headlong into the abyss that was the spiraling stairway. My head cracked on the mahogany treads several times during my descent, and one eye exploded from its socket before I landed in a crumpled, broken heap at the bottom of the stairs. With my one good eye, I saw her standing in the shadows at the top of the stairs, and I heard the unpleasant shrillness of uncontrollable laughter.

I had come by then to be conscious of this aspect of slave lives: at one and the same time the masters held contrary beliefs about those they bought into their homes, viz., It did not matter what a slave saw and so behaviour that the masters would be ashamed to even have rumoured about them was carried forward unchecked in front of their slaves; and at the same time they protested: how dare you, a slave, look at us as we do thus or thus?

Flung down a preliminary mile of steep descent, choked in between soaring walls of rock four hundred yards apart, innumerable crystal tons rushed down ninety feet in one magnificent plunge. You saw the long bent crest—shimmering with the changing colors of a peacock's back—smooth as a lake when all winds sleep; and then the mighty river was snuffed out in gulfs of angry gray. Capricious river draughts, sucking up the damp defile, whipped upward into the blistering sunlight gray spiral towers that leaped into opal fires and dissolved in showers of diamond and pearl and amethyst.

During the downward spirals, Hank would go to the brink, then pull himself back in the nick of time. He did it so many times that he probably made the fatal mistake of thinking he could always do it

The beat of things, their steady direction, had dissolved into nothing–this room wasn't happening then, it isn't happening now; maybe it's a dream of what's going to happen or what will happen never. The sound of her own voice injures her like a shock of electricity through her ears, but screaming herself to hoarse exhaustion is the only reprieve from breathing. She looked up out of her voice and saw the angel. He will have ears like a cartoon of organic growth. He is yellow with light but covered with mobile shadows, animated tattoos. His face kept changing. His voice will come from far off, like a train's. His body is steady and beautiful and hairless, the wings white, incinerating, and pure, but the head changes rapidly–the head of an eagle, a goat, an insect, a mouse, a sheep with spiraling horns that turn and lengthen almost imperceptibly–and the entire message had no words. The entire message will be only the beat and direction of time. Yes is Now. The angel who says "It's time." "Is it time?" she asked. "Does it hurt?" He will have the most beautiful face she has ever seen. "Oh babe." The angel starts to cry. "You can't imagine," he said.

The Success to the Successful dynamic was spotted long before Monopoly and Sugarscape came along. Two thousand years ago, the notion that ‘the rich get richer and the poor get poorer’ was noted in the Bible and hence came to be known as ‘the Matthew Effect’. Its tell-tale pattern of accumulative advantage, coupled with spiralling disadvantage, can be seen in children’s educational outcomes, in adults’ employment opportunities, and of course in terms of income and wealth. And that financial dynamic is certainly alive today. Between 1988 and 2008, the majority of countries worldwide saw rising inequality within their borders, resulting in a hollowing out of their middle classes. Over those same 20 years, global inequality fell slightly overall (mostly thanks to falling poverty rates in China), but it increased significantly at the extremes. More than 50 percent of the total increase in global income over that period was captured by just the richest 5 percent of the world’s population, while the poorest 50 percent of people gained only 11 percent of it.38

It was the clouds I saw first. Enormous clouds drifting in the cobalt sky, soft and magnanimous, still tinged by the rose remnants of sunrise, their round edges gilded with the golden light. The dewy freshness of morning lingered in the balmy air as we peered up at the mountain-palace spiralling into the heavens above. If the palace above the Court of Nightmares had been crafted of moonstone, this was made from... sunstone. I didn't have a word for the near-opalescent golden stone that seemed to hold the gleaming of a thousand sunrises within it. Steps and balconies and archways and verandas and bridges linked the towers and gilded domes of the palace, periwinkle morning glories climbing the pillars and neatly cut blocks of stone to drink in the gilded mists wafting by. Wafting by, because the mountain on which the palace stood... There was a reason I beheld the clouds first.

Watergate dismayed Scalia. He saw in it the personal tragedy of Nixon but also the accelerating spiral of Western spiritual decline, in an age already debased by Vatican II, the counterculture, Radical Chic.

Sophie saw a spiral staircase as she emerged from the kitchen and quickly climbed it. She was in a dangerous man's domain and didn't know where the stairs would take her. She had no idea where to even begin looking for her heart. All she knew was that she had impossible task ahead of her, and that the only way to finish such a task was to start it.

