I am still myself and so I am answered at last: yes, I have a soul, no matter what shape its vessel is forced into. I remember that I am sunlight made tender flesh, even as I stir soundless feathers against a starlit sky. I remember the wind in the woods, the gift of nectar, the graze of wings. Though I cannot see the sun, I fly ever closer to its resting-place, and I pray it hears me, in its dreams, when I call.

I hit the water headfirst. The sea latched onto my clothes and weighed me down like armour and crowns and scepters, all those vestments I had never wanted. I didn’t glance up at the ship. Didn’t care if the captain’s panicked eyes were peering down at me or not, and felt grateful the sea drowned out his calls. I breathed in water and choked on it, feeling my mind and vision slipping away. Then something wrapped around my waist and began dragging me... up.

Shon isn't afraid. This isn't the stark silence of his empty home. This living quiet conceals the stretch of new leaf to sun, the rustle of the worm, and the squirm of pink pinioned baby birds. It is the held breath of small lungs in small bone cages around small swift hearts that beat a little faster waiting for the listener and the whistler to pass by.

The wind turned, and the rustle of the field bled into the whistling of the wood, and more smoke blew closer. The air was bitter with it. He didn’t turn his gaze away from her. Anger. It was anger, there in its depths. She’d never had that directed at her before. Hadn’t had the chance to cause it, really. She let the hand holding the coins drop. “Tomorrow night.”

Hassan had loved her, but his eyes had still been clear enough to know how the world saw her, the horror of her power and her magic and her intolerance of human weakness. It was easier to think of that now, in the way that it was easier to see after stepping from too bright sun into a shaded room. Lamia was not here to blind him anymore.

As magehandler, I technically outrank them during transit. But what's a command here on the frontier, ankle-deep in corpses? Danger's one thing. Soldiers expect that. Some even enjoy it. But certain death? No one walks into that just because some asshole with rank tells them to. Besides, what use would they be, soft flesh and brittle steel, with a world-cracker on the loose?

“I hid him in that tree.” Her grandfather nodded at the famous one, its lopsided head barely visible in the gloom. “Gave him a ladder to climb with, and my wife Joan—you’re named for her—she fetched two pillows to cushion him. William Carlis sat there with His Majesty all through the day, while those Roundhead dogs searched high and low, but we never said a word.”

"Not me," Isaac said. "But all things are connected in the Ayn Sof. Maybe I can help him be found. Hochmah and Binah. Wisdom and understanding. Seventy-three and sixty-seven—a hundred and forty." He felt a change in the air and knew that Mansour, too, had risen; he turned to the house to get the things he would need before they went to the university. The smoke of burning Tuluz came to him one more time, and his familiar home had the smell of death.

There had to be other islands capable of supporting human settlements, Alain told himself. Life should be possible beyond the shores of Heora. That was the article of faith that drove all Exploration. They simply haven't sailed far enough to find a new home. It was their own failure, not the obvious fact that Heora did not want them.

But think—if we succeed, I’ll acquire a whole boxful of memories. Big, jewel-like memories whose sharp edges will tear my master’s world around me like old silk. I’ll escape. Eat a whole orange rather than a mere pip. Oranges are bright, like the sun. Do they taste like the sun? I think they might. I almost remember that they do.

She wanted to ask the nurse at her elbow if any of the others had survived, but while she was thinking about how she might phrase it, the woman gestured to a padded wooden dais meant for centaurs and abandoned her to the sunlight. She wondered how long she would be left there. This dais was close to the hedge maze’s entrance. A figure sat there on the long stone bench. Where the sun fell, the surface along her limbs and chest greened: a Rose Knight.

The piece was by a composer from Labadi. The trumpet had gone to the library to find out more about him, but all the books on Labadi were gone. The Dictator wanted the trumpet's home to not exist, to not ever have existed. Every rehearsal made the ache inside him hurt worse—the Labadin words in the margins, the little changes the conductor would make. She would bring in new pages, switching a part from one instrument to another, each time making it sound more like home.

How different that was from the beginning. With her hand in Deputy Quartermaster Omopria’s, sneaking away from the army’s camp, Captain Len felt like she could climb the clouds. But the sky was clear and blue, and the quartermaster’s smile was bright and warm, and the captain was sinking hopelessly into it. Back when the war was new and hope was sweet on the tongue. Freedom from the Tyrant. Rule by The People.

Bas'hai sits there, stunned. There is only one goal for an honorable Shahan: to dispatch the invaders once and for all, when they come back. Theirs is not the power to question, to wonder or to explore. She feels a jagged rift open between her and her lover, and her voice raises like a rockfall. “We know enough! They are not people, they are devils, and devils do not reason. The only one cowering at this instant is you. You better take your post, while I go to the general.”

Aware of what awaits you, you proceed as if you are not. There is no avoiding it: your story will end with you dead at the feet of a god. Your divinations have told you this. There is no ambiguity. The portents float at the edge of your vision, haunt your dreams, shake themselves free with each throwing of the bones.

I asked him once how fast the sky rose up from the horizon. I thought if one could put a number to that, and if the sky had the shape of an inverted bowl as we had been taught, then that speed could be used to determine its size, to determine how far the ink-etched parchment of the sky arched above us and descended down toward the fabled western horizon.