“But Kelsea could not even remember what reason she had cobbled together for mutilating Thorne. She remembered doing the deed, remembered black wings opening inside her, a darkness so inviting that a newly crowned Kelsea Glynn, one who seemed years younger in hindsight, had longed to lose herself inside it. But only madness waited there, the same madness that Finn and his ilk had always wanted to inflict on the Tearling...greed and callousness, lack of empathy, a narrowing of mind until only one lonely voice was left, surrounded by a void into which it could howl only a single word: Me.”