Whispered Ink Quotes

Mine,” he whispered against my mouth. He kissed me again. “You are mine.” In the shadows I stared into the eyes of a vampire, grazed his mouth with my finger. “No, you‟re mine.

Oh my God..." Xhex's heart stopped as she looked at him in the mirror. Across his upper back, in a glorious spread of black ink...in a declaration that didn't whisper but shouted...in a billboard-size front with flourishes... Her name in the Old Language.

Leslie?" Irial whispered. "What are you doing?" "Choosing." Tears were soaking the blanket under Leslie's face. "I'm mine. Not anyone else's." "I'm still yours, though. That won't ever change, Shadow Girl." And then he was gone, and her emotions crashed over her.

I used to dream only of fire and ash," he whispered, running a thumb over my cheek as I lifted my face to meet his gaze. "Now when I close my eyes, all I see is your face.

It was full of whispered words, the lure of stories waiting to be read, a rustle of promise that hung in the air. How many adventures were hidden here in paper and ink, how many great love stories, how many epic battles?

Lincoln closed his eyes. It seemed like the right thing to do, no matter what happened next. He closed his eyes and felt her fingertips touching his cheek, then his forehead, then his eyelids. He took a breath--ink and hand soap. "I" -- he heard her whisper, closer than he expected, and shaky and strange -- "think I might be a very stupid girl." He shook his head no. Just barely. So that only someone who was holding his cheek and his neck would notice. "Yes," she said, sounding closer. He didn't move, didn't open his eyes. What if he opened his eyes and she saw what she was doing? She kissed his cheek, and he let his head tip forward into her hands. She kissed his other cheek. And his chin. The groove below his bottom lip. "Stupid girl," she said near the corner of his mouth, sounding incredulous, "what could you possibly be thinking?" Lincoln found his mouth. "Perfect girl," he said so quietly that only someone with her hands in his hair and her lips all but touching his could possibly hear. "Pretty girl." He found her mouth. "Perfect." Kiss. "Magic." Kiss. "Only girl.

<…>….That's how he made his living. He gave me a pen and ink. This," he lifted his left arm then dropped it back to the bed. "After he died, I had it inked on me. Took what he gave me to a tattoo parlor right after the funeral and got it started." Her voice held a tone of light dawning as she whispered, "So he was your Ella." Her light dawned clear for her and for Walker because she was right. "Yeah, he was my Ella." "So it was Tuku who brought out my Ty." My Ty. My Ty. Christ. Fuck. Christ. Two words. Just two words. Walker had no clue until that moment that two words could mean so fucking much. He'd never belonged to anyone. He'd never belonged anywhere. Never thought he wanted to. Until he heard those two words. He couldn't keep the thick out of his voice when he confirmed, "Yeah, it was him."<…>

I love you,” I whispered into his suit. My words had life, and weight, and a pulse. I said them again. “I love you, Dad. I love you. I love you. I love you.” He lifted me up like I was a little girl, spinning me in place and burying his nose in my hair. Tears rolled down our faces. The pen bled the last of its ink, marking this page in our lives forever in my father’s office. I knew, with certainty that made my heart swell, that he was not going to replace that carpet. He was going to look at it every day, remember the day it had happened, and cherish it. “I love you, too, baby girl.

It was dangerous to go back, at least for him, to even think of those days when he was too young and had no way to save the dying. He could only whisper to them, tell them not to be afraid, and that someday, he would avenge them.

I'm not happy," she whispered. "I don't know what I am, but this isn't happiness.

Don't be afraid to make corrections! Whether the voice came from her memory or was a last whisper from the blinding new star far above, Nita never knew. But she knew what to do. While Kit was still on the first part of the name she pulled out her pen, her best pen that Fred had saved and changed. She clicked it open. The metal still tingled against her skin, the ink at the point still glittered oddly- the same glitter as the ink with which the bright Book was written. Nita bent quickly over the Book and with the pen, in lines of light, drew from the final circle an arrow pointing up-ward, the way out, the symbol that said change could happen- if, only if-

The dead no longer existed. Except in story. Some stories were modest in scale, existing in a single family or a small community of believers who whispered among themselves so their loved ones would not be forgotten. Others were so powerful they would transform the very fabric of the world.

Dear reader who finds this, if I am gone, My name is Jinny I lived here on this island. I loved it. I stayed. I held on. Then, after a pause, Jinny added a line. She'd never be able to write it in ink, bit it was there all the same, a ghost in the letter. As she slid the piece of paper into her pocket, she whispered it aloud. I held on Too long.

Nothing in life that’s worth having ever is,” I whispered, leaning over and kissing him.

I thought I could bring you out here, talk to you, comfort you,” he said, his voice strained. He leaned closer. “But all I can think of is being inside of you.” He kissed me, dragged his lips across my jaw, then back. “And staying inside of you,” he whispered against my lips. “I‟m comforted, so let‟s go,

Kiyo, what would you do if all of a sudden I weren't here any more?' Satoko asked, her words coming in a rushed whisper. This was a long-standing trick of Satoko's for disconcerting people. Perhaps she achieved her effects without conscious effort, but she never allowed the slightest hint of mischief into her tone to put her victim at ease. Her voice would be heavy with pathos at such times, as though confiding the gravest of secrets. Although he should have been inured to this by now, Kiyoaki could not help asking: 'Not here any more? Why?' Despite all his efforts to indicate a studied disinterest, Kiyoaki's reply betrayed his uneasiness. It was what Satoko wanted. 'I can't tell you why,' she answered, deftly dropping ink into the clear waters of Kiyoaki's heart...

I wonder. If I had you wear that mask today, Anne, would you find the courage to tell me what is troubling you?"  Anne would very much have liked to confide in her father, but where in the world would she begin?  He leaned over and whispered in her ear. "I will tell you a secret, my dear. All of my children are shy. They have simply learned the art of wearing masks.

I imagine my love breathing with the lungs of all things and it reaches me as poetry of roses or dust speaks softly to everything and whispers its news to the universe the way the wind and sun do when they split nature’s breast or pour the ink of day on the earth’s book from “Beginnings of the Body, Ends of the Sea

I’m lying on Cash’s chest, tracing his tattoo. “What does this mean?” I whisper. “It’s the Chinese symbol for awesome,” he teases lightly. I giggle. “If it’s not, which I imagine it isn’t, then it should be.” “Are you paying me a compliment? I just want to be sure, so I don’t miss it.” I slap his ribs. “You make it sound like I’m mean and horrible because I don’t throw myself at your feet.” “You don’t have to throw yourself at my feet. Although if you want to, I’m sure I can think of something for you to do while you’re down there.” I look up at him and he’s waggling his eyebrows again. “I’m sure you could.” Shaking my head, I settle back onto his chest and resume tracing the ink shapes. “Seriously, what do they mean?” Cash is quiet for so long I begin to think he’s not going to answer me. But then he finally speaks. “It’s a collage of things that remind me of my family.

Rest," he whispers against my temple, and despite my sleepiness, the feel of his lips moving across my skin makes me shiver. "I'll be here when you wake up." "Oh, God," I mumble, sliding my arm over Eli's chest and snuggling close. "Have we become that old couple that doesn't have sex anymore?" Eli's chuckle rumbles against my ear. "We had sex this morning." "Okay," I say already being pulled into slumber.

My love lies across linen sheets, snow white beneath cream coloured flesh an expanse of gentle curves,two rosy buds a dimple of a navel a dark thatch of curls I can describe her beauty And spill precious ink to tell of her goodness But to express my love... Come to my arms, and I'll whisper words I dare not write. How you could damn ore save me with just a word Let me love you with my body the sacred dance of one My Julia

Esme slowly turned the picture over, her hands beginning to tremble again. Inscribed across the back of the photograph, in a woman’s elegant script, were two words. The ink might have faded, but the sentiment would surely endure forever. Dix’s strong, warm arms went around her. He rested his cheek against hers as they whispered in unison,“My Darling”.

whispers are often thunderous

Screw you,” Soph whispers, stepping away from me. She turns her back, hiding herself from me.  “I’m betting you’d be ready for that, too,” I tell her.

The imperative—she whispered it to herself—to live. The universe was ruled by a force, and the force was life, and life, and life—a pulsing, commanding law of its own.

Once you’ve held a book and really loved it, you forever remember the feel of it, its specific weight, the way it sits in your hand. My thumb knows the grain of this book’s leather, the dry dust of red rot that’s crept up its spine, each waving leaf of every page that holds a little secret or one of Peabody’s flourishes. A librarian remembers the particular scent of glue and dust, and if we’re so lucky—and I was—the smell of parchment, a quiet tanginess, softer than wood pulp or cotton rag. We would bury ourselves in books until flesh and paper became one and ink and blood at last ran together. So maybe my hand does clench too tightly to the spine. I may never again hold another book this old, or one with such a whisper of me in it.

My mother’s postcards,” I whispered, and took off running. Oren bolted after me, and the others weren’t far behind. I made it to my room in a matter of seconds, to my closet in less than that, and soon I was holding the postcards in my hand. There was nothing written on the back, no postage. I’d never questioned where my mother had gotten them. Or from whom. I looked up at Jameson and Grayson, Xander and Nash. “You Hawthornes,” I whispered hoarsely, “and your invisible ink.

