To them, as to Magnus, time was like rain, glittering as it fell, changing the world, but something that could also be taken for granted.Until you loved a mortal. Then time became gold in a miser's hands, every bright year counted out carefully, infinitely precious, and each one slipping through your fingers.

You are mortal. You age, you die. If that is not hell, pray tell me, what is?

He remembered Tessa weeping in his arms in Paris, and thinking that he had never known the loss she felt, because he had never loved like she had, and that he was afraid that someday he would, and like Tessa he would lose his mortal love. And that it was better to be the one who died than the one who lived on. He had dismissed that, later, as a morbid fantasy, and had not remembered it again until Alec.

To love is to destroy, and that to be loved is to be destroyed