Status Updates From Kushiel's Dart (Phèdre's Tr...

“Alone among our allies, Drustan mab Necthana rides toward Troyes-le-Mont with his head held high and a joyful heart, because he rides toward you. The dream that you shared together, of two mighty nations ruled side by side, lives on in him. If his people had not risen up to follow him, he would have set out to retake his throne alone, and had he fallen in the attempt, his last thought would have been of you."

“I never understood, before, how sacrificial victims could go consenting.
I thought of Elua, baring his palm to the blade. I thought of Yeshua, taking his place upon the wooden tree. No two sacrifices are the same, and yet all are, in the end. It is the commitment to belong, wholly, to that which claims one.”

“Friend, brother, lover… I shaped his face in darkness with my hands, his mouth with my lips, his body with my own.” - Phèdre

“Comfort and atonement, sorrow and exhilaration; all of a piece, woven together on the green earth of Alba. The poets do not sing of this, either, how death begets the urge toward life. I, who knew how to take pain, took Hy-acinthe's. Pain and delight, I took from him, and gave him back both, until we understood, the both of us, how they are intertwined, how one does not come without the other.”

Just read a page where I swear I could some like LOTR music playing in my ears. Phedre is astonishingly written in the best ways

EXQUISITE like nothing else I’m reading compares

“ I knew firsthand the ravages that could be perpetuated against the soul. The torment of the flesh were as nothing to them.”