In the depth of my soul there are songs unwilling to take the garb of words, songs living as seed in my heart. They will not flow with ink onto paper. Like a translucent veil, they are wrapped about emotions that can never flow sweetly on my tongue. Yet how can I even whisper them when I fear what the particles of air may do to them? To whom shall I sing them when they have become accustomed to live in the house of my soul and fear the harshness of other ears? Were you to look into my eyes, you would see the image of their image. Were you to touch my fingertips, you would feel their quick movements. The works of my hands reveal them as the lake reflects the twinkling of the stars. My tears disclose them as the mystery of the rose petal is disclosed at the moment the heat dissolves the drops of dew when that rose withers. … Who can combine the roaring of the sea and the warbling of the nightingale? Who can link the crashing thunder with the baby’s sigh?

Sir Bird preens next to me, tucking feathers into place with a low noise in his throat almost like he’s talking to himself. A slow smile spreads across Finn’s face as he rubs his knuckles—black and blue with several bruises from Sir Bird’s beak. “Let’s see,” he says, flipping through his father’s book. “Here! I’ll need some water in a shallow bowl . . . ink . . . yes, I think this is everything.” He gathers the items, then reads over the entry several times, eyebrows knit in concentration. Dipping his pen in the ink, he whispers strange words while writing on the surface of the water. The ink drips down, elongating the form of the symbols that still hover where he wrote them. I recognize one—change. But the rest I haven’t learned yet. Then, without warning, he lifts up the bowl and dumps the whole thing onto Sir Bird. Only instead of getting wet, as the water washes over his body, Sir Bird’s feathers turn . . . blue. Bright, brilliant, shimmering blue. Squawking in outrage, Sir Bird hops and flies around the room, frantically shaking his feathers. He lands on the desk with a scrabble of clawed feet, then begins trying to bite off the color. “Ha!” Finn says, pointing at his knuckles. “Now you’re black and blue, too!” I can’t help but laugh at my poor, panicking bird. Not to mention the ridiculous pettiness of Finn’s magic show. Picking up Sir Bird, I stroke his feathers and speak softly to him. “Hush now. I’ll make him fix you. You’re still very handsome, but blue isn’t your color, is it?” He caws mournfully, still pulling at his own feathers. “Finn.” He puts his hands behind his back, trying to look innocent. “What? He deserved it.” “He’s a bird. You can’t really find this much satisfaction in revenge against a bird, can you?” His voice comes out just a tad petulant. “He started it.

I whispered, "Do you have a rubber?" He laughed, hushed, a laughing whisper, as though his parents were in the next room, and reached one arm past my head to a nightstand there. "A rubber chicken." He shook the dancing chicken in the air. "Will that do?" I laughed back, ran a finger along the bumps of the fake chicken skin. "Ribbed and beaked for her pleasure, even. Want me to leave you two alone?" He threw the chicken on the floor and bit my neck and I giggled and he said, "Never," and he was everywhere then. The couch was a sinking place and I disappeared into the orgy of costumes, the smell of nervous strangers, makeup and smoke, my naked body buried in the perfume of human need. I took the rubber chicken home. Plucky was my mascot, the souvenir of our date. Later, much later, there was the conception of our child. And now the miscarriage, unexpected, though I should've expected it because, why not? -- family slid through my fingers the same as the old silicone banana-peel trick. After the D&C, after the suctioning away of our tiny fetus, I drew the black heart on Plucky's rubber breast in the place where a chicken might have a heart, over the ridges of implied feathers. Indelible ink. Now she'd been nabbed by a kid too young to know what love means, what a chicken might mean. Too young to know that a rubber chicken can carry all of love in one indelible ink heart.

Her finger tapped at his chest. “You and I will have a talk about doing things behind my back,” she said and turned toward the kitchen. “Tate, honey, you know I love doing nasty things behind you. And you like them too,” he whispered to her and chuckled. She turned to glare at him, but he offered her his most charming smile, and she just shook her head.

A book was mere paper splattered with ink until a reader’s mind gave it life.

My North Star,” Augustus whispered, bending to brush his lips over the freshly inked spot on my arm and sending shivers down my spine. “So that we may always come back to each other.

She was a mimicry of a façade fashioned from the half-truths of her life. She was a beautiful abomination, patched together from the most pristine and terrible parts she could find. She was a black crystal of many cuts and facets whose dark glow suffocated and entranced those it washed over. There was a pointlessness in her eyes and apathy in her stature, and further in, past the symphonies of nightmarish screams was a blinding light. All the capability she could ever ask for kept in a place she would never reach. She chose the ice rather than the fire, shivering and hard with heat sparse, for while a flicker can exist in freeze's cold, it's heat will not radiate, no matter how bold. She took my face in hands that would make ice seem warm and whispered a blizzard into my ear, a cascading song of fear after fear. The lies she spilled, mixed with regrets and appeal, were cloaked in the inferno of her rage, the anger, the only thing that really made her real. This was her one semblance of life, a bottomless and endless void of proportions vast with a calamity of fusion and fission streaking through, a mindless hue, an emotion with a face, a darling of her race. The cracks spew darkness from within her ever so pale skin. They congregated on her curves and flesh in black and churning rivers and streams. They flooded every dip with blackness. They filled every hollow with unstable curiosity, this is her release, this is when she is free. The faces of deceit always laugh, they never wallow for their lies are a pleasure tool, her insides are contorted in laughter the same way, just as slick, just as cruel. A crude combination of fascination, of animation, of the darkest demons of them all. She was poetry written in pen, scratched and scribbled again and again. Ink splattered across the page, and within those scrawled words, those small, sharp incisions, an image can be seen, and you're left to wonder what, in the end, this all could mean...

Is it easier to have no heartbeat?" she asked softly. "To feel nothing at all?" He didn't want Flick to think of her mother and the horrible things Lady Linden had done. He didn't want Flick to rethink handing her the envelope. "We're alone in a dark corridor," Jin said, tilting his head toward her, "and you wish to philosophize?" For the rest of his days, he would recall the way her sunflower eyes went ink black at his words. "No," she whispered.

Then I lean back and take in the side of her, every speck of flesh, every freckle, every line of ink she has. So fucking gorgeous I can't stand it. I feel like I'm about to combust. I want her so badly that my body is throbbing, my veins pulsating with desire and need. The need to be with her. Forever. And ever. And ever. And when I open my mouth to say it, this time it's different - this time it means more than the first time I said it, because I know I can say it and it'll be welcomed not feared. "I love you too, Violet Hayes," I whisper then let my lips crash against her showing her with my mouth just how much I mean it. God, do I fucking mean it. More than anything else in my life.

An offer indeed," said Lord Brandoch Daha; "if it be not in mockery. Say it loud, that my folk may hear." Corund did so, and the Demons heard it from the walls of the burg. Lord Brandoch Daha stood somewhat apart from Juss and Spitfire and their guard. "Libel it me out," he said. "For good as I now must deem thy word, thine hand and seal must I have to show my followers ere they consent with me in such a thing." "Write thou," said Corund to Gro. "To write my name is all my scholarship." And Gro took forth his ink-born and wrote in a great fair hand this offer on a parchment. "The most fearfullest oaths thou knowest," said Corund; and Gro wrote them, whispering, "He mocketh us only." But Corund said, "No matter: 'tis a chance worth our chancing," and slowly and with labour signed his name to the writing, and gave it to Lord Brandoch Daha. Brandoch Daha read it attentively, and tucked it in his bosom beneath his byrny. "This," he said, "shall be a keepsake for me of thee, my Lord Corund. Reminding me," and here his eyes grew terrible, "so long as there surviveth a soul of you in Witchland, that I am still to teach the world throughly what that man must abide that durst affront me with such an offer.

If you're signing up all the pretty girls in Alden, I want to join too," Max told Christy. "We aren't taking men," she explained. He cocked his eyebrow. "What? We aren't sensitive enough for your kind of literature?" Christy turned to Annie and both broke into laughter. Annie leaned closer to Max and whispered, "We are talking cliterature here." His roguish smile was breathtaking. "Oh clits and chicks, I can handle that," he answered with a wink, his eyes glittering with laughter.

You’re fucking perfection,” he whispers against my lips. “And you’re mine. No other man gets to be inside you this way.” He gently runs his hand up the front of my neck, stopping when he reaches my lips. “You make me want to live again,” he whispers.

You make me so very happy. My life is happy, and I will never stop being grateful that you are in it. I looked up to find him not at all ashamed to have tears slipping down his cheeks in public. I brushed a few away before the chill wind could freeze them, and Rhys whispered into my ear, 'I will never stop being grateful to have you in my life, either, Feyre darling. And no matter what lies ahead' - a small, joyous smile at that- 'we will face it together. Enjoy every moment of it together.' I leaned into him again, his arm tightening around my shoulders. Around the top of the arm inked with the tattoo we both bore, the promise between us. To never part, not until the end. And even after that. I love you, I said down the bond. What's not to love? Before I could elbow him, Rhys kissed me again, breathless and swift. To the stars who listen, Feyre. I brushed a hand over his cheek to wipe away the last of his tears, his skin warm and soft, and we turned down the street that would lead us home. Toward our future- and all that waited within it. To the dreams that are answered, Rhys.

