Axelle⁷ > Recent Status Updates

She unconsciously curled into him, a habit borne of months in his arms. He wondered whether he would soon live off these memories once she knew the truth.

Her brow creased in sleep. He painted a row of kisses over her cheeks until relaxation overtook her face. A surge of affection choked him to breathlessness. The gods could offer him every seat in their Bright Realms, yet this was the only one he craved.

ughh

Damn miss Abeysekara !! You had me for a while but I remember your game now 😏

“Peahen,” Bastian offered with a flip of his hand, settling on the arm of the couch to watch her eat. “I hate it, but it seems you don’t.”

“I’d eat anything right about now,” Lore said around a full mouth.

“See, had you not just gone through something rather traumatic, I’d be making an off-color joke about that. As it is, I will let it lie. Please admire my restraint.”

lol

" His voice sparked in her, like the connection she’d always felt in his presence had sunk deeper, insinuated itself into muscle and marrow. An image flashed across her mind, roses and sunlight in a mountaintop garden, but then it was gone. "

👀👀 I love a mysterious mystical connection

“All that money, and hardly anyone here reads.”

“No one, really? What a waste.”

“Bastian used to. When we were children. He read voraciously.”

“That’s surprising.”

“He’s not stupid,” Gabe said. Then cocked his head, amended. “Well. He is, but not in a books way. Just a general-common-sense way.”

“If you want me to go north with you, ask nicely.”

“Fuck you,” he grits out, though the fury on his face dampens. In its place, a cocky smirk forms as he looks past me.

I smell her before I see or hear her. My little dictator.

“We’re going with Alexus,” Nephele says from behind me.


Hehe randomly picking this one up bc I remembered I enjoyed the dynamic between these two side characters

Sometimes, immoral women became something terrible and unnatural. A greedy woman might grow another mouth in the back of her head that consumed all the food it could find. In the most wicked cases, the woman’s grief, jealousy or rage would turn her into an oni, a hannya, or even a terrible giant serpent, demons that always met their ends on some great samurai’s sword.

" But some part of me knew that even if I left Arden in Allum, there would be no future. There would only …

Ruination. That’s how the vision had felt. Like utter ruination.

Arden was doing this for a reason. And that reason was to protect us.

My bones knew it. My blood, my guts, my soul. It was written in the very fabric of myself."

Mh is it something like, if they dont die at 18, they will be cursed even more ?

Nothing. Just a camera installed on the wall. Just Calla—long hair tangled around her neck, face and clothes splattered with blood, her surroundings contorting around her as the surface of the puddle catches irregular light.

She doesn’t look like herself. She’s never really looked like herself.

Calla Tuoleimi, princess of Er. She could do nothing on a throne, but she can do everything with a sword in her hand.

heh

Now, the games are a thrill that anyone can participate in, a solution to a kingdom simmering with complaints. Don’t worry if your babies drop dead because they have hollowed into starved husks, King Kasa declares. Don’t worry that your elderly must sleep in cages because there is no more apartment space, nor that the neon light from the strip club across the alleyway keeps you awake night after night.

Reread time

“Black/Third World women internationally, the majority of the majority of the world’s people, carry the major burden of the world’s work and get the least wealth in return,” they described.49 Black women in the US were kidnapped from their children and violently enslaved in homes, where they were forced to cook, clean, and care for and act as wet nurses for white children."

"Raj Patel estimates that the value of women’s unpaid work constitutes more than half the world’s entire labor output.45 In 2020, the New York Times pegged the value of women’s unpaid labor around the world at an overwhelming $10.9 trillion.46 This naturalization of reproductive work as unpaid, gendered work lays the foundation for underpaid domestic work in the wage economy"

28

Even though migrant workers—precarious and deportable—are some of the most vulnerable during times of economic crisis, they are the most likely to be scapegoated for “stealing” jobs and resources. Migrant workers are discursively and physically attacked for “causing unemployment” and become the targets of rising xenophobia. "

"One-third of farmworkers in Italy are migrant workers, earning an average of twenty to thirty euros a day for up to fourteen hours of work.2 Many workers are recruited through the caporalato (gangmaster system), under which their wages are often withheld, they are coerced to take performance-enhancing drugs, and they experience routine violence by employers and labor brokers."

