It was funny, she thought, but her smile turned wistful because she had nobody to tell.

I miss sunrise even more. The green scent of dawn in the forest? The color blushing back into the world, different every day.

The worst moment of one's life could be seared into the memory, brighter than any joy.

Wishes are false. Hope is true. Hope makes its own magic.

She was a girl and she was a queen and back in the mists she was a woman who had seized the moon from the sky and drunk its light so that she would never die. And she never had.

...and she felt the words come from some iron place within her that hadn't existed an hour ago. She didn't speak loudly, but there was such a change in her voice. Coming from that iron place, it was heavy and true; it wasn't persuasive, or desperate, or antagonistic. It just was.

How could you tell if your instincts were just hope in disguise, and if your hope was really desperation parading as possibility?