Laura Sebastian

There’s no shame in reaching your limits, Theo,” he says, using a small gust of air to invigorate the weak fire into a full blaze. “It means you’ve given something your all.

I remember how my mother had no shame in crying when it was necessary. She never saw it as a weakness; rather, she believed it a strength to bear one’s soul.

Time is immeasurable, an unending expanse where an hour could just as easily be a second which could be a week, and I would have no way of knowing. It is both infinite and infinitesimal at once.

He has already taken everything, my mother, Ampellio, my home. And now, I have nothing left to lose. And now, I have nothing left to fear.

It doesn’t seem fair to me to treat rapists, murderers, and slavers the same way as the farmers or the shipmates or the seamstresses-the people who benefited from bad acts, yes, who went along with them, but didn’t actively commit crimes.

May the gods bless Queen Eirene forever in the After, but until the end, she was the queen of a peaceful country. Her reign was largely untested and easy; she never had to know war until the Kalovaxians came and slit her throat. She had the luxury of being a sympathetic queen. You don’t.

He is a stone, incapable of feeling anything, and I don’t like being reminded that he’s also human. I don’t like to be reminded that we love the same person.

I spent much of my first six years afraid of my mother’s throne the way most children are afraid of monsters lurking under their beds.

It may be that I was a fool to trust Cress, not because of who she is but because of how she was raised. This is the only world she knows, and though it’s a nightmare to me, it’s a world she is at home in. I suppose it’s easy to be at home in a world where you are on top. It’s easy not to notice those whose backs you stand on to stay there. One doesn’t even see them.

Heartbreak isn’t as lethal as the name implies, you know. Maybe it feels that way at the time, but I swear it isn’t. You’ve seen Gwen and me both rebound from it eventually. I don’t regret anything leading up to it, and I doubt Gwen does either. It’s life, Elaine. Getting hurt, picking yourself up, trying again. You’re so focused on the ending sometimes that I don’t think you know how to appreciate the during.