Status Updates From The Language of Thorns: Mid...

“They lived long lives and kept few memories. They forgot old grievances.
Not so Ulla. She held each sorrow like a chafing grain of sand and grew her grudges like pearls”

“Ulla felt hate bloom in her heart.
What gave her strength then? We cannot know for sure. That contrary thing inside her? The hard stone of rage that all lonely girls possess?”

““You knew,” said Roffe. “Both of you knew. You were as eager as I, as hungry. You just wouldn’t look your ambition in the eye.”

“The want in her was an animal, scratching at her resolve, fretting its claws and saying, Why not? Why not?”

““Roffe thinks only of fire, day and night. Why did you put such a thought in his head?”
Because he made me dream of things I cannot have”

“How easily princes played. How easily they spoke of dreams they had no business offering”

“Hungry Ulla,” he had taunted. “Why do you work so hard? I can smell your ambition like blood in the water.”
as though if she could only sharpen her skill to a fine enough point, she might carve a true place for herself in the world.
“What would you know about ambition?” she scoffed.
But the prince had only winked. “I know that you should keep it like a secret, not shout it like a curse”

Magic doesn’t require beauty,” she said. “Easy magic is pretty. Great magic asks that you trouble the waters. It requires a disruption, something new.”

They know the land is a place of danger. Yet still they long for a taste of mortal life. This is the problem with making a thing forbidden. It does nothing but build an ache in the heart.

Lol and at the end her mom giving life to the clockmaker again wow
Okay so i did see this idea in many stories that the more you play with something or use something, you imbue it with life essence and it becomes real

This story ‘The Little Soldier’ is a mix of Pinocchio and Nutcracker and it s so good. It’s literally abracdabra… what you speak and desire becomes true

“You wanted only that I might live” said the young man as he knelt to look at the crumpled doll lying in a heap on the floor. “You would have sacrificed your own life to make it so.”
He picked up Droessen, cradled him gently“That’s how much you loved me, Father.” He opened the door to the cabinet and placed the charming little doll with its pale blue eyes inside. “Enough to give your life for mine”

“You couldn’t,” said the nutcracker. “You loved me too much.” It was not true. But Clara had made him a prince through the power of her desire; he could desire too.”

“You were an idea in my head,” said the clocksmith. “You were nothing, and to nothing you will return when I think of you no more.”

Lol the universe/ God be like

“You walk and talk and laugh when Clara dreams with you,” said the Rat King. “But those are her desires. They cannot sustain you. My life began with wanting something for myself.”

“Who are you when no one picks you up to hold you?” asked the Rat King. “When no one is looking at you, or whispering to you, who are you then?”

“Wanting is why people get up in the morning. It gives them something to dream of at night. The more I wanted, the more I became like them, the more real I became.”

“She lived in happy solitude, and grew old, and never worried when her beauty faded, for in her reflection she always saw a free woman.”

“The trap is loneliness, and none of us escapes it. Not even me.”

“Freedom is a burden, but you will learn to bear it”

Yep First story Ayama and the ThornWood is so beautiful
Okayyy storytales are so up my alley
And the fact that the places where they happen remain unnamed makes them universally true (as all stories should be!)