For Leonardo, the spiral form was the archetypal code for the ever-changing yet stable nature of living forms. He saw it in the growth patterns of plants and animals, in curling locks, in human movements and gestures, and above all in the swirling vortices of water and air. The movement of water is the grand unifying theme in Leonardo’s science of living forms. Water is the life-giving element flowing through the veins of the Earth and the blood vessels of the human body. It nourishes and sustains all living bodies. Its forms, like theirs, are fluid and always varying. It is a major source of power and for eons has shaped the surface of the living Earth, gradually turning arid rocks into fertile soil. With its infinite variety of form and movement—as rivers and tides, clouds and rain, cascades and currents, eddies and whirlpools—water flows through Leonardo’s art and interlinks the main fields of his science.

I could almost feel its heat on my back. Luckily, I made it to the spiral path and started running upward. As I ran, I looked down and saw that the angry cube was just hopping in place down there in the center.

i’ve always known why i incarnated into this existence. even though my soul didn’t wanna come here, a duty needed to be fulfilled (i’m a baby soul). i saw this manifest through my art and soul ova journey. the work evolved with “lady leader” and quarterly healing challenges. unfortunately, i stopped following the coordinates and wandered, about, a bit. the wandering brought on a ton of suffering. i descended into the abyss of depression that tried to swallow me into the -other-dimension that was at war with where i came from. it took a minute to crawl out of the spiral of stygian darkness. the spiral that continues to beckon from down below.

Through her window, I saw a blacked-out Hummer barrel through the red light. I sucked in a breath to scream at her, but I was too slow. It all happened at once. The Hummer didn't even attempt to slow as it plowed straight into the side of Bree's car and pushed us across three lanes of traffic. Our car spun, then dislodged from the front grill of the Hummer. We spiraled out of control for several gut-wrenching turns until finally we came to a screeching, crunching halt. Everything hurt. My ears rang and my face stung from the airbag deploying. Pain throbbed through my skull, sharp agony slicing through my neck with every breath. But... I was still alive. I was still conscious. That had to be a good sign, right?

But the Douglas, with his denser body, leaps and glides in hidden strength, seemingly as independent of common muscles as a mountain stream. He threads the tasseled branches of the pines, stirring their needles like a rustling breeze; now shooting across openings in arrowy lines; now launching in curves, glinting deftly from side to side in sudden zigzags, and swirling in giddy loops and spirals around the knotty trunks; getting into what seem to be the most impossible situations without sense of danger; now on his haunches, now on his head; yet ever graceful, and punctuating his most irrepressible outbursts of energy with little dots and dashes of perfect repose. He is, without exception, the wildest animal I ever saw,—a fiery, sputtering little bolt of life, luxuriating in quick oxygen and the woods’ best juices.

The time had come to deploy for the attack, and Commander Fuchida had a difficult decision to make. The plan provided for either “Surprise” or “Surprise Lost” conditions. If “Surprise,” the torpedo planes were to go in first, then the horizontal bombers, finally the dive-bombers, while the fighters remained above for protection. (The idea was to drop as many torpedoes as possible before the smoke from the dive-bombing ruined the targets.) On the other hand, if the raiders had been detected and it was “Surprise Lost,” the dive-bombers and fighters would hit the airfields and antiaircraft defenses first; then the torpedo planes would come in when resistance was crushed. To tell the planes which deployment to take, Commander Fuchida was to fire his signal gun once for “Surprise,” twice for “Surprise Lost.” Trouble was, Commander Fuchida didn’t know whether the Americans had caught on or not. The reconnaissance planes were meant to tell him, but they hadn’t reported yet. It was now 7:40 A.M., and he couldn’t wait any longer. They were already well down the west coast and about opposite Haleiwa. Playing a hunch, he decided he could carry off the surprise. He held out his signal pistol and fired one “black dragon.” The dive-bombers began circling upward to 12,000 feet; the horizontal bombers spiraled down to 3500; the torpedo planes dropped until they barely skimmed the sea, ready for the honor of leading the assault. As the planes orbited into position, Fuchida noticed that the fighters weren’t responding at all. He decided that they must have missed his signal, so he reached out and fired another “black dragon.” The fighters saw it this time, but so did the dive-bombers. They decided it was the second “black dragon” of the “Surprise Lost” signal. Hence, they would be the ones to go in first. In a welter of confusion, the High Command’s plan for carefully integrated phases vanished; dive-bombers and torpedo planes eagerly prepared to slam into Pearl Harbor at the same time.