For you, I would bring down the stars, wreath their fire around your neck like diamonds, and watch them pulse to the beat of your heart For you, I would capture the candlelight in the palm of my hand Give my breath to give it life A whisper, 'My love' So that it may grow Bright and hot And burn me For you, I would drink the salted oceans Until their depths Were swallowed into the depth of me How deep it is, this life This love, for you I cannot touch bottom I never will For you, I would mine the stony earth Until it relinquished The secrets of time Cracks in the stone wrinkles of the Earth As she turns her face to another new day And so I wish to live Every one of mine With you For you, I would be myself At long last I would live in my skin And breathe my words in my own voice Tinged with the accent Of a child calling to a car that will never stop And in the fading echo Nothing remains but the truth of me that is the love of you I have loved you with both Hands tied behind my back Bound with pen and ink Paper and words Sealed with someone else's name until this moment in which I am nothing but a man who loves a woman. There is nothing left to say Except to give all of my heart For you

Go to dinner with me?” His voice whispers against my ear. I start to shake my head when his fingertip lightly traces the birdcage tattoo on my arm. My eyes shut at the sensation. His touch. “I dream about you almost every night.” Join the club, buddy, I want to tell him. I dream about me every night, too… well, until I met him. Now I dream too damn much about him. “Just one date and I will leave you alone if you never want to see me again. Deal?” I open my eyes to gaze into his. There are too many things happening at once. Everything within me says to tell him no. Nothing good can come of this. I know what I have to tell him. “Dinner, not a date,” I say, looking him square in the eyes. Holy hell! What did you just do, Keller? Really? Seriously? He grins, not hiding his happiness at my words. I step away, allowing him time to button his shirt up. “Dinner then dessert, and, Keller, it will definitely be a date,” he says,

The bottom of the sea was aflame with a vast bloody glow that spread beneath the schooner; the light slid under the keel and illuminated the sails and rigging from below. It was as though we were on a boat in the Drury Lane Theatre, lighted by an invisible row of flares. ‘Phosphorescence?’ I ventured. ‘Look,’ whispered Jellewyn. The water had become as transparent as glass. At an enormous depth, we saw great dark masses with unreal shapes: there were manors with immense towers, gigantic domes, horribly straight streets lined with frenzied houses. We appeared to be flying over a furiously busy city at an incredible height. ‘There seems to be movement,’ I said. ‘Yes.’ We could see a swarming crowd of amorphous beings engaged in some sort of feverish and infernal activity. ‘Get back!’ Jellewyn shouted, pulling me violently by the belt. One of those beings was rising toward us with astounding speed. In less than a second its immense bulk had hidden the undersea city from us; it was as though a flood of ink had instantaneously spread around us. The keel received a tremendous blow. In the crimson light, we saw three enormous tentacles, three times as high as the mainmast, hideously writhing in the air. A formidable face composed of black shadows and two eyes of liquid amber rose above the port side of the ship and gave us a terrifying look.

The neon orange orb sat low in the sky, slowly breaking free of the horizon like the waking memory of a dream. The salty air smelled faintly of fish, and was thick with humidity and hung like a cloak over my body. The lavender sky at the horizon faded into cerulean above and behind me. The soft breeze whispered past my face, teasing my hair on its way to tickle the sawgrass that swayed in gratitude as if laughing like a child.
 I sat on the top plank of the boardwalk rail, the wood heavy with atmosphere and was damp and cool under my left palm. The surprising warmth of the winter air and the cool of the wood reminded me that yes, I am alive! Yes, I am grateful for this morning! And yes, I am glad to be here!
 The paper in my notebook as I wrote this began to feel sticky and moist within a few minutes. The ink from my pen seemed to grip the paper faster and firmer as if to say, I’m here, I’m happy, and I don’t want to lose this moment. Like my ink, I too wanted to cling to this morning.
 The sky started turning a peachy orange at the bottom and the ocean was sea foam green. The waves were breaking quietly, as if to give my thoughts amplitude so I could record and rejoice in the sea’s majesty. 
 The sand was gray and silky like a freshly pressed pair of slacks. The smooth beach seemed paved with sunlight. A jogger ran by, his knees probably grateful for the even stride the flat surface provided. 
 Chunks of sea foam lay strewn on the beach like remnants of Poseidon’s nightly bubble bath. A seagull circled low in the air, gliding in the sky with its streamlined body as the sun lit its white wings up like an angel’s halo.

She understood pictures because they could be anything, mean anything. Maybe a teardrop today could be rain tomorrow. Or even something good: a fresh pear or a cheery mandolin. And maybe, one day, something so lovely it breaks your heart: paisley on your child's dress the day they whisper their name for the first time. Pictures stayed the same but changed with you. They were past, the present, the future, all at once.

There is no obvious reason for voices and visions. My temperature is near normal and my pain relief is the usual moderate regime. Later the hallies, as I think of them, become less threatening, but more childish and conspiratorial. I close my eyes and they begin to pack my belongings into a pillow case, whispering and grinning. One sharp-faced dwarfish hally pulls at my right arm, and I drive her off with an elbow in her eye. After this they are more wary of me, intimidated. I see them slinking around the door frame, trying to insinuate themselves. The staff are concerned that I don’t cough, then that I cough too much. In soothing nurse-talk they smooth symptoms away. ‘I have a raging thirst,’ I say. ‘Ah, you are a lit-tul bit thirsty,’ says the nurse. I wonder if they laugh at the patients, who come in so brave and ignorant. None of us thinks that the complication rate applies to us.

Stop looking at me like that,” I whisper as I run a thumb over her jaw.  “How am I looking at you?” she whispers back while nuzzling into my palm.  “Like you can see every crack and broken piece of me.” Indy leans closer, her lips barely brushing mine.  “Maybe I can.” She whispers, and the softness of her lips sends chills over me.  “If you could, you would run.”  “No, baby,” she presses her lips to mine. “I’m just trying to find out where each piece goes.

The Woman Poet // Die Dichterin You hold me now completely in your hands. My heart beats like a frightened little bird's Against your palm. Take heed! You do not think A person lives within the page you thumb. To you this book is paper, cloth, and ink, Some binding thread and glue, and thus is dumb, And cannot touch you (though the gaze be great That seeks you from the printed marks inside), And is an object with an object's fate. And yet it has been veiled like a bride, Adorned with gems, made ready to be loved, Who asks you bashfully to change your mind, To wake yourself, and feel, and to be moved. But still she trembles, whispering to the wind: "This shall not be." And smiles as if she knew. Yet she must hope. A woman always tries, Her very life is but a single "You . . ." With her black flowers and her painted eyes, With silver chains and silks of spangled blue. She knew more beauty when a child and free, But now forgets the better words she knew. A man is so much cleverer than we, Conversing with himself of truth and lie, Of death and spring and iron-work and time. But I say "you" and always "you and I." This book is but a girl's dress in rhyme, Which can be rich and red, or poor and pale, Which may be wrinkled, but with gentle hands, And only may be torn by loving nails. So then, to tell my story, here I stand. The dress's tint, though bleached in bitter lye, Has not all washed away. It still is real. I call then with a thin, ethereal cry. You hear me speak. But do you hear me feel?

Later, as the sisters grew, Esther hyperfocused on their differences, but as a little kid she'd been far more hypnotised by their sameness. They both loved chewing lemon peels and watermelon rinds, loved pictures of goats but not actual goats, loved putting sand in their hair so they could scratch it out later, loved watching their parents slow-dance in the living room to Motown records. They loved the sound of the wind, the sound of breaking ice, the sound of coyotes calling on the mountain. They disliked zippers, ham, the word 'milk', flute music, the gurgling sound of the refrigerator, Cecily's long weekends away, Abe's insistence on regular chess matches, and days with no clouds. They disliked the boxes of books that came to their door daily or were lugged home by their father, disliked their dusty lonesome smell and how they consumed Abe's attention. They disliked when their parents closed the bedroom door and fought in whispers. They hated the phrase 'half sister.' There had been no half about it.

How do they know?” she asked miserably. “Everyone who knew her should be dead of old age by now—them and their chin too! Their grandchildren should be gray-haired. How do they even remember there’s a tower here?” She was talking, more or less, to a wagtail, a little bird that liked short grass and pumped its tail constantly as it walked. Wagtails were not so clever as rooks or jackdaws or carrion crows, but the fairy liked them. They did not make fun of her like the crows would, nor carry tales the way the rooms did. The wagtail scurried closer, pumping its tail up and down. “They must be telling stories,” said the fairy hopelessly. “About a princess in a tower and a hedge of thorns to keep princes out.” She wiped her eyes. She knew that her eyelids were turning blue-black in response to the unshed tears. There was no one to see her except the wagtail, but she pinched the bridge of her nose and tilted her head back anyway. The old habits were still with her. “I can’t fight stories,” she whispered, and a few tears, dark as ink, ran down her face and tangled in her hair.

But this here, the valley of sweet Virginia, this is the blissful shore. There is no more to reach for. But, humming, he knows. He knows what he believes. He believes in the strength of muscle, the pleasures of the body, the goodness of the heart. He believes in goodness, and this is a new thing, a gift to him from the river and the land and the blue light now almost black, the ink of the sky pocked with stars. This is what the valley and its waters whisper into his ear, in this evening into night. He believes at this moment, and he will always believe it, that people are good, and that he is good among them.

