Talatuti

“Madame Hugo had become insufferable. She had started with the peeking in at breakfast, and then moved on to skipping romps of faux-concern down the hallway at mid-day, speaking with trumpets in her throat and stumbling by my door with the grace of an elephant. In case it was not already clear, let me pronounce it: I loathed her. The violence I conjured up for her in that dark sanctum of mine was infinite, and the subject of her various fatalities and tortures came to almost—almost, but not quite—rival those intrusions which such thoughts of Sophia continued to make.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“Yes, for there I was, outside of society, destitute, torn between transformations, between beast and god. What other paths could I have taken? No, it was worth corrupting myself slightly, if corruption it truly was, for any filth on my soul would be washed out and countered tenfold—all corruptions sanctified in the purity of the ideal at hand.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“Follow me now, dark-hearted and gray-souled, as I stride on into the mist. If all ends are sown into their beginnings, then there is no other storm but this one.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay

“There was a family there, too: a man and a woman expecting a child. Like most couples, they had first seen each other in a metempsy; that is, the interprocrustic network had mathematically determined their optimal compatibility and arranged for them to meet and fall in love by way of subliminal or explicit suggestions. Mostly, they showed up as love interests in each other’s metempsies a year before actually meeting, and were therefore conditioned into love at first sight. This particular couple, however, had decided within six months that they hated each other, and that whatever system had brought them together was therefore evil. Though they themselves could not adopt a monastic life free of metempsies like their neighbor, they wanted better for their child. They had thus resolved to have their child in the Bilge, in order to prevent it from being procrusted. A number of people had had this same idea over the years, and since such ideas were lethal to a fetus, it usually resulted in a stillbirth.”
― K.K. Edin, The Measurements of Decay