Morwen > Recent Status Updates

So far, nothing is feeling awesome but at the same time it's not too cringy yet. Let's see how long I last with this one. I haven't heard good things about this since I've started it (I totally should have asked beforehand)

“Mm. Two lovers, from two feuding gentryclans, meeting secretly under false names for their tryst!” She scoffed. “How puerile. How derivative. I pray it is more deviant than it appears!”

Noah's drug addiction is mildly triggering to me tbh, so I'm having a hard time rooting for him as MMc/love interest. The story is great, but it makes me flinch a bit every time he promises anything

“But … how will you review the death scene of my sister,” said Jalin, “if you are blindfolded?”
“Thoroughly,” said Ana curtly.

CHAPTER 1
“IT IS AN INARGUABLE TRUTH, you know,” said Ana, “that most people are absolutely enthralled by dead girls.”

‘Scary, isn’t it? Think, why is this more frightening than a knife?’ Griffin did not move his arm. ‘It says I’m willing to kill you, and all I have to do is pull this trigger. I can kill at a distance, without effort. A gun takes all the hard work out of murder and makes it elegant. It shrinks the distance between resolve and action, you see?’

‘Nice comes from the Latin word for “stupid”,’* said Griffin. ‘We do not want to be nice.’

* This is true. Nice comes to us by way of the Old French nice (‘weak, clumsy, silly’), from the Latin nescius (‘ignorant, not knowing’).

Am I missing something? I'm liking it and enjoying the talk of translation concepts and the original style of narration with the second narrator for footnotes as in an academic text, but so far I enjoyed Katabasis more

Estiene was full of ideas and brandy and want. The world was enormous and it was as small as this rooftop; the world was the size of one person, and for Estiene it had always been Jehan.

You can save a lot of time doing if you spend more time thinking.

They stood, two short figures with shadows for hair and deep wild hurt sparkling in their eyes, and rolled their shoulders and gazed at one another.

The spirits must have heard her embarrassing wish that Clement be allowed to rearrange her insides, because earlier today, their magic had. It had felt like being lovingly unknotted.

“Everything happened for such good reasons in books. Everything turned out well.”

The kiss broke for breath. Estiene looked brutalised, and Jehan had always wanted to fight the world for that look. He would do anything for this man’s attention, shit, it was so fucking pathetic.

Magic flooded out from his fingertips where they fumbled and slid on the blood-slickness of Jehan’s chest, the unfocused and righteous surge of his anger making it feel rougher and more dangerous than diagnostics ever had before: magic like a hand dragging a man’s head back by a fist in the hair, magic like a crashing tide, searching for the hurt.

Some rules were obvious, though. You didn’t tell people, especially ones you didn’t know well, that you thought they would do a good job of choosing a comfortable arrangement for your guts.

That part wanted, for a wild moment, for Clement. And maybe from there Alys could unravel Clement’s hair and drench her fingers in the silky scent of blackcurrants, and Clement could reach through Alys’s skin and rearrange her organs, then put them back neatly and snugly so they didn’t rub, so Alys never again felt like she didn’t fit together right.

Clement cordially wished that twenty pigeons would take a shit on Estiene Marcelle’s perfect hair. They closed their eyes and imagined it. Lovely.

How cool!
[The dragon] now has four legs and a pair of wings. But if you raise it in the ground, its wings will disappear. Because it wouldn’t need to fly so much. But its front legs would grow large, like a mole’s. If you raised it in the desert, it may grow humps for water. Even a tail that can dig deep for wells. If you raised it in the water, its legs and wings would fall off and it would grow a fin instead.”

I'm officially bored 😭 I feel like this book should already be over. I have like zero motivation to finish it

😂😂😂
“I’m Sammo Pei. You’re human, I assume? And that is a horse?”
“A h-h-h-horse.”
“Hmm . . . what a long name . Is it related to a horse?”

“The king is a bird that drinks tears. The most elaborate, the most beautiful of the birds, but the first to die.”

Omg these idiots!

Not too much is happening, but it's not happening really well!

This book is so sweet to my ears!

“The reason the bird that drinks blood lives the longest is because it drinks that which the body wants to keep and never let flow outside of it. Tears, however, are discarded by the body. How harmful must they be that the body refuses them? It stands to reason that drinking such a thing leads to early death. However...”
“However?”
“They say the bird that drinks tears sings the most beautiful song in the world.”

Ah! Karu!

“The Corpsefall said something about a conspiracy toward a deicide. It said the plan for it was inside my memories. I didn’t know what that meant. But if I wasn’t the only Nhaga there, maybe what the Corpsefall read wasn’t my memory but my sister’s? Because the Corpsefall and the serpent were a collective. Maybe it is incapable of distinguishing between individual Nhaga.”

The flow twisted monstrously as the bottom part of the flow rose upward and clashed with the parts coming from above. At the point of clashing, the two flows began to build up into two piles that soon formed themselves into two arms. The lengths of the fingers were all different, but they had one thing in common. The tips of all the fingers were made of hundreds of eyeballs, like bunched grapes.

I'm so amazed at the surreal concept of the conscious Corpsefall that I forgot I should be disgusted