Isabella

“It was a funny thing, how fear made him look so much younger, how it rounded his eyes and erased the cruel grimace of his sneer so that he looked, just for an instant, like the boy she'd first met at Sinegard.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“Fire and water looked so lovely together. It was a pity they destroyed each other by nature.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Dragon Republic

“Dying was easy. Living was so much harder—that was the most important lesson Altan had ever taught her.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God

“She saw it in a flash of utter clarity. She knew what she had to do. The only path, the only way forward. And what a familiar path it was. It was so obvious now. The world was a dream of the gods, and the gods dreamed in sequences, in symmetry, in patterns. History repeated itself, and she was only the latest iteration of the same scene in a tapestry that had been spun long before her birth.”
― R.F. Kuang, The Burning God