Laini Taylor

He drifted about with his head full of myths, always at least half lost in some otherland of story. Demons and wingsmiths, seraphim and spirits, he love it all.

What's a horizon?' Lazlo asked, straight-faced. 'Is it like the end of an aisle of books?

He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn't sleep at all.

It is bodies that make us real. What is a soul without eyes to look through or hands to hold?

Is that all souls are for? For when we die?" "No. They're for living, too.

Anyone who takes on my sister," he had postured once, all puffed-out bravado, "will have to deal with ...my sister." And then he'd dived behind her and cowered.

Creamy and leggy, with long azure hair and the eyes of a silent-movie star, she moved like a poem and smiled like a sphinx.

Don't I deserve to finally be free of you?

I turned my nightmares into fireflies and caught them in a jar.

If you're afraid of your own dreams, you're welcome here in mine.

It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming.

Humans had a genius for devising instruments of death. Their lives were so short and they seemed to value them so little, sending waves of men to clash in battlefields, then weighing victory by the piled corpses. And if they held their own lives so worthless, the lives of everything else were as fruit to pluck from trees.

War does that, nothing for it. Reality lays siege. Your framed portrait of life is smashed, and a new one thrust upon you. It's ugly, and you don't even want to look at it let alone hang it on the wall, but you have no choice, once you know. Once you really know.

In moments Akiva was up in the ether, scarcely feeling the sting of ice crystals in the thin air. He let his glamour fall away, and his wings were like sheets of fire sweeping the black of the heavens. He moved at speed, onward toward another human city to find another doorway bitter with the devil's magic, and after that another, until all bore the black handprint....Once all the doors were marked, the end would begin. And it would begin with fire.

And just so you know, the invaders are always the bad guys. Always.

Peace is more than the absence of war. Peace is accord. Harmony.

Why not open the door, and open their arms, and close them again around each other? Did the not understand how, in the strange chemistry of human emotion, his suffering and her, mingled together, could... countervail each other?

She craved a presence beside her, solid. Fingertips light at the nape of her neck and a voice meeting hers in the dark. Someone who would wait with an umbrella to walk her home in the rain, and smile like sunshine when he saw her coming. Who would dance with her on her balcony, keep his promises and know her secrets, and make a tiny world wherever he was, with just her and his arms and his whisper and her trust.