The Black Prism Quotes

You might want to think twice before you try to use a man's conscience against him. It may turn out he doesn't have one.

Moments of beauty sustain us through hours of ugliness.

For I am I: ergo, the truth of myself; my own sphinx, conflict, chaos, vortex—asymmetric to all rhythms, oblique to all paths. I am the prism between black and white: mine own unison in duality.

It's better that the innocent should live than that the guilty die

Delusional people tend to believe in what they're doing.

When you don't know what to do, do what's right and do what's in front of you. But not necessarily what's right in front of you.

Do you know why you feel destined for something greater?” “Why?” Kip asked, quiet, hopeful. “Because you’re an arrogant little shit.

If you looked busy, you could get away with almost anything.

Maybe when you were born on the top of the mountain you could pretend the mountain didn't matter, but those who climbed it and those born at its base who could never climb at all knew differently.

Will covers a multitude of flaws, just as love covers a multitude of sins.

You have to be a little bad to make history.

Light cannot be chained.

And what fun is it being a genius if no one appreciates you?

If embarrassment were a muscle, I'd be huge.

one doesn't interrupt a beautiful girl unless one is going to be funny.

I was a bad child. Fortunately, I’ve come a long way since then. Now I’m a bad man.

I am the stupidest person I have ever met.

Delayed justice was as bad as injustice.

All power is a test.

They knew you had to be stopped. You, Dazen, are the Black Prism.

He wasn’t afraid of death, but he was afraid of dying before he accomplished his purposes.

Charm is less effective on people who have good reason to kick your ass

It was the kind of beauty that made you shit your pants.

Better oblivion chosen of his own will than torture forever according to his brother's.

Sometimes lies are most necessary with our friends.

The world is a better place seen through a prism of colors rather than merely in black and white. In this new world, there is room for versions and variations, for shades of gray.

At some point, you have to decide not merely what you're going to believe, but how you're going to believe. Are you going to believe in people, or in ideas or in Orcholam? With your heart, or with your head? Will you believe what's in front of you, or in what you think you know? There are some things you think you know that are lies. I can't tell you what those are, and I'm sorry for that.

After years of knowing her, a woman’s beauty shouldn’t be able to reach straight into a man’s chest and squeeze the breath out of him. Especially not when he could never have her.

Si tengo que dejar atrás todo lo que amo, me esforzaré para que valga la pena.

They made a deal and they liked the deal, until they had to pay the price.

When the sands were running out of the glass, delayed justice was as bad as injustice.

Tell me, Kip, if you’ve done bad things your whole life, but you die doing something good, do you think that makes up for all the bad?

One must respect black, nothing prostitutes it. It does not please the eye and it awakens no sensuality. It is the agent of the mind far more than the most beautiful color to the palette or prism

As they were walked closer, Kip saw that his inference was correct: every single person here was a drafter. There had to be eight hundred or a thousand drafters here! “Orholam,” Karris breathed. “There must be five hundred drafters here.” So I can’t count, so what?

¿Cuántas veces podía hacerte tanto daño una persona? [...] ¿Cuántos hombres vuelven de la guerra convertidos en mejores personas? Ninguno, por lo visto. ¿Y cuántas mujeres aprenden de sus errores? Esta no.

She was neither white nor black, Fyre nor Aquanite; she was a dame of the White King, and it was up to her, and her alone, to choose what path her life would take.

Uno no emplea un león para acabar con una rata.

Lo peor de todo era que Karris realmente se sentía agradecida. Un poco. Hijo de perra.

Nunca he encajado en ninguna parte. Madre decía que le había arruinado la vida, y ahora voy a arruinar la de Gavin.

sometimes simple precautions worked where more elaborate schemes did not.

The same research I found showing that white people increasingly see the world through a zero-sum prism showed that Black people do not. African Americans just don’t buy that our gain has to come at the expense of white people. And time and time again, history has shown that we’re right.

Because we know ourselves. Because others obey us as though we were gods, and we know we’re not. We see the fragility of our own power, and through it we see the fragility of every other link. What if the Spectrum suddenly refused my orders? Not hard to imagine, when you consider the scheming and lust for power it takes to become a Color. What if a general suddenly refuses his satrap’s orders? What if a son refuses his father’s orders? What if that first link in the Great Chain of being—Orholam Himself—is as empty as every other link before him? Seeing the weakness of each link, we think the Great Chain itself is fragile: surely at any moment it will burst if we don’t do everything in our power to hold it together.