It was the first time that I entered the house on the lake. I had often begged the “trap-door lover,” as we used to call Erik in my country, to open its mysterious doors to me. He always refused. I made very many attempts, but in vain, to obtain admittance. Watch him as I might, after I first learned that he had taken up his permanent abode at the Opera, the darkness was always too thick to enable me to see how he worked the door in the wall on the lake. One day, when I thought myself alone, I stepped into the boat and rowed toward that part of the wall through which I had seen Erik disappear. It was then that I came into contact with the siren who guarded the approach and whose charm was very nearly fatal to me. I had no sooner put off from the bank than the silence amid which I floated on the water was disturbed by a sort of whispered singing that hovered all around me. It was half breath, half music; it rose softly from the waters of the lake; and I was surrounded by it through I knew not what artifice. It followed me, moved with me and was so soft that it did not alarm me. On the contrary, in my longing to approach the source of that sweet and enticing harmony, I leaned out of my little boat over the water, for there was no doubt in my mind that the singing came from the water itself. By this time, I was alone in the boat in the middle of the lake; the voice—for it was now distinctly a voice—was beside me, on the water. I leaned over, leaned still farther. The lake was perfectly calm, and a moonbeam that passed through the air hole in the Rue Scribe showed me absolutely nothing on its surface, which was smooth and black as ink. I shook my ears to get rid of a possible humming; but I soon had to accept the fact that there was no humming in the ears so harmonious as the singing whisper that followed and now attracted me. Had I been inclined to superstition, I should have certainly thought that I had to do with some siren whose business it was to confound the traveler who should venture on the waters of the house on the lake. Fortunately, I come from a country where we are too fond of fantastic things not to know them through and through; and I had no doubt but that I was face to face with some new invention of Erik’s. But this invention was so perfect that, as I leaned out of the boat, I was impelled less by a desire to discover its trick than to enjoy its charm; and I leaned out, leaned out until I almost overturned the boat. Suddenly, two monstrous arms issued from the bosom of the waters and seized me by the neck, dragging me down to the depths with irresistible force. I should certainly have been lost, if I had not had time to give a cry by which Erik knew me. For it was he; and, instead of drowning me, as was certainly his first intention, he swam with me and laid me gently on the bank: “How imprudent you are!” he said, as he stood before me, dripping with water. “Why try to enter my house? I never invited you! I don’t want you there, nor anybody! Did you save my life only to make it unbearable to me? However great the service you rendered him, Erik may end by forgetting it; and you know that nothing can restrain Erik, not even Erik himself.” He spoke, but I had now no other wish than to know what I already called the trick of the siren. He satisfied my curiosity, for Erik, who is a real monster—I have seen him at work in Persia, alas—is also, in certain respects, a regular child, vain and self-conceited, and there is nothing he loves so much, after astonishing people, as to prove all the really miraculous ingenuity of his mind. He laughed and showed me a long reed. “It’s the silliest trick you ever saw,” he said, “but it’s very useful for breathing and singing in the water. I learned it from the Tonkin pirates, who are able to remain hidden for hours in the beds of the rivers.

We met at a Mexican restaurant. We ordered, and I immediately broached the subject of Haldol. “I was surprised to see you at the pharmacy today,” I said. “Shhh!” She was eavesdropping on the table behind us. “They don’t know the difference between a burrito and an enchilada!” Bernadette’s face tightened as she strained to listen. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “They’ve never heard of mole. What do they look like? I don’t want to turn around.” “Just… people.” “What do you mean? What kind of—” She couldn’t contain herself. She quickly turned. “They’re covered in tattoos! What, you’re so cool that you ink yourself head-to-toe, but you don’t know the difference between an enchilada and a burrito?

Light shall reveal all I writ upon the… “Wall,” Jameson whispered, like he’d lifted the word directly from my thoughts. He was breathing hard—hard enough to make me think that his heart was pounding even faster than mine. “Which wall?” I asked, stepping up beside him. Slowly, Jameson turned, three hundred and sixty degrees. He didn’t answer my question, so I threw out another one. “Invisible ink?” “Now you’re thinking like a Hawthorne.” Jameson closed his eyes. I could practically feel him vibrating with energy. My entire body was doing the same. “Light shall reveal all.” Jameson’s eyelids flew open, and he turned again, until we were facing each other. “Heiress, we’re going to need a black light.

Walt's father had been shopping with his son on a Sunday afternoon when he'd wandered into All Saints' Passage and found the bookshop. A silent boy, Walt still hadn't spoken, so there was no reason to think he'd be interested in reading yet. But when Walt snuck through the door, under his father's arm, he let out a gasp of delight. He had stepped into a kingdom: an oak labyrinth of bookshelves, corridors and canyons of literature beckoning him, whispering enchanting words Walt had never heard before. The air was smoky with the scent of leather, ink and paper, caramel-rich and citrus-sharp. Walt stuck out his small tongue to taste this new flavor and grinned, sticky with excitement. And he knew, all of a sudden and deep in his soul, that this was a place he belonged more than any other.

She found another intriguing object, and she held it up to inspect it. A button. Her brow creased as she stared at the front of the button, which was engraved with a pattern of a windmill. The back of it contained a tiny lock of black hair behind a thin plate of glass, held in place with a copper rim. Swift blanched and reached for it, but Daisy snatched it back, her fingers closing around the button. Daisy's pulse began to race. "I've seen this before," she said. "It was a part of a set. My mother had a waistcoat made for Father with five buttons. One was engraved with a windmill, another with a tree, another with a bridge... she took a lock of hair from each of her children and put it inside a button. I remember the way she took a little snip from my hair at the back where it wouldn't show." Still not looking at her, Swift reached for the discarded contents of his pocket and methodically replaced them. As the silence drew out, Daisy waited in vain for an explanation. Finally she reached out and took hold of his sleeve. His arm stilled, and he stared at her fingers on his coat fabric. "How did you get it?" she whispered. Swift waited so long that she thought he might answer. Finally he spoke with a quiet surliness that wrenched her heart. "Your father wore the waistcoat to the company offices. It was much admired. But later that day he was in a temper and in the process of throwing an ink bottle he spilled some on himself. The waistcoat was ruined. Rather than face your mother with the news he gave the garment to me, buttons and all, and told me to dispose of it." "But you kept one button." Her lungs expanded until her chest felt tight on the inside and her heartbeat was frantic. "The windmill. Which was mine. Have you... have you carried a lock of my hair all these years?

I look in the mirror. All my pieces are shattered. I look closer and I wonder if my soul is on the other side. I look inside me and I’m empty, full of lies and betrayal. All I do is bleed and bleed. Am I that insignificant? Am I the sacrifice? The soft-spoken words written as the ink dries, whispering death on poisoned lips. I’m alone as you are no more. My wings will heal, and I will fly away––never to be seen again.” The room goes deathly silent. You can hear a pin drop. I look up but refuse to look over at Dravin. I will never look into his eyes again. “Raven?” I hear his soft-spoken voice, but I don’t look, and I don’t answer. It is like he is a ghost. An imaginary shadow I made up in my mind and in my head. Even if he haunts me in my dreams, I refuse to acknowledge him when I’m awake. “Look at me,” Dravin demands quietly. There is this thing about ghosts I read somewhere. You don’t have to acknowledge them when you don’t want to. In this case,

make me see red.’” I stop, arching a brow. “This is hardly flattering,” I whisper over to her. The assembly laughs again. Faye’s own giggle is the brightest, warm and sweet. Even the priest is chuckling. “Keep reading,” she says. Amused, I cock my head and continue, following the bold, handwritten strokes in blue ink. “‘But every time I want to strangle you –” more laughter, “‘I remember the most important thing. Red is the color of my heart. Red is the color of love, and I love you more than anything. There’s not enough ink in this pen to tell you how much I love you...or how happy I am to be starting our life together. I’m proud to call you my husband. I'm proud to become your wife.’” On the last word, everyone sighs blissfully, while I can only smile. Smile in ways that I never let anyone see, and yet she brings it out in me, all of this emotion. Lifting my head from the note, I meet her eyes, feeling my heart turn hot as flame. “A bit more verbose than a wink and a ‘made you look.

In front of the mound: a mile of naked strangers. In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon . . . soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it’s chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered—look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes—or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors—the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit—well, son, your possibilities, as unrealized as the erections of your penis—in a moment—soon—will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered—not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us. And that we were.

Not knowing what to do, I started walking down St. Mark’s toward Tompkins Square. All Day All Night. You Must Be Twenty One To Enter. Downtown, away from the high-rise press, the wind cut more bitterly and yet the sky was more open too, it was easier to breathe. Muscle guys walking paired pit bulls, inked-up Bettie Page girls in wiggle dresses, stumblebums with drag-hemmed pants and Jack O’Lantern teeth and taped-up shoes. Outside the shops, racks of sunglasses and skull bracelets and multicolored transvestite wigs. There was a needle exchange somewhere, maybe more than one but I wasn’t sure where; Wall Street guys bought off the street all the time if you believed what people said but I wasn’t wise enough to know where to go or who to approach, and besides who was going to sell to me, a stranger with horn rimmed glasses and an uptown haircut, dressed for picking out wedding china with Kitsey? Unsettled heart. The fetishism of secrecy. These people understood—as I did—the back alleys of the soul, whispers and shadows, money slipping from hand to hand, the password, the code, the second self, all the hidden consolations that lifted life above the ordinary and made it worth living.

