vaishnave > Recent Status Updates

Let me write their names here, just once. They're only a dream, now, of the future that will never come to pass, but I won't have them forgotten.
Marro. Our son, named for the river where my mother died.
Thea. Our daughter, named for one of your fathers.

oh my GOD

[spoiler] had made a mistake in her calculations, I thought. For sometimes—when we could not run any longer, when all our choices had been whittled down to one—love made heroes of us.

oh my god oh my god oh my god

In that moment you seemed to be everything at once, a series of contradictions: You were a knight with no master and a mother with no children; a manly woman and a womanly man; a hero whose name would be sung for a thousand years, and an orphan whose name had already been forgotten. You were [Una] who I had loved long before my birth and long after your death, in the past and the future, and here, now. Always.

"But it's not an ordinary woman that I need, now. I need a hero, Una. I need you to fight again." I met your eyes around the blade and found them huge and hungering. "But not for her."
"Owen—"
"Kneel, love."

oh dear god

This, I thought, was the reason [spoiler] needed the book so badly. Because no throne is held easily, or for long; because a nation is a story we tell about ourselves, and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it.

"Have you learned to fear me yet, boy?"
I touched my palms very carefully to the backs of your hands. "Never."
You exhaled, shakily. "Madman."
"Yes, but I'm your madman."

But if the knight can put away her sword, then he can put away his pen. [...] The thrushes are singing and their second child is born. Her hair is a wet black cap and her eyes are the lucent brown of acorns in the sun. Her brother, upon meeting her, comforts his parents. "Maybe the next one will come with teeth," he says, patting his mother's knee.

alix what are you going to do don't scare me like this

The scholar looked down at his son and thought: Here, at last, is something worth dying for. The knight looked at the scholar, looking at his son, and thought: Here, at least, is something worth killing for.
They named him—but no. You asked for mercy. I will not make you remember his name.

alix e. harrow WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO

I'm not sure you've ever been what you should be, love." She scowled at him; he smiled his crooked smile. "[...] Now you're a knight without armor, and a wife without a ring. No matter what you are, you're always..."
"Bad at it?"
"Yourself," said the scholar, stubbornly. "And you'll remain so. Whatever you become next."

<3

i need to scream into a pillow jesus fucking christ

This, at least, came easily to them, for neither of them had ever quite been what they were supposed to be, or acted how they ought to act. [...] It was no hardship to trade one disguise for another.
They left so much behind them that they were not always sure, what, if anything, remained to them.

oh i love you alix e. harrow

"You want to run."
"I told you I was a coward." I heard the flinch in your voice.
"You want to run, and leave her alive."
"I want to run and leave youalive, you ass."

I felt myself smile, wide and loose, the way I hadn't smiled since I was a girl. "You came back for me."
I watched you choke with relief, eyes closing as if you could hardly bear the sight of me. "Always," you said, and your voice sounded more like the voice I remembered: fractured, scarred over.

I was alone, before you came. (You'll forgive me for telling this part, but it always makes you cry, Owen.)

"I given them an empire—and still, still, I am not safe. I cannot be too young or too old, too beautiful or too ugly. i cannot weep or rage. i cannot refuse a man nor fuck him nor marry him—a queen is only powerful if there are no kings or princes nearby."

"[My teacher] asked me to name a great woman of history. Just one [...] There were no precedents for what I wanted to become, you see. No stories. So I made my own precedents." A small, proud smile, here. "I built my own ladder, rung by rung, and climbed it all the way to the top. And now every child on the street could tell you their names, and every name is mine."

oh vivian

With this thought came a great clarity. Everything I had believed in and fought for—crown and country, the flag and the church, even the past itself—had proved false. What remained were those trivial, nameless moments which would be swallowed up by the tide of history and forgotten [...]
If I serve anything, let it be that. If I die for anything, let it be you.

I was a mere byproduct of war, one of tens of thousands of orphans left by centuries of war and crusades [...]
But I had lived, because my mother loved me enough to take a bullet to the spine, and my father—yes, he was my father, though perhaps not my only one—had loved me enough to put a bullet in his own leg.

oh god i'm tearing up

"And it felt—it was like a miracle to me. That anything or anyone would still trust me, after what I—"

oh my gods

"The body remembers, you see, even when the mind forgets."

oh god i'm gonna be sick alix e. harrow how dARE YOU

I loved you by then, or would soon, or always had. It was inevitable, foretold: When I look up, I will see the sky; when I fight, I will win; when I meet Owen Mallory, I will love him.

oh my god una

It had the cadence of a myth or a prayer, mesmerizing in its simplicity. Die, and be redeemed. Die, and be remembered. Die, and live forever. My destiny, and the last request of my queen.
I looked up into your face, made fractal by tears but still so familiar, too familiar. [...]
I could deny my destiny, and even my queen. I could never deny you.

Still, I think I would have refused—except you were watching me, and God, the way you watched me: with a pure and piercing beseechment, as if you needed me more than you had ever needed anything else.
Yvanne had looked at me like that...She had needed me, and I had spent the last two decades becoming whatever she needed...
I couldn't do it any longer, not for her. But for you—I would be a hero. One last time.

I found you on the other side of the yew. You were standing very still, as if you were waiting for me, as if we'd agreed to meet here long ago and I'd somehow forgotten.

God, please don't ask me to write it all down again.
It's your turn to tell it, love.

oh my GOD

The doctors had listed fatigue among my many symptoms, but I didn't sleep because I was tired; I slept because I dreamed, and every dream was of you.

I would touch my cheek and discover I'd been crying without knowing it. I would wake sometimes from a bad dream to discover I was standing at the sink, washing my hands over and over.

oh alix e. harrow you absolute devil of a genius how could you

The world might remember you as I wrote you, but I would remember you as you were: hard and strange and silent, your hands bloodied and your soul sick with it. I would remember the line between your brows. I would remember that you were not beautiful, not really, but that the sight of you struck me as a hammer strikes hot iron, reordering my very atoms.

"Understand me. Her death is worth nothing. It is meaningless. It is a waste—unless you make it matter. [...] If you loved her at all, Owen—make them remember her."

"She dies, and they forget her. I've seen it. She becomes a footnote, a piece of trivia. And she wanted so badly to be remembered."
She pressed something heavy into my hands. "This is why you're here, Mallory. Dominion is nothing without Una Everlasting, and she is nothing without you."

oh my gods