-Trazar se rige por la lógica. Menos cuando no lo hace. Por ejemplo: ver el subrojo equivale a ver el calor, de modo que ver el supervioleta debería equivaler a ver el frío, ¿correcto? -Correcto. -Pero no es así.

No era justo. Después de tantos años, la belleza de una mujer no debería ser capaz de penetrar con tanta impunidad en el pecho de un hombre y de oprimirlo hasta arrebatarle el aliento. Sobre todo cuando jamás podría ser suya.

¿Por qué arrasarían esos dos hombres el mundo entero, de lo contrario? ¿Por tus conocimientos de historia? ¿Por tu aguda conversación? No. Eras una chica bonita embellecida por los bardos en un intento por explicar lo que desencadenaste. No me malinterpretes -añadió-, estaba tan loco por ti que me pasaba las noches en vela. Fuiste mi primer gran amor no correspondido.

How well do you know yourself?” He thought about the years, the goals he’d achieved, and the ultimate goal it was serving. “The Philosopher said that a man alone is either a god or a monster,” Gavin said. “I’m no god.” She stared at him for one moment more, those intense blue eyes unreadable. She smiled. “Well then. Maybe the times call for a monster.” She knelt at his feet, and he blessed her.

And last, thank you to you unshakably curious readers who still read acknowledgments though you aren’t looking for your name. What, the book wasn’t long enough for you? Go on, get outta here and go tell someone, “You gotta read this! No, really. C’mon, there’s a maa-aap.

I allow myself, for the gash of a moment, to remember what I once possessed: the abyssal ocean, the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god; the searing colors moting my sisters' coils, sapphire and quartz crushed into constellations and prisms of incandescence spiraling through the dark, our tails in endless, restless motion; our mother's eyes colossal, phosphorescent; our father's ribs, still studded with our egg sacs, his heartbeat in our veins. I'd been happy there.

I’m not arguing that we deserve more sympathy than other folks. This is not a story about why white people have more to complain about than black people or any other group. That said, I do hope that readers of this book will be able to take from it an appreciation of how class and family affect the poor without filtering their views through a racial prism.

The world is a better place seen through a prism of colors rather than merely in black and white.

It hurts to leave a lie, but it hurts more to live one.

The Philosopher said that a man alone is either a god or a monster. I'm no god.

There’s a reason theory and practice are two different words.

When you don’t know what to do, do what’s right and do what’s in front of you. But not necessarily what’s right in front of you.

I don’t want to kill someone,” Karris said quietly, not meeting his gaze. “Oh, you had that look in your eye—” She looked up and smiled sweetly. “Not someone. I want to kill you.

Is it better that the guilty should perish, or that the innocent should live?

The Blackguards themselves would fight with whatever was at hand: blades, magic, a goblet of wine, or a faceful of sand.

The world isn’t black and white, especially not with you. You’re a prism of color, reflecting every beautiful thing back, and I never want to let that go.

Have you ever wondered if you were the only real person in the world, and everything and everyone else was just your imagination?

a woman is the mystery you’ll never stop investigating.

I don’t understand what?” she asked. Damn it. “You’re light to me.” It slipped out. He couldn’t believe he’d said it out loud. His eyes went wide even before hers did.

Rossz gyerek voltam. Szerencsére azóta sokat változtam. Most már rossz ember vagyok.

- Mennyit fizetek én neked? - Eddig még semmit, Prizma nagyúr. - Na, akkor azt kétszerezd meg!

Another wolf answered, farther out. A haunting sound, the very voice of the wilderness. You couldn’t help but freeze when you heard it. It was the kind of beauty that made you shit your pants.

The young women who’d joined the harvesters had shortened their skirts to make it easier to climb ladders repeatedly. Clearly someone had objected to that. Probably not the young men holding the ladders.

Death and his scythe do not come. No sweeping black capes or ethereal escapes. There’s no pearly gate, no prisms of colors as his soul slips away. The stillness is cold steel. The silence is empty with no memory to mend it.

He couldn’t love as he had loved before. Losing another woman he loved as much as he’d loved Qora would kill him, and it wasn’t fair to ask another woman to act as mother to his daughter if he wasn’t willing to love her with his whole heart. Corvan no longer had a whole heart to give.

And as Bi'ul leaped at him, a shimmering prism of rage, Dairy swung. The world went black for one long moment, and there was only the sound of glass breaking, a glass containing all the oceans in the world, and those oceans held back the fires of a thousand suns, and it all burst forth in one massive wave of power that spread across creation in an instant.

