Laura McClure > Recent Status Updates

“We are Bloodsworn,” Revna Hare-Legs shrugged. “Death is a companion we are well-used to.”

"He is no warrior," Edel said, jutting her chin at Lif.
"We are none of us born warriors," Orka muttered. "It is the world that makes us so."

I am blood. I am vengeance, I am death.

“No,” Orka said. “Death is my only companion…”

“I am blood. I am death, I am vengeance,” she said, her voice flat, empty.

“Fear me,” Orka snarled.

"No, this is my home," Orka said, placing her palm over Thorkels chest. "You and Breca are my home. Wherever we are together, that is home to me."

A twist of Thorkel's lips, a shrug of his shoulders. "Aye, I may be guilty of that, but then, he has your eyes, and I'm not remembering the last time I said no to you, either. You two have a strange power over me."
"You wouldn't dare say no to me," Orka said, not able to keep the hint of a smile from softening the hard line of her mouth.

"Wishes don't just come true. They're only the target you paint around what you want. You still have to hit the bull's-eye yourself."

It wasn’t even an alternate version of his life. He hadn't gone back in time and done everything differently to get to this place. It turned out that sometimes it's enough to start doing things differently now.

The scope of Strange’s power defied normalization. Maybe the day would come when Thyon was no longer gobsmacked by the fact that the meek junior librarian who used to walk into walls while reading was now in possession of a massive, impregnable, interdimensional skyship that he controlled with his mind. But that day was not today.

Lazlo would have and would still make it a safe place, and not just for them but for others who needed it. "People," she said. "People are our safe places. I have one: a person who's a home and a world to me."

But the time for wishing had passed.


😭💔

How people love to see a dream shatter, thought Nova from far away. To see the dreamer hobbled and lamed, foundering in the shards of their broken hopes.
‘This is what you get for believing that you could have more. You're no better than us. You’re nothing special.’

Friends? A pair of warriors and a thief? Even now a voice within him explained that they were lowborn, incompatible with his sta-tion, and ridiculous besides. But now that voice sounded haughty and condescending, and he wanted to put it in a jar and toss it in a river, then sit and eat bacon with his ridiculous, lowborn friends.

Their shames were different, but their fear was the same: of seeing rejection in the other's eyes.
Instead, each saw hope, a mirror of their own, and brightened like new-polished glavestones that had been muted under dust. Eril-Fane groped for words, but only one came to him:
"Daughter," he said.

But Sarai knew what she knew—what only she knew-and the greatest feat of strength she had ever witnessed was the one he performed every day: continuing to live for the sake of others, when it would be so much easier to stop.

"Impossible?" Lazlo gave a soft laugh and shake of his head. "There must be things that are impossible. But I don't believe we've gotten there yet. Look at us. We've barely begun. Sarai, we're magic." He said this with all the wonder of a lifelong dreamer who's found out he’s half god. “You don’t know yet what you’re capable of, but I’m willing to bet it’s extraordinary.”

Her beauty annihilated him. How could she be for him?

He was Strange the dreamer, after all. He wasn't your ordinary dreamer, prey to all the vagaries of the unconscious. He moved through his mind with the assuredness of an explorer and the grace of a poet. Most dreams don't make sense, and most dreamers aren't even aware they're dreaming.

Her mind, he meant, knowing in a way that few people do that a mind is a place—a landscape, a wilderness, a city, a world. And that Sarai could go there. It filled him with awe and extraordinary pride.

There was nowhere she would rather go than Dreamer’s Weep with Lazlo Strange.

She whispered, "I love you," and he was lost. No one had ever said those words to him, not once in all his life.

It represented a claiming of one's self—stepping forth from childhood and all the ways we're shaped by others, to choose and make a new shape, all on one's own.
And she’d wondered: What shape would she choose, if she were free to do so?

Fertility, sexuality, strength, the ability to create and nurture life: These were the powers of a woman, and the ink honored them, connecting them with all their foremothers going back hundreds of years.

Of all the possibilities laid out like a feast of uncertainty and doom, there was simply no scenario in which Lazlo Strange hurt Weep, or anybody in it.

In the young faranji, Eril-Fane's starved and stunted paternal feelings had found a place to fix. He was more than fond of the young man. He felt protective of him, and in spite of everything, he couldn't help trusting him.

Thyon Nero was late awakening to the understanding that other people are living lives, too... They had always been minor players in a drama about him, their stories mere subplots woven around his own, and it floored him to experience a sudden shift-
He was the minor player now, standing in the settled dust, while Strange flew metal beasts and held dead goddesses in his arms.