But then grey, watery light hit her. And the air- the air was heavy, full of slow-running water and mould and loamy earth. No wind moved around them; not even a breeze. Cassian whistled. 'Look at this hellhole.' Dropping Azriel's hand. Nesta did just that. Oorid stretched before them. She had never seen a place so dead. A place that made the still-human part of her recoil, whispering that it was wrong wrong wrong to be here. Azriel winced. The shadowsinger of the Night Court winced as the full brunt of Oorid's oppressive air and scent and stillness hit him. The three of them surveyed the wasteland. Even the Cauldron's water hadn't been so solidly black as the water here, as if it were made of ink. In the shallows mere feet away, where the water met the grass, not one blade was visible where the surface touched it. Dead trees, grey with age and weather, jutted like the broken lances of a thousand soldiers, some draped with curtains of moss. No leaves clung to their branches. Most of the branches had been cracked off, leaving jagged spears extending from the trunks. 'Not one insect,' Azriel observed. 'Not one bird.' Nesta strained to listen. Only silence answered. Empty of even a whistle of a breeze.

You choose this moment to act like the Abnegation?” His voice fills the room and makes fear prickle in my chest. His anger seems too sudden. Too strange. “All that time you spent insisting that you were too selfish for them, and now, when your life is on the line, you’ve got to be a hero? What’s wrong with you?” “What’s wrong with you? People died. They walked right off the edge of a building! And I can stop it from happening again!” “You’re too important to just…die.” He shakes his head. He won’t even look at me--his eyes keep shifting across my face, to the wall behind me or the ceiling above me, to everything but me. I am too stunned to be angry. “I’m not important. Everyone will do just fine without me,” I say. “Who cares about everyone? What about me?” He lowers his head into his hand, covering his eyes. His fingers are trembling. Then he crosses the room in two long strides and touches his lips to mine. Their gentle pressure erases the past few months, and I am the girl who sat on the rocks next to the chasm, with river spray on her ankles, and kissed him for the first time. I am the girl who grabbed his hand in the hallway just because I wanted to. I pull back, my hand on his chest to keep him away. The problem is, I am also the girl who shot Will and lied about it, and chose between Hector and Marlene, and now a thousand other things besides. And I can’t erase those things. “You would be fine.” I don’t look at him. I stare at his T-shirt between my fingers and the black ink curling around his neck, but I don’t look at his face. “Not at first. But you would move on, and do what you have to.” He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me against him. “That’s a lie,” he says, before he kisses me again. This is wrong. It’s wrong to forget who I have become, and to let him kiss me when I know what I’m about to do. But I want to. Oh, I want to. I stand on my tiptoes and wrap my arms around him. I press one hand between his shoulder blades and curl the other one around the back of his neck. I can feel his breaths against my palm, his body expanding and contracting, and I know he’s strong, steady, unstoppable. All things I need to be, but I am not, I am not. He walks backward, pulling me with him so I stumble. I stumble right out of my shoes. He sits on the edge of the bed and I stand in front of him, and we’re finally eye to eye. He touches my face, covering my cheeks with his hands, sliding his fingertips down my neck, fitting his fingers to the slight curve of my hips. I can’t stop. I fit my mouth to his, and he tastes like water and smells like fresh air. I drag my hand from his neck to the small of his back, and put it under his shirt. He kisses me harder. I knew he was strong; I didn’t know how strong until I felt it myself, the muscles in his back tightening beneath my fingers. Stop, I tell myself. Suddenly it’s as if we’re in a hurry, his fingertips brushing my side under my shirt, my hands clutching at him, struggling closer but there is no closer. I have never longed for someone this way, or this much. He pulls back just enough to look into my eyes, his eyelids lowered. “Promise me,” he whispers, “that you won’t go. For me. Do this one thing for me.” Could I do that? Could I stay here, fix things with him, let someone else die in my place? Looking up at him, I believe for a moment that I could. And then I see Will. The crease between his eyebrows. The empty, simulation-bound eyes. The slumped body. Do this one thing for me. Tobias’s dark eyes plead with me. But if I don’t go to Erudite, who will? Tobias? It’s the kind of thing he would do. I feel a stab of pain in my chest as I lie to him. “Okay.” “Promise,” he says, frowning. The pain becomes an ache, spreads everywhere--all mixed together, guilt and terror and longing. “I promise.

In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon… soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it’s chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered - look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes - or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors - the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit - well, son, your possibilities, as unrealised as the erections of your penis - in a moment - soon - will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered - not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us.

Last night I undressed for bed. But instead of crawling between the sheets I decided to stand, naked, in front of the large full-length mirror that is propped against the wall next to my bed. ⠀ ⠀ I turned off the bright lights, and found a song that spoke to the energy I could feel under my skin. For a while I just stood there. And I looked at myself. Bare skin. Open Heart. Clear truth. ⠀ ⠀ It's a wonder, after 42 years on earth, to allow it to fully land, this knowing that I can stop, and look at myself and think things other than unkind words. ⠀ ⠀ Don't get me wrong. I don't want to paint you a pretty social media picture that doesn't play out in real life. I'm not suddenly completely fine with all that is. I'm human and I'm a woman in the midst of this particular culture, and so of course I'd love to be tighter and firmer and lifted. I'd love to have the skin and metabolism I did in my twenties. I wish, often, that my stomach were flatter. I wear makeup and I dye away my gray hair. I worry about these things too, of course I do. ⠀ ⠀ But finally, and fully - I can stand and look at myself and be filled, completely, with love. I can look at myself entirely bare and think, yes, I like myself now. Just as I am. Even if nothing changes. This me. She is good. And she is beautiful. ⠀ ⠀ And even in the space of allowing myself to be human, and annoyed with those things I view as imperfections, I honor and celebrate this shift. ⠀ ⠀ And so last night I was able to stand there. Naked and unashamed and run my own hands gently along my own skin. To offer the tenderness of the deepest seduction. To practice being my own best lover, to romance my own soul. To light the candles and buy the flowers. To hold space for my own knowing. ⠀ ⠀ And to touch my own skin while the music played. Gently. Lightly. With reverence. My thighs, my arms, my breasts, my belly, the points where my pulse makes visible that faint movement that proves me alive. To trace the translucent blue veins, the scars, the ink that tells stories. To whisper to the home of my own desire. ⠀ ⠀ I love you. ⠀ I respect your knowing. ⠀ Thank you for waiting for me to get here. ⠀ I finally see that you are holy.

...and the handsome jester, Devil’s Gold, is shaking his bead-covered rattle, making medicine and calling us by name. We are so tired from our long walk that we cannot but admire his gilded face and his yellow magic blanket. And, holding each other’s hands like lovers, we stoop and admire ourselves in the golden pool that flickers in the great campfire he has impudently built at the crossing of two streets in Heaven. But we do not step into the pool as beforetime. Our boat is beside us, it has overtaken us like some faithful tame giant swan, and Avanel whispers: “Take us where The Golden Book was written.” And thus we are up and away. The boat carries us deeper, down the valley. We find the cell of Hunter Kelly,— . St. Scribe of the Shrines. Only his handiwork remains to testify of him. Upon the walls of his cell he has painted many an illumination he afterward painted on The Golden Book margins and, in a loose pile of old torn and unbound pages, the first draft of many a familiar text is to be found. His dried paint jars are there and his ink and on the wall hangs the empty leather sack of Johnny Appleseed, from which came the first sowing of all the Amaranths of our little city, and the Amaranth that led us here. And Avanel whispers:—“I ask my heart: —Where is Hunter Kelly, and my heart speaks to me as though commanded: ‘The Hunter is again pioneering for our little city in the little earth. He is reborn as the humblest acolyte of the Cathedral, a child that sings tonight with the star chimes, a red-cheeked boy, who shoes horses at the old forge of the Iron Gentleman. Let us also return’.” It is eight o’clock in the evening, at Fifth and Monroe. It is Saturday night, and the crowd is pouring toward The Majestic, and Chatterton’s, and The Vaudette, and The Princess and The Gaiety. It is a lovely, starry evening, in the spring. The newsboys are bawling away, and I buy an Illinois State Register. It is dated March 1, 1920. Avanel of Springfield is one hundred years away. The Register has much news of a passing nature. I am the most interested in the weather report, that tomorrow will be fair. THE END - Written in Washington Park Pavilion, Springfield, Illinois.