How to reconcile the strangeness of an adult’s intellect and experience wrapped up in a hatchling’s body? Or now, as her mood spun on a wingtip, endlessly unpredictable, for she began to dance first with some of the aerial movements Grandion himself had taught her, then very quickly modifying and expanding upon those as the desire to express herself became irrepressible and she spiralled about the much larger Dragons, calculating at an ever more furious pace. He could no longer follow her thoughts, for they sparked off in effervescent spirals far quicker even than her dance; one second she was battling Numistar, the next he saw spin-offs of an eggling-dream and a memory of her mother’s reaction to the Reaving and here was a Dragon Rider Academy with Elki at its head, a place where Dragons and Humans learned freely together, and another flash-memory of Imbalance detected and pondered through at least fourteen separate vectors … and she danced with him in courtship and saw him slough free of the volcanic lake beside the monastery building, sleek and gleaming of gemstone scales, snatching her breath from her chest … and she charged into battle with him against ten thousand two-headed Dragons – what had become of that scourge of the East? Now, she recounted the nth detail of the shield constructs which, laced in soul-shadowing grief, had composed the paean of his honour-offering for his slain father, Sapphurion. A flicker of insight saw those constructs modified and enriched, while she simultaneously visited with the filthy Maroon Dragoness, Ianthine, and recalled her bedazzling, hypnotic power which had so nearly opened the path to slaying Azziala. The Empress would not be surprised like that again. Then, Grandion’s mind hurtled out of her orbit, overwhelmed. He clutched hopefully at the fireflies of her thoughts.

forms that are found in Nature are the result of motion, and embodied movement, not stasis; similarly, movements found in Nature enact forms, not structures. The great biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Thompson saw form as inseparable from the energy involved in the processes which generate it.16 We have already seen that many flows in Nature are vortices, and that self-organising and self-promulgating patterns of complexity and beauty – fractals, spirals, lǐ-formations – are everywhere in the world, both organic and inorganic. The spiral is an expression of dynamism (DNA is the ‘betweenness

The forms that are found in Nature are the result of motion, and embodied movement, not stasis; similarly, movements found in Nature enact forms, not structures. The great biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Thompson saw form as inseparable from the energy involved in the processes which generate it.16 We have already seen that many flows in Nature are vortices, and that self-organising and self-promulgating patterns of complexity and beauty – fractals, spirals, lǐ-formations – are everywhere in the world, both organic and inorganic. The spiral is an expression of dynamism (DNA is the ‘betweenness’ of two spirals), where the circle is an expression of stasis.17 In the spiral, the end point of each turn does not

Let's get her outside,' Charlton said, motioning with his hands to the door. The woman stepped outside and saw the Germans lined up on the road. Her face turned red and she began to talk faster, her hands on her hips as she spat at the prisoners. 'We should give her a rifle and put her in the company,' Williams said, watching as the woman berated the Germans who shrank back from her anger. 'Take care of the prisoners and see that this woman is, ah,' Charlton paused, searching for the right word. 'Safe.' 'I wouldn't fear for her sir, it's poor old Fritz I'm worried about,' Williams replied, laughing as the woman slapped the short German, sending his glasses spiralling to the floor. 'Indeed,' Charlton said, turning and hurrying back along the road to the village.

draw that brought them to that moment. As soon as he saw her that first time, he knew there was nothing he could do to stop himself.  Not that he really wanted to.  He knew he shouldn’t do it. He knew every thought, every breath, every movement, every touch, every last moment weren’t right. No one needed to tell him that. No one needed to lecture him or get through to him. He knew. It wasn’t a question or hesitation. He simply didn’t care that it was wrong. It was what he wanted. What he needed. But it was only supposed to be that one time.  He wasn’t going to let himself fall into that deep well of fantasy and fulfillment any more than that. Once was a taste, a dip that washed over him and quelled the endless gnawing need. Another time and he might drown.  But no matter how much he told himself that, no matter how many times he promised it, the need rose up again. Only this time, it was more than just the urge. It wasn’t just the fantasy. He had experienced it now. It wasn’t thought or imagination. It wasn’t just a feverish dream that left him lying awake. That wasn’t enough to make it irresistible.  It was the reaction of the people around him. Before he gave in the first time, he wondered what it would be like to walk out of that room and back into the reality of his regular life. To step out of the pages of a fantasy and back into his neatly organized and structured datebook. How would people look at him? Would they be able to tell? As soon as it was done, would there be a change that came over him, letting anyone who came close to him sense the shift? And afterwards, he watched. He waited for the reaction and gauged everyone around him. He watched how people looked at him, some with hope, others with something close to suspicion. There were moments, singular seconds that hung, frozen in the flow of a day, when he thought for sure somebody knew. That they heard something or saw something. That he slipped and wasn’t holding it all in as well as he thought he was. But those passed. Everyone knew something had changed with her. There was no question in their minds about that. They just didn’t know what it was. There were so many questions, but none of them swirled over to him, and somehow that just made the hunger stronger. He didn’t know if it was because he was going undetected and could continue his easy walk through his day-to-day life, or if it was because he was enjoying watching the reaction and wondering if it would change if he did it again. Would another dip down that well alter what people were thinking? Will it build up on him until it became so obvious no one would look past him anymore? It was only weeks later he found himself moving down that spiral again.  As it had before, it started with a look.  This time, it wasn’t in sunlight.  A chill wind whipped up, sending red and gold leaves

