The less you say, the more weight your words will carry.

I had spared the stag's life. The power of that life belonged to me as surely as it belonged to the man who had taken it.

Na razrusha'ya. I am not ruined. E'ya razrushost. I am ruination.

Weakness is a guise. Wear it when they need to know you're human, but never when you feel it.

And there's nothing wrong with being a lizard either. Unless you were born to be a hawk.

My stories usually begin with the characters and some elements of how power (personal, political, magical) functions in the world. The rest develops as I write, and research helps a great deal with that. If you're going to write about an agrarian economy, research agrarian economies. If your main character is starving, then you should know what it means for a malnourished body to break down.

Maybe love was superstition, a prayer we said to keep the truth of loneliness at bay. I tilted my head back. The stars looked like they were close together, when really they were millions of miles apart. In the end, maybe love just meant longing for something impossibly bright and forever out of reach.