‘I don’t feel like any of them,’ I said slowly. ‘I don’t feel, in my heart, that I’m a boy. But neither do I feel like I am inherently a girl. My soul isn’t rooted to any of them. I’m just me. No particular body feels more “right” than the other, nor more wrong. They’re just vessels. And with you … it doesn’t matter to me how you look, what form you take.’ I tapped the top of his cane. ‘You’re just you.’

Memories came to me as visceral images: a head on my shoulder as we lay beneath a goat-hide tent in the desert; two ravenous bodies pressed together in a steaming hammam; my jaw cupped in rough hands as I wept beside a pod of dancing whales. Battlefields and asylums, olive groves and caravels, the whole world a backdrop for our doomed love, for our infinite fates.

I should have hated him. I should have hated the person in front of me. I should have wanted to cross the room and punch him in the face.
But I didn’t. I ached for him. I ached to go to him, to feel his heart beat against mine, to press my face into his neck and just sob and sob and sob.


Very curious about why he "has" to kill her as he said

This book has the mc having amnesia, and we discover bit by bit along with her, her lost memory, and I love when this happens haha, the angst, the tension

“Sometimes,” I told him, “you must be content with ignorance.”

He did not like that answer, yet that was the perversity of him: in a way he liked it best of all. So little of the world did not yield to his sounding. In the end, I think the fact that I did not was his favorite thing about me.

But I am ahead of myself now.

I enjoy this style of writing where we get glimpses of the future by the narrator haha

“Is there—” He threw me back against the wall. My head hit the uneven stone and the room sparked. I opened my mouth to cry out the spell, but he jammed his arm against my windpipe and the sound was choked off. I could not speak. I could not breathe. I fought him, but he was stronger than I had thought he would be, or maybe I was weaker.

Idk how I feel about s*xual violence as a plot point to "justify" women rage

But gods are born of ichor and nectar, their excellences already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters. All that smoke and savor rising so delicately from our altars. It leaves only ash behind.

“The servants say he is a monster, and my father shouted at me when I asked about him. But he is still my brother, is he not?”

I hesitated.

“I know about my mother and the white bull,” she said.

No child of Pasiphaë’s could remain innocent for long. “I suppose you may say he is your half-brother,”

I was traumatized reading Ariadne and knowing about the bull already lol now we got a birthing scene...

He paused with the fork to my mouth.

“If you so much as breathe one word of this, I vow revenge, my lady.”

“Very well. Though I doubt I’ll even remember this extreme act of chivalry in the morning.”

I waited for him to feed me the dessert. With only a fraction of hesitation, he did. I swore the food tasted sweeter. I felt like a pampered Roman goddess as he fed me one decadent berry at a time."

we love that for u

“Black people are far more likely than any other
population to be arrested, convicted and imprisoned in the US criminal
enforcement system—the system upon which immigration enforcement
increasingly relies.”

Millions of migrant and undocumented workers across the country endure
impoverishment and lethal work conditions(..)trapped in the American dream of choosing to sell one’s
labor for a wage under deadly conditions or death by unemployment and
destitution. Meanwhile, the US billionaire class has experienced a wealth
surge of $434 billion during the pandemic

Right-wing demagogues are making rising populist appeals about
“foreigners” stealing our jobs, draining our services, ruining our
environment, infecting our neighborhoods, and tainting our values.

This rhetoric deflects responsibility from the underlying systems producing mass inequality, impoverishment, and misery by conveniently scapegoating
“foreigners.”

Love the writing, very poetic and dramatic at times (teen drama like), the horror is definitely present but it's not scary imo

The world has really expanded a lot, we also have new characters's POVs, I fear this may have been too much for a 2nd book in a YA trilogy haha (there's a demon-like entity that is getting mixed with Emory though... hehe)

This is not a level playing field.
It doesn’t come naturally to me to orchestrate the downfall of vulnerable women. I liked it better when she was actively trying to murder me. I liked it better before I made her cry. Hell, I . She never used to look at me like this, like a cat when it’s comfortable. Softly blinking, sleepy eyes. I don’t like it. I need her to try to stab me or something, and soon. Really soon.

Lol

"
But I’d realized at a young age that you can’t have peace without securing justice; and when you’re living under tyranny you can’t secure justice without violence. I didn’t want to live a passive life
"

Been loving the humour, the plot, the characters