Mal’s Reviews > The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic > Status Update

“They lived long lives and kept few memories. They forgot old grievances.
Not so Ulla. She held each sorrow like a chafing grain of sand and grew her grudges like pearls”

“Ulla felt hate bloom in her heart.
What gave her strength then? We cannot know for sure. That contrary thing inside her? The hard stone of rage that all lonely girls possess?”

““You knew,” said Roffe. “Both of you knew. You were as eager as I, as hungry. You just wouldn’t look your ambition in the eye.”

“The want in her was an animal, scratching at her resolve, fretting its claws and saying, Why not? Why not?”

““Roffe thinks only of fire, day and night. Why did you put such a thought in his head?”
Because he made me dream of things I cannot have”

“How easily princes played. How easily they spoke of dreams they had no business offering”

“Hungry Ulla,” he had taunted. “Why do you work so hard? I can smell your ambition like blood in the water.”
as though if she could only sharpen her skill to a fine enough point, she might carve a true place for herself in the world.
“What would you know about ambition?” she scoffed.
But the prince had only winked. “I know that you should keep it like a secret, not shout it like a curse”

They know the land is a place of danger. Yet still they long for a taste of mortal life. This is the problem with making a thing forbidden. It does nothing but build an ache in the heart.

Lol and at the end her mom giving life to the clockmaker again wow
Okay so i did see this idea in many stories that the more you play with something or use something, you imbue it with life essence and it becomes real

This story ‘The Little Soldier’ is a mix of Pinocchio and Nutcracker and it s so good. It’s literally abracdabra… what you speak and desire becomes true