Dazzle the monsters, Nadya. You’ve already charmed the worst of the lot; the rest should be easy.

Less a boy, more a monster. Was that all he was? The silly boy who smiled too much and felt too deeply just a mask for the monster underneath?

Can you love someone and ask them to shatter themselves for you?

Bodies, so fragile, so mortal, but so resilient under pressure. They did not want to break.

She wanted to, though. Cry like a village maid who’d had her heart broken, not a girl touched by the gods who fell for a monster and was devoured.

A knife twisted in the gut of the divine as he waits and he watches and he knows that they will fall, they always fall, nothing is eternal except for the darkness.

One last fight, my love. Together, this time.” she whispered.

Blood and blood and bone. Magic and monsters and tragic power.

We’re all monsters, Nadya, some of us just hide it better than others.

He was a nightmare – the echoes she still felt of his power were troubling – but he was gentle. Anxious and strange, a boy caught up in a world that had broken him, all while trying to do something good for once.