Ana

“You were staring up at the rotten thatch of the roof, wondering if anyone would remember your name long enough to mark your grave, and then you were looking at a woman’s face. She didn’t seem much like the saints in the songs. Her lips were sunken where teeth were missing, and her skin was puckered with old scars. There was a fresh wound above her jaw, livid and weeping, and the armor that lapped her shoulders was dented and scored with battle. Her eyes were rather fine, you thought—the lavish blue of the Virgin’s own robe, just like yours—but she carried no cross and wore a rusted mail hood instead of a halo.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Six Deaths of the Saint

“This time, when you looked into the water, you caught a fleeting glimpse of your true reflection. And it was only then, when you saw your own gory, blue-eyed face, bright hair hidden beneath rusted mail, that you understood who you were and who they were. You saw yourself as an unholy triptych, three into one, one into three: she the girl, you the Devil, and I the Saint. And you understood, finally, that there had never truly been a she or a you but only a terrible, lonely I.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Six Deaths of the Saint

“The Saint came to you again and again, always with that terrible fury on her face. You wondered if perhaps she did not want to be the Saint of War any longer, and you sympathized; you often didn’t want to be what you were. You were a shrike, a leopard, a plague, a thing that lived only to kill.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Six Deaths of the Saint

“Perhaps I sense, in the hazy way of an early memory, that I will never grow old, will never see my squire again.
Perhaps any tool, used hard enough and long enough, begins to fail.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Six Deaths of the Saint