Amelia

“Hurry up. I have a letter for you,' said Ianthe.
Harrow, it was in your handwriting. She handed me a fat, bulging envelope with your handwriting, and it said 'To be given to Gideon Nav,' and I felt - strange. Time softened as I held it, and I didn't even care about the barely repressed mirthful scorn on the other girl's face. It was your curt, aggravated handwriting, curter and more aggravated than ever, like you'd written it in a hurry. I'd gotten so many letters in that handwriting, calling me names or bossing me around. You'd touched that letter, and I - you know it was killing me twice that you weren't there, right? You must know it was destroying me to be there in your body, trying to keep your thumbs on, and I couldn't even hear your damn voice?”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“It was worse when I was a kid. I remember the time you caught me telling her, "I love you,' and I can't even remember what you said, but I remember that I had you on your back - I put you straight on the fucking ground. I was always so much bigger and so much stronger. I got on top of you and choked you till your eyes bugged out. I told you that my mother had probably loved me a lot more than yours loved you. You clawed my face so bad that my blood ran down your hands; my face was under your fucking fingernails. When I let you go you couldn't even stand, you just crawled away and threw up. Were you ten, Harrow? Was I eleven?
Was that the day you decided you wanted to die?
You remember how the fuck-off great-aunts always used to say, 'Suffer and learn'?
If they were right, Nonagesimus, how much more can we take until you and me achieve omniscience?”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“That night, the Body consented to embrace you. You so nearly felt those long arms wrap around your neck, your middle. You were so close to feeling that press of graceful forehead to yours, the long, lean dead body chilling yours to the shivering point, as you all but perceived one cool corpse thigh touching yours from hip to knee. You had been nearly eight weeks in the Mithraeum. The sword that you bathed in your own arterial blood was sheathed in bone and heavy on your back. You no longer knew what it was like not to be afraid.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth

“The letter was wrapped around a black, folded-up bunch of angles: smoked glass, thin black frames, mirrored lenses. A little bend in one arm, but otherwise - you'd kept my sunglasses.”
― Tamsyn Muir, Harrow the Ninth