He recognized her deft hand and eye for detail immediately. He flipped through the pages, past vignettes of the dairymaid and her vague-featured gentleman engaged in a courtship of sorts: a kiss on the hand, a whisper in the ear. By the book’s midpoint, the chit’s voluminous petticoats were up around her ears, and the illustrations comprised a sequence of quite similar poses in varying locales. Not just the dairy, but a carriage, the larder, in a hayloft lit with candles and strewn with…were those rose petals? I’ll be damned. Gray was fast divining the true source of the French painting master’s mythic exploits. More unsettling by far, however, as he perused the book, he noted a subtle alteration in the gentleman lover’s features. With each successive illustration, the hero appeared taller, broader in the shoulders, and his hair went from a cropped style to collar length in the space of two pages. The more pages Gray turned, the more he recognized himself. It was unmistakable. She’d used him as the model for these bawdy illustrations. She’d sketched him in secret; not once, but many times. And here he’d nearly gone mad with envy over each scrap of foolscap she’d inked for once crewman or another. His emotions underwent a dizzying progression-from surprised, to flattered, to (with the benefit of one especially inventive situation in an orchard) undeniably aroused. But as he lingered over a nude study of this amalgam of the real him and some picaresque fantasy, he began to feel something else entirely. He felt used. She’d rendered his form with astonishing accuracy, given that it must have been drawn before she’d any opportunity to actually see him unclothed. Not that she’d achieved an exact likeness. Her virgin’s imagination was rather generous in certain aspects and somewhat stinting in others, he noted with a bitter sort of amusement. But she’d laid him bare in these pages, without his knowledge or consent. God, she’d even drawn his scars. All in service of some adolescent erotic fantasy. And now he began to grow angry. He had been handling the leaves of the book with his fingertips only, anxious he might smudge or rip the pages. Now he abandoned all caution and flipped roughly through the remainder of the volume. Until he came to the end, and his hand froze. There they were, the two of them. He and she fully clothed and unengaged in any physical intimacies-yet intimate, in a way he had never known. Never dreamed. Sitting beneath a willow tree, his head in her lap. One of her hands lay twined with his, atop his chest. The other rested on his brow. The sky soared vast and expansive above, gauzy clouds spinning into forever. The hot fist of desire that had gripped his loins loosened, moved upward through his torso, churning the contents of his gut along the way. Then it clutched at his heart and squeezed until it hurt. Somehow, this illustration was the most dismaying of all. So naïve, so ridiculous. at least the bawdy situations were plausible, if sometimes physically improbable. This was utterly impossible. To her, he'd never been more than a fantasy. It occurred to Gray that more secrets might be packed within these trunks. If he sorted through her belongings, he might find the answers to all his questions. Perhaps answers to questions he'd never thought to ask. In spite of this, he let the lid of the trunk clap shut and fastened the strap with shaking fingers. He'd suffered as many of her fantasies as he could bear for one day. It was time to acquaint her with reality.

And a hateful little voice whispered deep inside that she'd set him to trick Wolfe, and she was doing the same thing now. Making him believe something that couldn't be true. Making him believe she cared. Doesn't matter, he told that part of him. If she doesn't end up with a collar on her neck, locked in a tower, it doesn't matter how much she lies to me. It's all that matters. She should be free, whatever the costs.

I think most of them are more afraid of the specific sun-blessed magic I possess.” So that’s where the ink hid. Brela ran her tongue over her lip as she leaned closer to whisper. “I’m not afraid to play with fire.

Micah purred, unaware of the camera mere feet away, “I saw the footage of you in the Comitium lobby. You gave your Archesian amulet to Sandriel. And she destroyed it.” His broad hand clamped around her neck, and Bryce squeezed her eyes shut. “That’s how I realized. How you realized the truth, too.” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Bryce whispered. Micah’s hand tightened, and it might as well have been his hand on Hunt’s throat for all the difficulty he had breathing. “For three years, you wore that amulet. Every single day, every single hour. Danika knew that. Knew you were without ambition, too, and would never have the drive to leave this job. And thus never take off the amulet.” “You’re insane,” Bryce managed to say. “Am I? Then explain to me why, within an hour after you took off the amulet, that kristallos demon attacked you.” Hunt stilled. A demon had attacked her that day? He found Ruhn’s stare, and the prince nodded, his face deathly pale. We got to her in time was all Danaan said to him, mind-to-mind. “Bad luck?” Bryce tried. Micah didn’t so much as smile, his hand still clamped on her neck. “You don’t just have the Horn. You are the Horn.” His hand again ran down her back. “You became its bearer the night Danika had it ground into a fine powder, mixed it with witch-ink, and then got you so drunk you didn’t ask questions when she had it tattooed onto your back.” “What?” Fury Axtar barked. Holy fucking gods. Hunt bared his teeth, still forbidden from speaking. But Bryce said, “Cool as that sounds, Governor, this tattoo says—” “The language is beyond that of this world. It is the language of universes. And it spells out a direct command to activate the Horn through a blast of raw power upon the tattoo itself. Just as it once did for the Starborn Prince. You may not possess his gifts like your brother, but I believe your bloodline and the synth shall compensate for it when I use my power upon you. To fill the tattoo—to fill you—with power is, in essence, to blow the Horn.

Rhys lunged against his hold, but Amren stepped to their side and hissed, “Listen.” Nesta whispered, “I give it all back.” Her shoulders heaved as she wept. Rhys began shaking his head, his power a palpable, rising wave that could destroy them all, destroy the world if it meant Feyre was no longer in it, even if he only had seconds to live beyond her, but Amren grabbed the nape of his neck. Her red nails dug into his golden skin. “Look at the light.” Iridescent light began flowing from Nesta’s body. Into Feyre. Nesta kept holding her sister. “I give it back. I give it back. I give it back.” Even Rhys stopped fighting. No one moved. The light glimmered down Feyre’s arms. Her legs. It suffused her ashen face. Began to fill the room. Cassian’s Siphons guttered, as if sensing a power far beyond his own, beyond any of theirs. Tendrils of light drifted between the sisters. And one, delicate and loving, floated toward Mor. To the bundle in her arms, setting the silent babe within glowing bright as the sun. And Nesta kept whispering, “I give it back. I give it all back.” The iridescence filled her, filled Feyre, filled the bundle in Mor’s arms, lighting his friend’s face so the shock on it was etched in stark relief. “I give it back,” Nesta said, one more time, and Mask and Crown tumbled from her head. The light exploded, blinding and warm, a wind sweeping past them, as if gathering every shard of itself out of the room. And as it faded, dark ink splashed upon Nesta’s back, visible through her half-shredded shirt, as if it were a wave crashing upon the shore. A bargain. With the Cauldron itself.

In confessions deep, my heart reveals its weight, As the ink on paper echoes a love so great. At dawn's first light, your thought graces my mind, A gentle whisper, consciousness defined. Magical moments, your essence in the air, Setting joy's tone, a happiness rare. In waking thoughts, I sense you near, A profound love, crystal clear. With patience vast, I embrace life's bends, Winding paths and obstacles it sends. Prepared to wait, my love steadfast and true, Believing destiny will guide us, me and you. Unbound by barriers, a transcendent love, Withstanding time, distance above. In sleepless nights, haunted by silence so deep, Love unwavering, secrets it keeps. Blocked yet unbroken, my love persists, Enduring pain, challenges that exist. Through tear-stained keys, a message I impart, A love resilient, etched in my heart. Fear may linger, a future unclear, Yet hope prevails, refusing to disappear. Blocked or unblocked, my love remains, A steadfast beacon, untouched by chains. In patience and pain, my truth I declare, An unwavering love, beyond compare. Even if faces fades from view, Hope persists, love enduring, and true.

They did not bury humans here,” Yrene whispered. For the markings on the sealed, stone gates … “The Old Language.” He’d seen it inked on Rowan’s face and arm. This was a Fae burial site. Fae—not human.

Right here,” he whispered, and returned to Trinket’s ear, gently sucking his earlobe, saying, “I want the next one right there, so I can see it when I fuck you from behind.

A folded slip of paper fell from the wallet, and she began to tuck it back in. "We'll keep all your things right here, and..." Her voice faded as she saw the imprint of typed letters on the parchment. It was a carefully torn strip of the page she had typed at the office. Mr. Keir MacRae Lady Merritt Sterling "Oh," Merritt heard herself whisper, while her heartbeats went scattering like pearls from a broken necklace. It was only a scrap of paper and ink... but she understood what it meant.

swallowed, but couldn’t get her voice above a whisper. “Yes. And yes.” “How explicit were his instructions?” “That’s not yes or no.” God, her voice sounded all wobbly, and hot tears burned at the backs of her eyes. She knew her reactions didn’t make sense. But she couldn’t think, she could only feel. Somehow, that fantasy she wrote for Carl set off a horrible chain reaction that led to him falling into the gorge. An untenable thought, but she couldn’t help it. Brax shoved the coffee table out of the way and hunkered down beside her. She realized she had been staring at the paper, the ink suddenly running down the page from three wet

Get on your hands and knees,” he ordered, his voice so low she could barely understand him. But her blood heated, and an ache that had nothing to do with how hard he’d just taken her began to build between her legs once more. So Nesta did as he bade, baring herself, still wet and gleaming with both of their releases. He snarled in satisfaction. “Beautiful.” She whimpered a bit—because beneath the praise, pure lust simmered. He growled, “Put your hands on the headboard.” Her breath began sawing out of her again, but she obeyed, already thrumming with need. Cassian rose behind her, gripping her hips. He knocked a knee against each of her own, spreading her legs wider. Callused fingertips brushed down the length of her spine, over the tattoo there, the ink binding them. He leaned to whisper in her ear, “Hold on tight.

