Kayla Valley

“What if I told you I wanted to be my most monstrous self all the time? What if I wanted to be a god?

Would you pray to me?”
― Jamison Shea, I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me

“One person’s pain doesn’t negate another’s. Our heartaches are not competition, but the bridge to empathy. So that we can look at one another and know that on some level, we understand. That’s one beautiful thing about grief, I think. That sometimes, we can find someone in the world to look at from the other side of the bridge of our torments and know that we are not alone.”
― Raven Kennedy, Glow

“The words and ways this requires are…potent. They come at a price—power always does. This isn’t a matter of wrong or right, you understand, but merely the working of the world. If you want strength, if you want to survive, there must be sacrifice.”
That’s not what Mags taught them. You can tell the wickedness of a witch by the wickedness of her ways. “So who paid your price?”
He bends his neck to look directly at her, weighing something. “A fever spread through my parents’ village that first winter.”
The word fever rings in Juniper’s ears, a distant bell toiling.
“It was nothing too remarkable, except the midwives and wise women couldn’t cure it. One of them came sniffing around, made certain deductions…I took her shadow, too. And the sickness spread further. The villagers grew unruly. Hysterical. I did what I had to do in order to protect myself.” That line has smoothed-over feel, like a polished pebble, as if he’s said it many times to himself. “But then of course the fever spread even further… I didn’t know how to control it, yet. Which kinda of people were expendable and which weren’t. I’m more careful these days.”
The ringing in Juniper’s ears is louder now, deafening.
An uncanny illness, the Three had called it. Juniper remembers the illustrations in Miss Hurston’s moldy schoolbooks, showing abandoned villages and overfull graveyards, carts piled high with bloated bodies. Was that Gideon’s price? Had the entire world paid for the sins of one broken, bitter boy?
And—were they paying again? I’m more careful these days. Juniper thinks of Eve’s labored breathing, the endless rows of cots at Charity Hospital, the fever that raged through the city’s tenements and row houses and dim alleys, preying on the poor and brown and foreign—the expendable. Oh, you bastard.
But Hill doesn’t seem to hear the hitch in her breathing. “People grew frightened, angry. They marched on my village with torches, looking for a villain. So I gave them one.” Hill lifts both hands, palm up: What would you have of me? “I told them a story about an old witch woman who lived in a hut in the roots of an old oak. I told them she spoke with devils and brewed pestilence and death in her cauldron. They believed me.” His voice is perfectly dispassionate, neither guilty nor grieving. “They burned her books and then her. When they left my village I left with them, riding at their head.”
So: the young George of Hyll had broken the world, then pointed his finger at his fellow witches like a little boy caught making a mess. He had survived, at any cost, at every cost. Oh, you absolute damn bastard.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Once and Future Witches

“Vengeance isn’t for the victims. It’s to make the people around them feel better for not doing anything to stop it in the first place.”
― Katee Robert, Wicked Beauty