I have been to Mont Saint-Michel, which I had not seen before. What a sight, when one arrives as I did, at Avranches toward the end of the day! The town stands on a hill, and I was taken into the public garden at the extremity of the town. I uttered a cry of astonishment. An extraordinarily large bay lay extended before me, as far as my eyes could reach, between two hills which were lost to sight in the mist; and in the middle of this immense yellow bay, under a clear, golden sky, a peculiar hill rose up, sombre and pointed in the midst of the sand. The sun had just disappeared, and under the still flaming sky the outline of that fantastic rock stood out, which bears on its summit a fantastic monument. At daybreak I went to it. The tide was low as it had been the night before, and I saw that wonderful abbey rise up before me as I approached it. After several hours’ walking, I reached the enormous mass of rocks which supports the little town, dominated by the great church. Having climbed the steep and narrow street, I entered the most wonderful Gothic building that has ever been built to God on earth, as large as a town, full of low rooms which seem buried beneath vaulted roofs, and lofty galleries supported by delicate columns. I entered this gigantic granite jewel which is as light as a bit of lace, covered with towers, with slender belfries to which spiral staircases ascend, and which raise their strange heads that bristle with chimeras, with devils, with fantastic animals, with monstrous flowers, and which are joined together by finely carved arches, to the blue sky by day, and to the black sky by night.

I have been to Mont Saint-Michel, which I had not seen before. What a sight, when one arrives as I did, at Avranches toward the end of the day! The town stands on a hill, and I was taken into the public garden at the extremity of the town. I uttered a cry of astonishment. An extraordinarily large bay lay extended before me, as far as my eyes could reach, between two hills which were lost to sight in the mist; and in the middle of this immense yellow bay, under a clear, golden sky, a peculiar hill rose up, sombre and pointed in the midst of the sand. The sun had just disappeared, and under the still flaming sky the outline of that fantastic rock stood out, which bears on its summit a fantastic monument. At daybreak I went to it. The tide was low as it had been the night before, and I saw that wonderful abbey rise up before me as I approached it. After several hours’ walking, I reached the enormous mass of rocks which supports the little town, dominated by the great church. Having climbed the steep and narrow street, I entered the most wonderful Gothic building that has ever been built to God on earth, as large as a town, full of low rooms which seem buried beneath vaulted roofs, and lofty galleries supported by delicate columns. I entered this gigantic granite jewel which is as light as a bit of lace, covered with towers, with slender belfries to which spiral staircases ascend, and which raise their strange heads that bristle with chimeras, with devils, with fantastic animals, with monstrous flowers, and which are joined together by finely carved arches, to the blue sky by day, and to the black sky by night. When I had reached the summit, I said to the monk who accompanied me: “Father, how happy you must be here!” And he replied: “It is very windy, Monsieur;

And with that, he stepped out from the darkness of the tunnel mouth to find himself in a kind of cave; the air was warm with sandalwood, and nutmeg, and allspice, and cardamom, and the Moths were all around him. For a moment, Tom was breathless with the beauty of the Midnight Folk. In the semi-darkness, their wings shone with a faint luminescence and their skin gleamed with unearthly tattoos, like something under black light. Their hair was braided with feathers and rags, and all of them seemed to be covered with a powdery dust that twinkled and shone against their skin, setting the shadows darkly aflame. And all around them lay a pattern of those vivid tracks, as if the luminescence could be transferred to their surroundings by touch; each set of prints a different shade in troubled, alien colors. Instinctively, he looked for Charissa's colors in the crowd. But she was nowhere to be seen. Instead, he was surrounded by the dangerous shine of the enemy. He saw them only in slices of light against the velvet darkness. The tip of a wing; the gleam of an eye; the mystic spiral of a tattoo that seemed to move across the skin.

