You should always listen to minotaurs. Anybody with four stomachs has to have a firm grip on reality.

You look like a winter night", he had told her when he had given it to her. "I could sleep inside the cold of you".

That’s what happens to friends, eventually. They leave you. It’s practically what they’re for.

I did not set out to be beloved and just, only strong." 'A King can be better than that," the Prince insisted. "And so we all begin, determined to better our fathers' performances, knowing we can change the very nature of humanity, make it better, cleaner. But then daggers strike in the night, and peasants revolt, and all manner of atrocities become a necessity as breakfast. Only Princes believe in the greater good. Kings know there is only Reign, and all things may be committed in its holy name.

That's how you get deathless, volchitsa. Walk the same tale over and over, until you wear a groove in the world, until even if you vanished, the tale would keep turning, keep playing, like a phonograph, and you'd have to get up again, even with a bullet through your eye, to play your part and say your lines.

She was beautiful and terrifying, savage and pure.

Her heart ached as though a knife had quietly slipped between her ribs.