At some point, you have to decide not merely what you’re going to believe, but how you’re going to believe. Are you going to believe in people, or in ideas, or in Orholam? With your heart, or with your head? Will you believe what’s in front of you, or in what you think you know? There are some things you think you know that are lies. I can’t tell you what those are, and I’m sorry for that.

Some people can’t handle power. Some men seem decent until you give them a slave, and soon they’re a tyrant, beating and raping the slave in their charge. Power is a test, Liv. All power is a test. We don’t call it breaking the halo. We call it breaking the egg. You never know what kind of bird is going to be hatched. And some are born deformed and must be put down. That is tragedy, but not murder. Do you think your father could handle a little extra power?

You remind me of my brother. I could never win against him growing up. And when I did, he'd give me some patronizing praise that made me wonder if he'd let me win. You see the cracks in things? Fine. It's proof enough that you're a Guile. Our whole family has it. Including me. Think about this, Kip: there are a lot of problems that would go away for me if I leave that mask on your face until you're dead. You might want to think twice before you try to use a man's conscience against him. It may turn out he doesn't have one.

I allow myself, for the gash of a moment, to remember what I once possessed: the abyssal ocean, the song in those depths like swimming down the black throat of a god; the searing colors moting my sisters' coils, sapphire and quartz crushed into constellations, patterns and prisms of incandescence spiraling through the dark, our tails in endless, restless motion; our mother's eyes colossal, phosphorescent; our father's ribs, still studded with our egg sacs, his heartbeat in our veins. I'd been happy there. I could have been happy there forever.

The very best thing about landing in that grave? Perspective. So I peer through this morning's prism: a science test looming in second period, an a-hole of a coach who probably could have used more childhood therapy than I got, and a tell-tale tampon under my foot. I consider the clawed tiger on the bed, the one wearing the zebra-printed sports bra - the same tiger that every Sunday transforms into the girl who voluntarily walks next door to help sort Miss Effie's medicine into her days-of-the-week pill container. The one who pretended her ankle hurt one day last week so the backup settler on her volleyball team would get to play on her birthday.

Marie Antoinette would have loved this place!" Piper Donovan stood agape, her green eyes opened wide, as she took in the magical space. Crystal chandeliers, dripping with glittering prisms, hung from the mirrored ceiling. Gilded moldings crowned the pale pink walls. Gleaming glass cases displayed vibrant fruit tarts, puffy éclairs, and powdered beignets. Exquisitely decorated cakes of all flavors and sizes rested on pedestals alongside trays of pastel meringues and luscious napoleons. Cupcakes, cookies, croissants, and cream-filled pastries dusted with sugar or drizzled with chocolate beckoned from the shelves. "It's unbelievable," she whispered. "I feel like I've walked into a jewel box---one made of confectioners' sugar but a jewel box nonetheless.

Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never-dying. Pippa herself is the play between those things, both love and not-love, there and not-there. Photographs on the wall, a balled-up sock under the sofa. The moment where I reached to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and she laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky—so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children. Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.

Because between 'reality' on one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And - I would argue as well - all love. Or perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never dying. Pippa herself is the play between those things, both love and not love, there and not there. Photographs on the wall, a balled up sock under the sofa. The moment where I reached out to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly the middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

Because, between 'reality' on one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic. And - I would argue as well - all love. Or perhaps more accurately, this middle zone illustrates the fundamental discrepancy of love. Viewed close: a freckled hand against a black coat, an origami frog tipped over on its side. Step away, and the illusion snaps in again: life-more-than-life, never dying. Pippa herself is the play between those things, both love and not love, there and not-there. Photographs on the wall, a balled up sock under the sofa. The moment where I reached to brush a piece of fluff from her hair and she laughed and ducked at my touch. And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of colour across the sky - so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly the middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.

