Rissa > Recent Status Updates

"Women are the backbone, the foundation, the immovable force that still does not falter when men stand on our spines to grab power. So no, Callum, I am not fragile. The cracks in my soul aren't broken places. They are veins cemented together with rage. And it will take more than the hands of men to kill my spirit, to break my will."

She'd already shot him twice and it'd only seemed to turn him on. She wasn't sure what that said about either of them.

If I'm to be happy, it's with you.
This time, she had told him a fairy tale in only eight words.

“I love you. I would have loved you in defiance of your rejection, and I will love you, in spite of any of your objections. I had no heart to give, until you, and now it has passed to your keeping—and it’s yours—it’s yours—and it will be yours, whether you want it or not.”

She clutched his hands in her shaking ones. "For so long my hands have been defined by my abilities, my tācn, my Cost. But they've been empty—so empty. Hands should have other hands to hold. I want them to be yours."

"You almost lost your life. I'm not worth that."
"You don't get to decide what you're worth to me."

"Can you hate someone for what they are, but love them for what they could be?"

He was vivid, scarred, imperfect, beautiful, far too in love with her. And she, frightened, knew that she was far too in love with him. Her heart harassed her, pulled her from logic to a known suffering; he was a Fyren; there was no future here; the future could be nothing but pain.

But she felt in that moment that even if they went their separate ways, in him there would always be a bit of her now, and in her a bit of him. One couldn't touch hearts unchanged.

Kiss me and kiss me again; our tomorrows are so few.

She had cured him of one thing and afflicted him with another.
He kissed her smile. And he knew sadness then, because this was the end, because he was who he was and she was who she was. This was the inevitable goodbye. They were already standing in a memory.

A Haelan and a Fyren walked into a pub. It was the start of a joke.
That the Fyren was a bit in love with the Haelan was the punch line, probably.

“I don’t either of us is destined for an ordinary sort of love.”

He wanted her, and he hated her for it

She and Mordaunt had been drawn to each other in sleep—by the oddness of the unconscious, by the strange logic of souls. The healer in the arms of a killer, the sinner entangled with the saint. They lay as two halves of a whole, fragments held together in a new form, and it was wrong yet right, and so it was ugly-beautiful.

"Río," I whispered, out of breath, and not from wheezing. "You make me feel like I'm kissing the tides."
"Benigno," he whispered back. "You make me feel like I am holding the moon."

"What if nobody taught me how to keep my heart safe" —my eyes drifted to the dark ribbon of his mouth—"from you?"
"Your heart in my keeping," he whispered, "would always be safe."

But I saw you, Owen Mallory, and swore to serve you by my right arm and my left, by my life and death. And I am not dead yet.

Everlasting, Yvanne called me. But nothing that lives lasts forever. Save, perhaps, this thing between us, which had drawn us together across a thousand years, over and over, and—my breath caught-dragons.

I laid myself down beside you and took your hand carefully in mine. I thought: Let us lie here forever. Let us be buried as wild things are, by tooth and claw and worm. Let the grasses grow up through the sockets of our eyes. Let them find us in seven years or seventy, and let their brows furrow, because they cannot tell my bones from yours.

Your clever black eyes had so often been the last thing I’d seen, looking into mine as if you would follow me to heaven or hell, as if there was nowhere I could go that you would not find me.