But it wasn’t just Twain and Whitman whispering heresies into my ear, a whole ink spill of geniuses had staked their reputations on the argument that “Will Shake-speare” was one of the hyphenated pen names popular among Elizabethan satirists who didn’t fancy being disemboweled in public. The list of gadflies who questioned the official narrative of Shakespeare included Chaplin, Coleridge, Emerson, Gielgud, Hardy, Holmes, Jacobi, James, Joyce, Welles, and of late even Mark Rylance, the first artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Collectively they believed the Stratford businessman to be a front and a fraud. Whatever the truth, it’s fair to say the authorship debate had long been divided into two camps, artists vs. academics.

It's not over until the ink of our stories runs dry. It's not over until the final curtain falls. It's not over until the last grain of sand slips through the hourglass. It's not over until the last chord fades into silence. It's not over until the last star fades from the morning sky. It's not over until the last wave retreats into the vast ocean. It's not over until the final page turns. It's not over until the last drop fills the cup. It's not over until the last breath whispers its goodbye. It's not over until the echoes of our laughter linger in the air. It's not over until the last ember dims into darkness. It's not over until the fireflies dance in the twilight...

She didn’t know how long she sat before she saw the shadow in the kelp forest. It was very long, and a different shape than anything she’d seen thus far. But she wasn’t going to move. Nothing so far had been dangerous. Then the shadow lunged out of the kelp, so quickly it was hard for her to even get an idea of what it was before it struck her. Her ribs screamed in pain, but the water seemed to cushion her wild slide before she hit rocks. Shark, her mind screamed. There’s a shark and there is nowhere for you to hide. She grabbed onto the stones with her hands, shoving herself farther away from the creature and kicking her feet. But she wasn’t a fast enough swimmer, not even slightly. Black water bubbled around her, and she didn’t have time to wonder where all the ink was coming from. Perhaps it was an octopus trying to help hide her. She didn’t care. Again it struck her, shoving her into the kelp forest and away from the safety of the bells. Away from Byte. Away from anywhere Arges would find her. Panic swirled, making it hard to focus on anything but the terror that ran through her veins and the way her mind screamed to hide. She turned her body in the water, forcing herself to look, even though that was the last thing she wanted to do. She didn’t want to see the giant shark, the sharp teeth, or the nightmare that likely waited for her. But when she turned, she saw nothing. Not even the dark shadow before she bumped into something equally hard.

Crawl to me, baby" I whisper, my voice raspy and sweet. Nash doesn't even consider what I ask for more than one second. His knees hit the floor with a thud, he discards his shirt and begins moving toward me. My breathing increases as I watch his powerful inked body make his way toward me

Who would have believed that something as simple as pumpkin pie could bring together and spark a lifelong friendship between a living human woman and a ghost man named Kai?

Because they knew that no matter how far they traveled or how much they changed, the memories of their youth would always be waiting for them, just beyond the horizon.

just like a firework on the fourth of July you have brightened my life even in the darkest times. and became my hope and light. For you are, my beautiful light in the night sky of life.

For with each turn of the page An opportunity to escape to an enchantment of undiscovered mysteries laden with Heroes, villains, and mythical creatures that fall and rise And where destiny is written by hand but Determined by the heart and mind

We couldn’t remove the ink,” Blif said. “But the Stratagrams, and the magic beneath them, are now severed.” “How do you feel?” Tisaanah asked. Like I’ve been run over by a horse, I wanted to say, until I took a moment to actually think about the answer to that question. I was dizzy and sore, but as the pain and shock continued to subside, I realized that something was just… gone, too. A certain weight I hadn’t known I was carrying had disappeared. I allowed myself to hope. “It will take some time before—” Klasto started. I extended my hand. A flame unfurled in my palm. My face broke into a smile. Beside me, Tisaanah drew in a sharp breath. I whispered to my magic, and for the first time in so long, it listened to me. I made the fire larger, reaching it up to the ceiling in twirling dances, then pulled it back to me in a perfect sphere between my palms.

perhaps one day is all it takes to start creating the memories that make up our life story but multiple one-days to create a lifetime of us." - One Day (poem)

Once I went into another Bulgarian village. And one old brute who'd spotted me - he was a village elder - told the others and they surrounded the house I was lodging in. I slipped out onto the balcony and crept from one roof to the next; the moon was up and I jumped from balcony to balcony like a cat. But they saw my shadow, climbed up onto the roofs and started shooting. So what do I do? I dropped down into the yard, and there I found a Bulgarian woman in bed. She stood up in her nightdress, saw me and opened her mouth to shout, but I held out my arms and whispered: "Mercy! Mercy! Don't shout!" and seized her breasts. She went pale and half swooned.' "Come inside," she said in a low voice. "Come in so that we can't be seen ..." 'I went inside, she gripped my hand: "Are you a Greek?" she said. "Yes, Greek. Don't betray me." I took her by the waist. She said not a word. I went to bed with her, and my heart trembled with pleasure. "There, Zorba, you dog," I said to myself, "there's a woman for you; that's what humanity means! What is she? Bulgar? Greek? That's the last thing that matters! She's human, and a human being with a mouth, and breasts, and she can love. Aren't you ashamed of killing? Bah! Swine!" 'That's the way I thought while I was with her, sharing her warmth. BUT DID THAT MAD BITCH, MY COUNTRY, LEAVE ME IN PEACE FOR THAT, DO YOU THINK? I disappeared next morning in the clothes the Bulgar woman gave me. She was a widow. She took her late husband's clothes out of a chest, gave them to me, and she hugged my knees and begged me to come back to her.' 'Yes, yes, I did go back ... the following night. I was a patriot then, of course - a wild beast; I went back with a can of paraffin and set fire to the village. She must have been burnt along with the others, poor wretch. Her name was Ludmilla.' Zorba sighed. He lit a cigarette, took one or two puffs and then threw it away. 'My country, you say? ... You believe all the rubbish your books tell you ... ? Well, I'm the one you should believe. So long as there are countries, man will stay like an animal, a ferocious animal... But I am delivered from all that, God be praised! It's finished for me! What about you?' I didn't answer. I was envious of the man. He had lived with his flesh and blood - fighting, killing, kissing - all that I had tried to learn through pen and ink alone. All the problems I was trying to solve point by point in my solitude and glued to my chair, this man had solved up in the pure air of the mountains with his sword. I closed my eyes, inconsolable.

That's when she saw the black ink strokes, underlining four words of the poem: Door. Veil. Thee. Me. And in a flash, the code to the sultan's combination lockbox flew into her mind. D V J S. Door. Veil. Jasmine. Sultan... or sultana. Even though the meaning was still opaque, even though she still hadn't the slightest clue which door or veil her father was trying to draw her toward, something lifted in her chest as she looked at the words. Hope. He was still talking to her, communicating with her, even from another plane. "As above, so below," she whispered.

We're all authors in the grand anthology of humanity, composing our stories with the ink of experiences and the parchment of time. Every laugh, tear, success, and failure etches itself into our narrative, shaping the chapters of our lives. And as life's final pages draw near, our essence blends into the rich tapestry of collective memory, becoming the anecdotes, the fables, and the legends whispered from one generation to another. We are the epics, the sonnets, the sagas — for in the end, we all become the stories that outlive us.

The paper words had been drowned in a sea of black ink. There a mass can be heard without whispering. May the world bend at your refusal. Its secret is the secret of doom. Wrought from prayer and verse.

To believe.” His words were a whispered promise. “That I’ll never leave you hanging again.” It had never seemed easy before. Their history was full of missteps, a tangled mess of good intentions gone from bad to worse. But here, now, the way forward was so painfully clear. She told him so. “You and me, baby. There isn’t anything else.” “Yeah, there is,” he replied, closing one hand over her wrist. Over her ink. “You and me, and everything else.

She kissed him softly, her eyes closed as her body finally relaxed. "I love you," she whispered. "I'm an idiot." "Well, yes, but you're adorable when you're an idiot." She punched him in the shoulder. Hard. "Patronizing much?