The masses of dense foliage all round became prison walls, impassable circular green ice-walls, surging towards her; just before they closed in, I caught the terrified glint of her eyes. On a winter day she was in the studio, posing for him in the nude, her arms raised in a graceful position. To hold it for any length of time must have been a strain, I wondered how she managed to keep so still; until I saw the cords attached to her wrists and ankles. Instead of the darkness, she faced a stupendous sky-conflagration, an incredible glacial dream-scene. Cold coruscations of rainbow fire pulsed overhead, shot through by shafts of pure incandescence thrown out by mountains of solid ice towering all round. Closer, the trees round the house, sheathed in ice, dripped and sparkled with weird prismatic jewels, reflecting the vivid changing cascades above. Instead of the familiar night sky, the aurora borealis formed a blazing, vibrating roof of intense cold and colour, beneath which the earth was trapped with all its inhabitants, walled in by those impassable glittering ice-cliffs. The world had become an arctic prison from which no escape was possible, all its creatures trapped as securely as were the trees, already lifeless inside their deadly resplendent armour. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the structure of ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world. Fear was the climate she lived in; if she had ever known kindness it would have been different. The trees seemed to obstruct her with deliberate malice. All her life she had thought of herself as a foredoomed victim, and now the forest had become the malign force that would destroy her. In desperation she tried to run, but a hidden root tripped her, she almost fell. Branches caught in her hair, tugged her back, lashed out viciously when they were disentangled. The silver hairs torn from her head glittered among black needles; they were the clues her pursuers would follow, leading them to their victim. She escaped from the forest at length only to see the fjord waiting for her. An evil effluence rose from the water, something primitive, savage, demanding victims, hungry for a human victim. It had been night overhead all along, but below it was still daylight. There were no clouds. I saw islands scattered over the sea, a normal aerial view. Then something extraordinary, out of this world: a wall of rainbow ice jutting up from the sea, cutting right across, pushing a ridge of water ahead of it as it moved, as if the flat pale surface of sea was a carpet being rolled up. It was a sinister, fascinating sight, which did not seem intended for human eyes. I stared down at it, seeing other things at the same time. The ice world spreading over our world. Mountainous walls of ice surrounding the girl. Her moonwhite skin, her hair sparkling with diamond prisms under the moon. The moon’s dead eye watching the death of our world.

At some point, you have to decide not merely what you're going to believe, but how you're going to believe. Are you going to believe in people , or in ideas, or in Orholam? With your heart, or with your head? Will you believe what's in front of you, or in what you think you know? There are some things you think you know that are lies. I can't tell you what those are, and I'm sorry for that.

Gavin Guile wasn’t just a great man. He was a good man. Kip would do anything for him.

Moments of beauty sustain us through hours of ugliness,

one doesn’t interrupt a beautiful girl unless one is going to be funny.

You might want to think twice before you try to use a man’s conscience against him. It may turn out he doesn’t have one.

When we are confronted with people or individuals who have different values and belief systems, we feel threatened. Our first move is not to understand them but to demonize them—that shadowy Other. Alternatively, we may choose to look at them through the prism of our own values and assume they share them. We mentally convert the Other into something familiar—“they may come from a completely different culture, but after all, they must want the same things we do.” This is a failure of our minds to move outward and understand, to be sensitive to nuance. Everything must be white or black, clean or unclean.

His father curled a finger toward him. “I have need of your gift.” “Why?” His Starborn abilities were little more than a sparkle of starlight in his palm. His shadow talents were the more interesting gift. Even the temperature monitors on the high-tech cameras in this city couldn’t detect him when he shadow-walked. His father held up the prism. “Direct a beam of your starlight through this.” Not waiting for an answer, his father again put an eye to the metal viewing contraption atop the prism. It ordinarily took Ruhn a good amount of concentration to summon his starlight, and it usually left him with a headache for hours afterward, but … He was intrigued enough to try. Setting his index finger onto the crystal of the prism, Ruhn closed his eyes and focused upon his breathing. Let the clicking metal of the orrery guide him down, down, down into the black pit within himself, past the churning well of his shadows, to the little hollow beneath them. There, curled upon itself like some hibernating creature, lay the single seed of iridescent light. He gently cupped it with a mental palm, stirring it awake as he carefully brought it upward, as if he were carrying water in his hands. Up through himself, the power shimmering with anticipation, warm and lovely and just about the only part of himself he liked. Ruhn opened his eyes to find the starlight dancing at his fingertip, refracting through the prism. His father adjusted a few dials on the device, jotting down notes with his other hand. The starlight seed became slippery, disintegrating into the air around them. “Just another moment,” the king ordered. Ruhn gritted his teeth, as if it’d somehow keep the starlight from dissolving. Another click of the device, and another jotted note in an ancient, rigid hand. The Old Language of the Fae—his father recorded everything in the half-forgotten language their people had used when they had first come to Midgard through the Northern Rift. The starlight shivered, flared, and faded into nothing. The Autumn King grunted in annoyance, but Ruhn barely heard it over his pounding head. He’d mastered himself enough to pay attention as his father finished his notes. “What are you even doing with that thing?” “Studying how light moves through the world. How it can be shaped.” “Don’t we have scientists over at CCU doing this shit?” “Their interests are not the same as mine.” His father

[…] many allosexuals perceive us [asexuals] to be lacking because asexual relationships to sex do not align with theirs, with what we have always been told is “normal” and right and required. In their eyes, seeing the world through the prism of compulsory sexuality, asexuals must be lacking in joy and satisfaction, intimacy and connection, emotional intelligence, maturity, sanity, morality, and humanity.

