It’s all I want, to be beside you, helping you. If it takes forever, all the better, if it’s forever with you.

He watched her with a hopeful, piercing scrutiny that made her tingle, she felt so...seen.

Theirs wasn't the only love story ended by the gods, but it was the only one that ended the gods.

All evening long, real snow would fall from the ceiling to glitter on the lashes of dancing girls and ardent boys, but Neve and the Dreamer didn't linger. They had other things to do: *all* of them. All the things, dreamed and undreamed, in the depth and breadth of the whole spinning world.

Love affair. Doesn't that sound so middle-aged? And also ill-fated. Like ill-fated is an understood prefix to love affair. Well, ill-fated is fine, as long as it's a meaty and fraught ill-fated love affair, not a pale and insipid one.

The two of them were stoic and stone-faced and ten feet apart, currently not even looking at each other, but Zuzana had the impression of a pair of magnets pretending not to be magnets. Which, you know, only works until it doesn't.