Hi, Jared,” she said, leaning out of the window. “Are you brooding?” He was leaning back on the roof, looking up at the sky, at the gray clouds spiraling as if to make steps to climb up to the silver hook that was the moon. His hands were linked behind his head, his body one long lean line. “No, I was about to strip off all my clothes, stand on the edge of the roof, and shout, ‘I’m a golden god,’ ” Jared said. “That’s the cool thing to do at parties; I saw it in a movie. Except I’m afraid that in this town, considering I’m a Lynburn and the worst family trait we have besides the constant murdering is our crushing arrogance, people would take it seriously.” He paused. “Just kidding, I was brooding. Brooding’s my favorite.” “I know the ambiance isn’t as good as a starry night overlooking your shadowed town, but might you consider coming down and brooding on a bar stool?

The repetition of the days did something to you. You knew the monotony, but you couldn't fight it. You had to invent your own repetitions to meet it. A ritual. This early, barely awake kneeling was hers. She looked deep into the black of her closed eyes. Stared into the dark. When your sense of vision has very little stimulation, it invents images. Sarah doesn't know the name for this is the Prisoner's Cinema. It is a trick of the mind, blindness turned into glorious sight. Isolation turned into hallucination. After enough time, she saw a series of lights. The false images are called phosphenes, which means "show of lights." But all Sarah knew was that it gave her vibrant colors of great depth, and patterns like a mosaic, like a tiled church floor or sometimes like the spiral of a shell. These visions would not absolve her of her time, her duty, and her deeds. Instead these visions took her through the limits of who she was and what she had done, and for this she felt gratitude, and with this, at last, consolation.

The twist of the stairs tightened; the carpet beneath their galloping feet gave way to boards; a door presented itself with a simpler, barer flight of staircase beyond. Glancing back down the well, Smith saw beneath the spiral of astonished faces tilted up at him that there was a commotion in the hall now, with shouts and banging, but that, judging by the banging, the door to the street had not been opened. Not yet, anyway. Up the next flight. Oilcloth, plain wood, a child’s wooden horse: a nursery. Past a nurse with a babe in arms that began, reliably, to bawl. Last flight: up among the eaves, servants’ bedrooms, grey plaster, cold air, truckle beds. Along a mean corridor, Septimus counting along the rooms on their right. Last room. Door of plain pine. Door locked from inside. Septimus rapped on it. No answer but a faint, sickly groan.

God created the world in the way that he saw fit, and humans should not question the divinely appointed order. All wisdom literature, not just Job, develops this theme (e.g., Is 40:28- 29). Human beings must take their proper place in the cosmos, find their appointed life and make the most of it.

Kill somethin’,” he muttered out of the corner of his mouth. “Right now?” I hissed. “Do it,” Haragh urged. “He thinks you’re weak.” I looked around at the angry ogres all towering beyond Aurora’s ring of flames, and as much as I wanted to avoid being eaten by Grot, I didn’t think killing one of his ogres would strictly get things off on the right foot. Then I saw another of the black birds swooping overhead, and I pulled my revolver out to take my aim. I waited a few seconds until the bird circled back to where I wanted him, and when I fired a bullet into his chest, the body came spiraling down and crashed into the mud directly in front of Grot. Another batch of mud boiled up as everyone stared at the carcass, and I holstered the revolver. “I came for the feast,” I informed the leader. “Smooth,” Haragh mumbled. We both waited as we carefully gauged Grot’s reaction, and I could see the leader’s bloody brown eyes staring down at the huge bird for what felt like an eternity. When he finally looked up, his wrinkly expression was completely unreadable, and he looked at me like this for a full minute before slowly sizing up the women at my back. Then he let out a low growl that was so bassy I could feel it resonating in my chest. “Ye’ kill for Grot?” he suddenly roared as he bared his teeth, and every ogre in the mob snarled their disapproval. I didn’t even have to glance at Haragh to know the look he was sending me was wide-eyed and loaded, but I just crossed my arms and held the leader’s gaze. “Hell, no,” I growled back. “That’s my kill. Get your own.

He saw the thing the shell of gray paper had concealed. Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind's eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, revealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien.

The dream of the death spiral. The ants I saw once in Costa Rica. There was a circle in the sand. The swirling black swirl. Thousands and thousands of ants, all running together in an endless circle. Blindly, they follow each other, each one fixed on the trail of pheromones of the ant in front of them. Running in circles and circles. Running towards death. A closed circle. A snake biting its tail. A symbol of futility. Trapped in their circle, the ants keep running around - desperate, stupid, doomed.