I didn’t think you were much for religion,” Gavin said, trying to inject a bit of levity. “Why would you think that? I speak with Orholam constantly.” “ ‘Orholam, what did I do to deserve this?’ ” Gavin suggested.

but one doesn’t interrupt a beautiful girl unless one is going to be funny.

The veins of Kansans may bleed prisms of Jayhawk blue and red, Wildcat purple, or Shocker black and gold, but our identity as a buffalo state unites all Kansans. By what right though? Our iconic state mammal is extirpated in the wild, and for more than 125 years now we have chosen not to share our wild lands with the buffalo.

the danger at looking at the world through a black-and-white lens is that you miss the grays, and it’s there, in that bleak prism, you find the twists and turns that give reason to the unreasonable, imagination to the unimaginable, and logic to the illogical.

One doesn't sent a lion to kill a rat.

When you don’t know what to do, do what’s right and do what’s in front of you. But not necessarily what’s right in front of you.” The

The Haunt The haunt walks counting the bodies held in cubicle chambers; each night the rattle of his keys reminds one of the living dead who are keyless. The Turnkey continues his nightly watch to ensure none of the living dead commits suicide. To be truly dead is forbidden, unless the State sanctions the kill. This ritual first began as a means of penitence, and Auburn was the first N.Y.S. penitentiary and silence was the means to repentance, silence and reading the bible. Back then, the penitent memorized the portions of the bible: when Cain killed Abel, Joshua’s war on Jericho, and all about Ruth, Mary, and Esther — with little thought of God. Over 100 years, the haunt walks with the sanctimonious sentiments of a sentinel, with self-righteous indignation which the living dead attempt to repel with false braggadocio — but when the lights go out, the sudden screams, and all- night talk to prohibit nightmares — awaiting the dawn — permit the haunt to smile with arrogant knowing. The torture of the night is the haunt’s pleasure, making the rounds smelling the decay of dreams deferred, the putrid stench of justice, like the full bowels of slave ships. Gun towers stand reminiscent of the hanging trees with its strange fruit that the haunt picks at leisure appraising its ripeness in terms of life sentences. As steel bangs against steel, chains clang with the echoes of gangs dressed in strips of day and night, black and white; the fright prohibits flight as jail cells constrict and severely depict the absence of liberty. The haunt of Auburn, year by year decade by decade, in a century has never escaped the nightly count of tormented souls, himself chained to the ball of the imprisoned — a spirit’s horror of lost freedom.

What was going on? The only way to make sense of this exchange is through the prism of cognitive dissonance. Many prosecutors see their work as more than a job; it is more like a vocation. They have spent years training to reach high standards of performance. It is a tough initiation. Their self-esteem is bound up with their competence. They are highly motivated to believe in the probity of the system they have joined. In the course of their investigations, they get to know the bereaved families well and quite naturally come to empathize with their trauma. And they want to believe that in all those long hours spent away from their own families pursuing justice, they have helped to make the world a safer place. Imagine what it must be like to be confronted with evidence that they have assisted in putting the wrong person in jail; that they have ruined the life of an innocent person; that the wounds of the victim’s family are going to be reopened. It must be stomach churning. In terms of cognitive dissonance, it is difficult to think of anything more threatening.

We secretly know that being seen as nice is the same as being nice in actuality. If you present yourself as a nice person, that becomes the prism for how your other actions are judged. The deeper motives that drive you can only be questioned by those who know you exceptionally well, and (most of the time) not even by them. If you act nice, you’re nice.

Blue eyes were blue because they were the deepest,

For once, I allow myself to feel it all. The beautiful, terrible sensation that love is. It explodes like a supernova inside of me, a prism of light erupting in my vision before all things fade to black. If she is death, I am happy to take her hand and walk into the afterlife.

Another wolf answered, farther out. A haunting sound, the very voice of the wilderness.

You want a beautiful woman? That’s what mistresses are for.