Dora’s Reviews > Winter Rose > Status Update

You killed his father. You turn his words to leaves. You take away his eyes, his voice. You don't love him. Why do you care where he goes?"
"Because he is mine, of my blood and of the wood. Love and hate are nothing more than leaves here; he knows that. He was not born to learn them."

i love how she writes fae, fucking terrifying

"Do you care for me at all? Or do you only need me?"
His hand opened to my face; I felt only the cool invisible leaves. I lifted my own hand; in the light our shadows touched.
"You come to me," he whispered. "Into every dark place. Into every memory. Into the empty eyes of winter. I go alone and find you with me. Why do you care for me?"
I did not know until I spoke. "Because you are making me human."

*screams*

"Who are you?" I whispered. She was something wild in my wood, the glint of an eye on a lightless night, the formless shadow the moon reveals tangled in the shadow of a tree. "Who are you?"
"I am night," she said, and it was. "I am winter's song," and I heard it. "I am the shadow of the bloody moon and all the winds that harvest in it." I felt them. "I am the dead of winter."
She wore my mother's face.

disl jezomor

"I thought I knew what you were, who I was, but you changed under my eyes, and so has Laurel and so has the wood, and I don't know anymore what I am except a woman who sees too much.'
"I know. I always knew."
"What did you always know?"
"That you see with the wood's eyes."

You lied to both of us... I believed you...
YOU SAW ME. I COULD NEVER PRETEND TO YOU... YOU SAW ME TOO WELL 💔

But they didn't know where to look, or how to see. I thought I did. Doors, he had said. Thresholds. Places of passage, where gold fell from one story into another, where time shifted across the boundary between worlds.

✨️

I thought I knew what cold was, before cold stripped me bare of thought, then blinded me and froze my heart. I could not feel such cold and live; cold forced me into something other, something not quite human, who held a dream with bones of ice, and did not remember names, only what we once had been: a flower on a vine, a fall of light.

"I must go," I said to Anis, but where, I did not know. I kissed her cheek; she drew a deep breath as I straightened.
"I can smell the wind and wood on you," she said, "as if you lived in them."
I opened the door and glimpsed, in the wild wind and sky, perhaps in her words, the next turn of the tangled path we walked.

It was a song out of a forgotten kingdom, out of the deep, secret heart of the wood. It burned wild and sweet in my throat, in the back of my eyes. It lured and beckoned; it gave us glimpses of the land beyond the falling leaves, within the well. He blurred into tears and fire, a face of fire and shadow, a gleaming stroke of silver. I wanted to find that place where such music grew as free as roses, where winds began

Come in."
"No. "
"You will," he told me. "You will follow me. You keep trying to find your way past the world. You still see your reflection in water, you still feel the wind rushing past you, leaving you behind. You want to dissolve into light, ride the wild winds. I saw you, that night. You wanted to flow like moonlight out of your own body. You will follow me."

scary aa only fairy tales can be 🤫

Water has its moods, flowing or still; it can lure you like a lover, or look as bleak as a broken heart. I pushed the faded vines aside and dipped my hand into the water. Wind rippled it, and my splashing; it would not give me my reflection. But it tasted of those great dreaming clouds, and of the bright winds and broken pieces of blue sky its trembling waters caught. It tasted of the last sun before winter.
*sigh*