A hole in a hole in a hole—Numberphile Around the World in a Tea Daze—Shpongle But what is a partial differential equation?—Grant Sanderson, who owns the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel Closer to You—Kaisaku Fourier Series Animation (Square Wave)—Brek Martin Fourier Series Animation (Saw Wave)—Brek Martin Great Demo on Fibonacci Sequence Spirals in Nature—The Golden Ratio—Wise Wanderer gyroscope nutation—CGS How Earth Moves—vsauce I am a soul—Nibana

And sometimes, when I find that sweet solitude, I hear warnings about isolation. Some summers, when I was alone in the wilderness, content in my tiny trailer at the edge of the lake, I would not speak to or see another human being for weeks. There, I could slow it all down. I felt the power of life being lived around and within me. I became like a sun warmed rock in the centre of the stream. The water parted around me, eddied in spirals, and flowed on, gently wearing away all my sharp edges. Once, a man who is my lover and friend, I wanted to be more, came to see me there unexpectedly. I had just split an arm load of wood and was carrying it into the trailer as he appeared. He stayed only briefly. Later he told me, “When I came down the driveway and saw you standing there with the wood in your arms, your face glowing from the wind off the lake and the effort of chopping wood, I thought, ‘She belongs to this place. She’s at home here, alone in the bush. She’s not missing me, doesn’t need me here.’ I felt like an intruder.” His observation surprised me. I heard the voice of my mother warning, “You are too independent. Don’t get too good at being alone or you’ll end up by yourself. Everyone needs someone.” Her fear finds a small corner in me, but I resist the idea that I will be with another only to avoid being alone. Surely, the ability to truly be with myself does not exclude the willingness to fully be with another. I do not seek isolation. The longing for another remains even when I am able to be with myself, although it is smaller, a whisper that tugs at me gently. Even there, in my place of solitude in the wilderness, I found myself at moments wanting to turn to someone and share my awe at the brilliance of the full moon on the still water, the delight of watching otters playing at the edge of the stream. But the loneliness was bittersweet and bearable because I knew myself and the world in a way I sometimes do not when I let my life become too full of doing things that do not really need to be done.

Cameron looked down long enough to end the call. When she returned her attention to the road, something large and black was in her path. A shriek escaped from her clenched jaw as she jammed on the brakes. The tiny car skidded perilously, and she was certain she’d be spiraling into the abyss at any second. Instead she smashed straight into the immovable object, deploying the car’s airbags. That was the last thing she saw before everything went black.

Artifact As long as I can remember you kept the rifle-- your grandfather's an antique you called it- in your study, propped against the tall shelves that held your many books. Upright, beside those hard-worn spins, it was another backbone of your pas, a remnant I studied as if it might unlock-- like the skeleton key its long body resembled-- some door i had yet to find. Peering into the dark muzzle, I imagined a bullet as you described: spiraling through the bore and spinning straight for its target. It did not hit me then: the rifle I'd inherited showing me how one life is bound to another, that hardship endures. For years I admired its slender profile, until-- late one night, somber with drink--you told me it still worked, that you kept it loaded just in case, and I saw the rifle for what it is; a relic sharp as sorrow, the barrel hollow as regret.

Dumbledore had already crossed the crenellated ramparts and was dismounting; Harry landed next to him seconds later and looked around. The ramparts were deserted. The door to the spiral staircase that led back into the castle was closed. There was no sign of a struggle, of a fight to the death, of a body. “What does it mean?” Harry asked Dumbledore, looking up at the green skull with its serpent’s tongue glinting evilly above them. “Is it the real Mark? Has someone definitely been — Professor?” In the dim green glow from the Mark, Harry saw Dumbledore clutching at his chest with his blackened hand.

more defenseless than you can have dreamed of finding me, and still you have not acted. . . .” Malfoy’s mouth contorted involuntarily, as though he had tasted something very bitter. “Now, about tonight,” Dumbledore went on, “I am a little puzzled about how it happened. . . . You knew that I had left the school? But of course,” he answered his own question, “Rosmerta saw me leaving, she tipped you off using your ingenious coins, I’m sure.” “That’s right,” said Malfoy. “But she said you were just going for a drink, you’d be back. . . .” “Well, I certainly did have a drink . . . and I came back . . . after a fashion,” mumbled Dumbledore. “So you decided to spring a trap for me?” “We decided to put the Dark Mark over the tower and get you to hurry up here, to see who’d been killed,” said Malfoy. “And it worked!” “Well . . . yes and no . . .” said Dumbledore. “But am I to take it, then, that nobody has been murdered?” “Someone’s dead,” said Malfoy, and his voice seemed to go up an octave as he said it. “One of your people . . . I don’t know who, it was dark. . . . I stepped over the body. . . . I was supposed to be waiting up here when you got back, only your Phoenix lot got in the way. . . .” “Yes, they do that,” said Dumbledore. There was a bang and shouts from below, louder than ever; it sounded as though people were fighting on the actual spiral staircase that led to where Dumbledore, Malfoy, and Harry stood, and Harry’s heart thundered

