Status Updates From Game Theory (The Fae Tales ...

‘I’m still angry.’

‘You’ll always be angry, and I will always have done something wrong,’ Gwyn said into his fingers. ‘I have lived in this world long enough to know that this is how it goes.’ MY BABYYYY😭😭😭

‘I have...’ Gwyn gasped, ‘other cabins we can do this in.’

Augus felt himself smiling unbidden.

‘Do you want to remember me in all of them, then?’

‘Yes,’ Gwyn said. 👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻👌🏻

‘I don’t need to hunt you,’ Augus said quietly.

‘I know,’ Gwyn said, despair and pleasure turning his voice soft.

He was already caught.

I’m too invested in this relationship and i know I’m gonna get hurt soon

‘I never took clients on for more than a day or two. Every now and then, someone would come, some fae, and I’d want to know what it would be like if they stayed longer. A week. If I had them for a week. Two.’

Gwyn’s heart started pounding, he felt his eyes widen.

‘You were one of those fae.’

We're so close to shit hitting the fan, a.k.a. Act 4. I love the pacing in this book. I'm feeling the tension and their impatience, both of them are on a short fuse. 💣

“I’ve given you everything you need to break me, even as I know how to break you.”

I'm on the way to Tesco, when this song comes on the radio
"And oh oh oh, I was a king under your control"
... and i'm like this is f*** perfect 😱😍 and promptly started giggling 😆

"‘I am trying to make this easier on you,’ Augus said. ‘Then you’re going soft,’ Gwyn replied, his voice breaking."

Don't poke the bear. 😱😏

‘What you are may terrify you, but it doesn’t scare me, Gwyn ap Nudd.’

‘You didn’t want me to cleanse you of your madness, all that time ago,’ Augus said, gently. ‘Did you? […] Even I couldn’t make you into something you weren’t. I might be good, but I’m not that good.’

Gwyn kissed with that hesitant, sweet innocence that made Augus want to dig his claws into his ribcage and pull his sternum apart, look at what lay beneath in the core of him. He wanted mess and blood and viscera, he wanted to place his tongue against the rift in Gwyn’s soul and lick.

‘Sweetness, I don’t want to leave you here,’
‘But you must. And you will realise that this has been a way of you making the best of a bad situation. And you will remember that I defeated you, and betrayed your brother, and placed you in a cell, and raped you, and hunted you, and displayed you to my Court, and you will...you will come to your senses.’

"‘I’m going to stay here, if you don’t mind. You can imagine that me making egregious errors regarding judgement in these matters, doesn’t actually happen to me that often, and I’d like to lie here and absorb the fact of my own mistake about as melodramatically as you insist on lying here and staring up at the ceiling.’"

Augus, ever so humble. 🤭

‘If you keep making me stronger, Gwyn, there’s going to be consequences. If you’re going to torture me, torture me. I tire of waiting for you to choose between cruelty or kindness.’

There was an instinct there to check if Augus was okay, if he needed anything. There was a darker instinct that told him to drop to his knees. He couldn’t stand it.

‘You don’t get absolution,’ Augus pushed his lips against Gwyn’s, breathed the words against his mouth. ‘You don’t get absolution because it’s not a sin to be yourself, Gwyn.’

‘Do you want to know what I learned about you, all those years ago? I learned that you are a wild creature who tames himself for others […] but there are serious consequences, a barely restrained madness perhaps, and afterwards you’re so bewildered. You are so damaged by your reality that you need someone else to give you permission for it. Can you imagine? A wild creature, asking permission to be wild.’

"He had met all kinds of monsters in his lifetime, he was related to them, he had defeated them, he had avoided them, he had killed them. But the one he couldn’t get away from, the one that seemed to do the most damage, was himself."

Skipping right over those first ten chapters, because I love Augus too much to read those ever again

Two of my friends are (re)reading this right now, and I just can’t help myself! 🙈 Never let it be said that I’m not impressionable af 😂

"There are stories about heroes, and then there are stories about the madness that can befall heroes, that can turn even the strongest into dust. That can turn the Each Uisge to corruption, that can turn an Unseelie King into a fallen captive, and a Seelie King into his uncertain captor.
It was, after all, the Season of Turning."

Oookay Pete, I'll give it to ya'. You're not so bad a storyteller after all. 😏

Doing a palate cleanse after Dark Rise.
I don't intend to read the whole book, just some of it.
But don't hold it against me if I get swept away again. :)

“You may not, under any circumstances, kill me with a letter opener, you uncouth creature,” Augus spat.

“under different circumstances, this could have been erotic. Gwyn doubted it. This was not one of his kinks[…]he tightened his grip around the chain all the same.
‘If I’m to shift, I want privacy,’ Augus said ‘Turn away’
‘I-Yes’ Gwyn said, letting go of the chain and walking several steps, before turning and facing the wall”

I don’t get how it went from the previous horrible encounters to this blushing insecure Gwyn

“Thinking of Ash opened a wound in his heart, and though he did not chase those thoughts away, he winced to be confronted with them. He did not like to dwell on Ash, he particularly didn’t like to dwell on how it had gone between them, last time. The day that he’d started out as King, and finished as Gwyn’s captive; underfae, unconscious.”

So many questions! So many secrets!
Ahhhh, I’m liking this😱