Tess

“I'll tell you a story, I whispered. It always helped me sleep as a child.
He nodded, folding his hands over his lap, and closed his eyes.
There once was a girl, clever and good, who tarried in shadow in the depths of the wood. There also was a King, a shepherd by his crook, who reigned over magic and wrote the old book. The two were together, so the two-
I couldn't go on.
Elspeth.
No. I'm not ready. Not yet.
Finish the story, dear one.
My voice shook. The two were together-
Together.
So the two were the same.
The girl, he whispered, honey and oil and silk.
The King...
We said the final words together, our voices echoing, listless, through the dark. A final note. An eternal farewell. And the monster they became.”
― Rachel Gillig, Two Twisted Crowns

“At last, he lifted his face from his sleeves and wiped furiously at his eyes. His voice was still broken as he said, 'I should have you beheaded for seeing me like this.'
It was another flat attempt to get me afraid of him—or perhaps merely a force of habit. But I knew the threat did not have his heart behind it. 'Is that so?'
'Beheaded and worse.'
'Terren, it is not a weakness to be seen.'
There were no knives between us now, no fear, not even enough distance for a sparrow to spread its wings. I looked into his eyes, and though they were older and meaner, there was no question they were the same ones as on the boy I’d seen in the meadow. I looked into them and I saw him.
Maybe it was possible to love somebody that one hated.
Maybe, buried heart-deep, I really did love him. Not the kind of love a wife shared with her husband—that was not possible, after all he’d done to me; I might have borne no scars, but my body still remembered—but the kind of love one human could not help but feel for another when they had to pry away blades to find them.
I did not know what else to call it, if not love.”
― Shen Tao, The Poet Empress

“All his life, time had been passing in the only way he knew time to pass: uncrushed and uncrushable, as sands running through an hourglass grain by grain. And if the hourglass had been real, then in the bottom and neck-the past and the present-the sands of Lazlo's life would be as gray as his robes, as gray as his eyes, but the top-the future-would hold a brilliant storm of color: azure and cinnamon, blinding white and yellow gold and the shell pink of svytagor blood. So he hoped, so he dreamed: that, in the course of time, grain by grain, the gray would give way to the dream and the sands of his life would run bright.”
― Laini Taylor, Strange the Dreamer

“Or, at the very least, turn me little again.' He wiped his eyes with a sleeve, and stared at the plate of mung bean cakes. 'Little enough that all I wanted to reach for was the banquet table. When all I knew to desire was a sweet cake. And even if everyone punished me, or yelled at me, or hated me, at least back then I didn’t know why. If you can’t turn me into a fish, at least turn me little.”
― Shen Tao, The Poet Empress