I WOULD NEVER FORGET the day you slipped away. A small lift of your chin and our eyes met. I only saw emptiness in a place where a wistful vulnerability used to collide with wonder. Now, a hollowness of a bottomless pit. In your eyes, I’d never seen your shade of green so dim. It caused my stomach to fall into the same somber eclipse, spiraling faster and faster with no end, no walls, only darkness. And then you averted your gaze. The flesh from my bones, the blood in my veins, the oxygen in my lungs, all of it crumbled, breaking into small pieces yet still holding on by a thread—the thread was my heart. It pumped on auto-pilot as if it couldn’t associate with the rest of my body. It’s thumping sounded in my ears, and I wished it would stop, but my heart was not ready to let go. It continued with the same steady beat, refusing to give up what was right in front of me. Maybe your eyes will return to mine, I thought—well, prayed. And I waited. Two seconds passed. Then three—waiting as my body weakened from your disconnection, and my heart continued to pump. Four. And then your back was to me. Whatever we’d had no longer existed, but I remembered everything clearly, and it wasn’t fair. Could I have accepted the hollow look in your eyes over the wonder? Surely, anything you had to offer would be better than nothing. If only you had turned back around. Had you even noticed me? And then you took a step in the opposite direction. You were gone, left in obscurity and I couldn’t bring you back, but my heart still maintained a steady beat, pumping along to a rhythm of crimson hope. “Stay with me,” you had said over and over. Who would have thought you would be the one to take a step into oblivion? I’m screaming now, can you hear me?Why didn’t you stay with me? I didn’t get to kiss you goodbye. You were gone, and even though you were only twenty feet away, I missed you. It was entirely possible you’d wake up and turn back around, or I’d wake up. Either way, it was a nightmare. I forced my eyes closed. I couldn’t watch you walk away, each step drawing more distance and less of a chance of you coming back. The darkness was better, anyway, and if I held my lids closed tight, I could see stars. I focused on the yellow and orange horizon behind my eyelids, pretending it was a sunset through the bitterness. The only warmth was the water gathering in the corners of my eyes. The tears struggled for a moment, fighting the same lie as my beating heart. I wished I could switch places with you, because I didn’t deserve a world once blessed by your light, and you didn’t deserve this at all. But this is what I deserved. In the beginning, I’d thought you’d be fun, and I’d thought I could leave you effortlessly. It was me who ripped hearts out, but now mine was the one bleeding. The walls surrounding me had been durable, indestructible, before you. And with no more walls, and no more you, I was slowly suffocating. When it came down to you and me, I’d never thought you’d be the one to slip away.

On January 8, 1959, Fidel made his grand entrance into Havana. With his son Fidelito at his side, he rode on top of a Sherman tank to Camp Columbia, where he gave the first of his long, rambling, difficult-to-endure speeches. It was broadcast on radio and television for the entire world to witness. For the Cubans it was what they had waited for! During the speech, smiling Castro asked Camilo Cienfuegos, “How am I doing?” and the catch phrase “Voy bien, Camilo” was born. The following Christmas the celebrations were exceptional and made up for the drab Christmas of 1958. There were great expectations on the part of the Cuban people, but most of these expectations would be shattered in the years to come. In the United States, people saw things differently. “Kangaroo trials” of Batista’s followers, ending with their executions, infuriated Americans who couldn’t believe what was happening on what they considered a happy island. Members of the U.S. Congress held formal hearings, interviewing exiled Cubans known as Batistianos. The result was that in the United States, people began to rally against Castro and in Cuba, people saw the United States as presumptuous and overbearing. Eisenhower treated Fidel with contempt and Nixon did not hide the fact that he disliked the Cuban leader. It was this combination of events that led Cuban-American relations into a diplomatic downhill spiral, from which the two countries have just now started to emerge. Without American backing, Cuba turned to Communism and looked to the Soviet Union for support. The results that followed should have been expected and were the consequences of American arrogance and Cuban misplaced pride.

He stood on the summit, his legs planted wide apart, leaning back against space. He looked at the materials before him, the knobs of rivets in steel, the sparks in blocks of stone, the weaving spirals in fresh, yellow planks. Then he saw a husky figure enmeshed in electric wires, a bulldog face spreading into a huge grin and china-blue eyes gloating in a kind of unholy triumph.