Wriggling out of his grasp she braced herself on his shoulders and tried to stand. Next thing she knew, he had her around the legs and took her down to the mattress in some sort of super-fast ninja move. She screamed and laughed, and he was laughing every bit as hard as he came down on top of her. And, oh God, his laughter was a sweet and sexy rumble that lit her up inside. “You fight dirty, Easy,” she said around her chuckles. “I haven’t had this much fun in so long.” She caressed his face with her fingers. “Me neither. Between overloading on classes and my epilepsy, I often feel like a little old lady trapped in the body of a twenty-year-old. All I need is some cats.” “Cats are awesome,” he said. “When I was a kid, I used to sneak stray cats into the house, just for a night or two. I’d keep them in my room and bring up bowls of milk and cans of tuna for them.” “Aw, you were a sweet little boy, weren’t you?” she asked, loving how he was opening up to her. The closeness, the sharing, the way his big body was lying on her legs and hips, leading him to prop his head up on her lower stomach—both her heart and her body reacted. “Maybe for about five minutes.” He winked. “Mostly, I was a hell-raiser. Growing up, we didn’t live in the best neighborhood. Drug dealers on the corner, gang activity trying to pull in even the younger kids, crack house one block over. All that. Trouble wasn’t hard to find.” He shrugged. “Army straightened me out, though.” “Well, we lived in a nice neighborhood growing up and here my father was the freaking drug dealer on the corner. Or close enough, anyway.” Jenna stared at the ceiling and shook her head. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get serious.” His thumb stroked along her side, sliding the cotton of her borrowed shirt against her skin in a way that almost tickled. “Don’t apologize. Our histories are what they are, you know?” She nodded and gave him a little smile. “Yeah.” Shifting off her, Easy stretched out alongside her and propped his head up on his arm. “I’m thirty, Jenna,” he said out of nowhere. And he was telling her this because? He thought their age difference was too great? He thought she was too young? He was worried she would think he was too old? Probably D) all of the above. Thing was, all she saw when she looked at Easy was a guy she really freaking liked. One who’d saved her life, helped make her sister safe, and gave her a sense of security she hadn’t felt in years. He was hot as hell, easy to talk to, and one of the kindest guys she’d ever known. Maybe some of that was because he was older. Who knew? “And I need to know this because?” she asked, resting her head on her arm. The muscles of his shoulders lifted into a shrug, but his face was contemplative. “Because there’s clearly something going on between us.” Heat rushed across her body. She held up a hand, and he laced his fingers between hers. “When I look at you, I don’t see a bunch of differences, Easy.” “What do you see then?” Warmth flooded into Jenna’s cheeks, and she chuckled. He’d said that she was beautiful, after all, so why couldn’t she give him a compliment in return? “A really hot guy I’d like to get to know more.” A smug smile slipped onto his face, and she might’ve rolled her eyes if it weren’t so damn sexy. “Really hot, huh?” “Well, kinda hot, anyway.” “Nuh-uh,” he said, tugging her hand to his chest. “Can’t take it back now.” Cheeks burning and big smile threatening, she rolled onto her side to face him. They lay there, side by side, her chest almost touching his, looking at each other. Tension and desire and anticipation crackled in the space between them, making it hard to breathe. “What do you see when you look at me?” she whispered, half-afraid to ask but even more curious to hear what he’d say. Did he mostly see someone who was too young for him? Or a needy girl he had to save and babysit?

At the corner of the table sat a stack of papers with a big rock holding them down—made of a material, Lex noted, that she was pretty sure didn’t exist anywhere on the periodic table. Uncle Mort set the rock aside and started to sift through the papers, staring at them intently. “Should we point out that there’s nothing on them?” Lex whispered to Driggs. “And spoil the fun of watching an honest-to-God crazy person do what he does best?” “It’s written in Elixir ink,” Grotton said behind them. When Lex looked at him with the sort of expression that such a statement might elicit, he pursed his lips. “Invisible to everyone but the person who wrote it. Amateurs

She'd insulted Manuel HaLevy today because he angered her - yet, she admitted, also to pique him. For those Esther disliked him, still her body had woken to his challenge - just as every caged part of her, her thoughts, her breath, her pulse, seemed to wake now to this city from which she'd hidden herself. London, which had consumed her brother; London of her mother's drunken, eviscerating whispers. The very language spoken on the streets fired Esther strangely - as if a thing long shuttered in her spirit had, quietly and all at once, quickened.

Show me something." "What would you like to see?" "Anything. Dazzle me with your boring, practical Alben magic." Sir Bird preens next to me, tucking feathers into place with a low noise in his throat almost like he's talking to himself. A slow smile spreads across Finn's face as he rubs his knuckles - black and blue with several bruises from Sir Bird's beak. "Let's see," he says, flipping through his father's book. "Here! I'll need some water in a shallow bowl ... ink ... yes, I think this is everything." He gathers the items, then reads over the entry several times, eyebrows knit in concentration. Dipping his pen in the ink, he whispers strange words while writing on the surface of the water. The ink drips down, elongating the form of the symbols that still hover where he wrote them. I recognize one - change. But the rest I haven't learned yet. Then, without warning, he lifts up the bowl and dumps the whole thing onto Sir Bird. Only instead of getting wet, as the water washes over his body, Sir Bird's feathers turn ... blue. Bright, brilliant, shimmering blue. Squawking in outrage, Sir Bird hops and flies around the room, frantically shaking his feathers. He lands on the desk with a scrabble of clawed feet, then begins trying to bite off the color. "Ha!" Finn says, pointing at his knuckles. "Now you're black and blue, too!" I can't help but laugh at my poor, panicking bird. Not to mention the ridiculous pettiness of Finn's magic show. Picking up Sir Bird, I stroke his feathers and speak softly to him. "Hush now. I'll make him fix you. You're still very handsome, but blue isn't your color, is it?" He caws mournfully, still pulling at his own feathers. "Finn." He puts his hands behind his back, trying to look innocent. "What? He deserved it." "He's a bird. You can't really find this much satisfaction in revenge against a bird, can you?" His voice comes out just a tad petulant. "He started it. Besides, I made it temporary. It'll wear off within the hour." "There now." I kiss Sir Bird's head and set him on my shoulder. "You'll be back to yourself in no time." "Tell him to stop pecking at me.' "Perhaps you deserve it.

Do you know what I do to things that unbalance my city, Petra?" Petra stepped back, her hands trembling. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "Too late," Fein said with a shrug. It happened in the blink of an eye. One moment Rex was standing next to me, the next, his hand was buried in Petra's chest cavity before he pulled her heart out. She disintegrated into a small pile of dust. The rest of the room looked down and remained very still. "Does anyone else want to upset the balance?" Fein asked.

…The Valley of Fear. I whispered the thrilling words to myself, then lifted the book to my nose and breathed the ink from its pages. The scent of possibilities

You choose this moment to act like the Abnegation?” His voice fills the room and makes fear prickle in my chest. His anger seems too sudden. Too strange. “All that time you spent insisting that you were too selfish for them, and now, when your life is on the line, you’ve got to be a hero? What’s wrong with you?” “What’s wrong with you? People died. They walked right off the edge of a building! And I can stop it from happening again!” “You’re too important to just…die.” He shakes his head. He won’t even look at me--his eyes keep shifting across my face, to the wall behind me or the ceiling above me, to everything but me. I am too stunned to be angry. “I’m not important. Everyone will do just fine without me,” I say. “Who cares about everyone? What about me?” He lowers his head into his hand, covering his eyes. His fingers are trembling. Then he crosses the room in two long strides and touches his lips to mine. Their gentle pressure erases the past few months, and I am the girl who sat on the rocks next to the chasm, with river spray on her ankles, and kissed him for the first time. I am the girl who grabbed his hand in the hallway just because I wanted to. I pull back, my hand on his chest to keep him away. The problem is, I am also the girl who shot Will and lied about it, and chose between Hector and Marlene, and now a thousand other things besides. And I can’t erase those things. “You would be fine.” I don’t look at him. I stare at his T-shirt between my fingers and the black ink curling around his neck, but I don’t look at his face. “Not at first. But you would move on, and do what you have to.” He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me against him. “That’s a lie,” he says, before he kisses me again. This is wrong. It’s wrong to forget who I have become, and to let him kiss me when I know what I’m about to do. But I want to. Oh, I want to. I stand on my tiptoes and wrap my arms around him. I press one hand between his shoulder blades and curl the other one around the back of his neck. I can feel his breaths against my palm, his body expanding and contracting, and I know he’s strong, steady, unstoppable. All things I need to be, but I am not, I am not. He walks backward, pulling me with him so I stumble. I stumble right out of my shoes. He sits on the edge of the bed and I stand in front of him, and we’re finally eye to eye. He touches my face, covering my cheeks with his hands, sliding his fingertips down my neck, fitting his fingers to the slight curve of my hips. I can’t stop. I fit my mouth to his, and he tastes like water and smells like fresh air. I drag my hand from his neck to the small of his back, and put it under his shirt. He kisses me harder. I knew he was strong; I didn’t know how strong until I felt it myself, the muscles in his back tightening beneath my fingers. Stop, I tell myself. Suddenly it’s as if we’re in a hurry, his fingertips brushing my side under my shirt, my hands clutching at him, struggling closer but there is no closer. I have never longed for someone this way, or this much. He pulls back just enough to look into my eyes, his eyelids lowered. “Promise me,” he whispers, “that you won’t go. For me. Do this one thing for me.” Could I do that? Could I stay here, fix things with him, let someone else die in my place? Looking up at him, I believe for a moment that I could. And then I see Will. The crease between his eyebrows. The empty, simulation-bound eyes. The slumped body. Do this one thing for me. Tobias’s dark eyes plead with me. But if I don’t go to Erudite, who will? Tobias? It’s the kind of thing he would do. I feel a stab of pain in my chest as I lie to him. “Okay.” “Promise,” he says, frowning. The pain becomes an ache, spreads everywhere--all mixed together, guilt and terror and longing. “I promise.

WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?’ ‘Oh damn,’ whispered Ginny, jumping to her feet. ‘I forgot –’ Madam Pince was swooping down on them, her shrivelled face contorted with rage. ‘Chocolate in the library!’ she screamed. ‘Out – out – OUT!’ And whipping out her wand, she caused Harry’s books, bag and ink bottle to chase him and Ginny from the library, whacking them repeatedly over the head as they ran.