The little man in black had stopped speaking at last and resumed his seat. Harry waited for somebody else to get to their feet; he expected speeches, probably from the Minister, but nobody moved. Then several people screamed. Bright, white flames had erupted around Dumbledore’s body and the table upon which it lay: Higher and higher they rose, obscuring the body. White smoke spiraled into the air and made strange shapes: Harry thought, for one heart-stopping moment, that he saw a phoenix fly joyfully into the blue, but next second the fire had vanished. In its place was a white marble tomb, encasing Dumbledore’s body and the table on which he had rested. There were a few more cries of shock as a shower of arrows soared through the air, but they fell far short of the crowd. It was, Harry knew, the centaurs’ tribute: He saw them turn tail and disappear back into the cool trees. Likewise, the merpeople sank slowly back into the green water and were lost from view. Harry looked at Ginny, Ron, and Hermione: Ron’s face was screwed up as though the sunlight were blinding him. Hermione’s face was glazed with tears, but Ginny was no longer crying. She met Harry’s gaze with the same hard, blazing look that he had seen when she had hugged him after winning the Quidditch Cup in his absence, and he knew that at that moment they understood each other perfectly, and that when he told her what he was going to do now, she would not say, “Be careful,” or “Don’t do it,” but accept his decision, because she would not have expected

The light travelers felt the familiar tingling and vibrational pull at the top of their heads, and the great rush of cool air pressed in on them. The familiar green fluorescent geometric shapes and symbols collided with their vibrating bodies. As the third spiral drew them up, it dissolved into very fine hair-like ribbons of light that seemed to meld into all things, all time, all space. The teens realized they had access to all knowledge—past, present, future. Using her intent Drew, asked to see the inside of the South Portal at Aramu Muru. In the next second she saw a clash of light and dark, distorted inhuman faces, hellacious other-worldly images.

You didn’t even take a drink, did you?” “I did so.” Falco shook the container again. “I don’t believe you.” Cass leaned in toward him and blew gently in his face. “See? You can smell that ghastly poison on my breath.” Falco sniffed the air. “All I smell is canal water, and a hint of flowers, probably from whatever soap you use on your hair.” He put his face very close to Cass’s, reached out, and tilted her chin toward him. “Try again.” Her lips were mere inches from his. Cass struggled to exhale. Her chest tightened as the air trickled out of her body. She noticed a V-shaped scar beneath Falco’s right eye. She was seized by an irrational urge to touch her lips to the small imperfection. “What about now?” she asked. Falco brushed a spiral of hair from her freckled cheek and touched his forehead to hers. “One more time?” He closed his eyes. He reached up with one of his hands and cradled the back of her head, pulling her toward him. He was going to kiss her. She was going to let him. Falco’s face blurred in the darkness as he closed the distance between them. And then…it wasn’t Falco she was about to kiss. It was Luca. She lunged backward in her seat, causing the gondola to lurch to one side. Falco’s eyes snapped open. “What happened?” Cass had no idea what to say. “I--I thought I saw something,” she stammered out. Falco glanced around, as if reaffirming that it would be impossible to see anything in the blackness under the bridge. “A vampire?” His voice was thick with sarcasm.

I genuinely believe that there are people from my past who would feel closer to me, perhaps even trust me more, if they witnessed me unraveling in a way that society often finds strangely endearing. If they saw me weeping into a glass of whisky, acting like a fool, picking fights, or spiraling into a tearful drunken mess—losing all sense of self-control—I’m convinced it would make me more relatable in their eyes. Maybe if I went further, crashing cars, getting into trouble with the law, and ending up locked up for the night, some might finally see me as more human, more approachable. The truth is, I’ve always found these states in others to be exhausting, awkward, and embarrassingly dull, yet I can’t shake the feeling that there are those who would cherish a glimpse of me in such a state, if only to know that I too can fall apart. I am truly grateful that I don't live that life anymore but I am only ever a drink away from going back there.

A unicorn stepped onto the path. Kiela gasped. Caz breathed, "Whoa." It was like moonlit water, so bright that tears sprang into Kiela's eyes as she looked at it. Shaped like a dreamer's idea of a horse, the unicorn was slender and graceful--- closer to a line drawing than an in-the-flesh creature. Its neck curved like a wave, with its mane as the sea foam. The longer Kiela looked at it, the more she saw that it wasn't as white as the moon, it was iridescent, like mother-of-pearl, with purples and reds and blues that swirled through its silvery white hide. Its horn was a slender spiral of gold. It regarded them with ocean-blue eyes.