Amber & Dusk

We are all thieves here, Mirage,” Thibo breathed. “We steal a thousand scintillating moments of drinking and dancing and laughter and pretend that there will never be any cost for the choices we make. But the price of love is heartbreak. The price of pleasure is pain. And the price of power is always corruption.

You are weak,” he said. “And you are a child. But none of that matters if only you could admit to yourself that you’re both those things. Then try to be better. And try again, until you are wiser, and stronger. No one is born belonging anywhere. Nothing valuable is ever given. You deserve nothing that you haven’t first earned.

My monster,” he whispered against my mouth. “Show me what you dream, when you dream of new worlds.

Everything about you offends me,” Sunder said, and though his words rang harsh the look in his eyes was unguarded, ragged with expectation. “I don’t understand how you can be the way that you are. You are brash, and thoughtlessly brave. You do exactly the thing that is the least expected and the most destructive. You are a puzzle and a curse.

You spoke of sunlight and ambric smiles, of dreaming vast, colorful dreams. That’s why I came here: to be part of that world. They named me Mirage, and that is what I am. Not a faint illusion that will quickly disappear, but a desire, and a promise, and a dream of something impossible. But only if I’m given the chance.

I curled my hands into fists, and made myself a promise. If this world liked games, then I’d learn the rules. If intrigue bought friends, then I’d collect secrets. If Dowser could teach me to control the kaleidoscope of colors blooming like jeweled flowers from my fingertips, then I’d endure the tabak stench of his gloomy chambers. I would not falter.

So you don’t mind,” I managed, “if I’m a monster?” “No.” He rocked closer, and his closeness sent a thread of desire stitching up my spine. “Because I’m a monster too.

I believe that, instead of arising from our blood, our legacies are shaped by who we are. Our abilities rise and shape to our own inclinations. For better or for worse, I want to cause pain, even to the things I love.

A wolf wasn’t cruel when she killed for her meal. A nighthawk wasn’t cruel when he ripped his talons through the still-warm body of a mouse. Winter wasn’t cruel when it blanketed the land in snow and stole the warmth from your bones. Sunder and Bane might be cold, but they weren’t cruel. They were merely as nature made them.

You think you understand this world, demoiselle,” he whispered, leaning closer. That sharp tang of genévrier needles slapped me in the face. “You think you hear Dexter, or Sinister, and you know what that means. Good, evil, legacy. Pain, poison, power. You imagine these words bound up and trussed away, with clear outlines and hard borders. But they are alive, seething with a complexity you refuse to acknowledge.

However highly you may consider yourself, I can assure you: Whatever you’re planning, you are outnumbered, outpaced, and outwitted. You are neither as brave nor as clever as you imagine yourself to be.

Why a place that had once seemed like a haven for magic and wonder had transformed into a nightmare of pain and lies and disappearances.

There are worlds of understanding you have failed to envision. We are only as blind as the things we refuse to see.

So what? What’s wrong with being ambitious? I do want a world full of beauty and grace. I do want power. And what’s more, I deserve it. It’s my birthright, and I’ll be damned if I don’t claim what’s mine!

I wanted to live. I wanted to love. But more than anything, I wanted to be where I was always meant to be. I wanted to go home.

Whether that meant banishment, death, or worse, I dare not guess. I just knew I would do everything in my power to escape that fate

I will not sit idly by while the world changes around me. I don’t know whether my blood is a gift or a curse. And I don’t relish breaking the world in order to remake it the way I see it. But I will if I have to. Does that make me a monster?

Tell you?” Sunder’s eyebrows winged up toward his hairline. “Tell you, an ignorant, unreliable, loudmouthed provincial with delusions of grandeur and an entitlement complex as big as this château? Your grasp of the intricacies of intrigue boggles the mind.

A game. A vicious game to take my trust and transfigure it into something else. Something that now nestled chilly against my heart, beckoning me even as I fought to shove it away. Something bleak and delicious and horribly, wonderfully tempting.

I had finally forged the dristic bones of my own fortune in this pristine palais. I would not squander that on a man whose truths were laced with lies, whose face was a mask, whose price was power. He could only be a curse.

These were the dreams that had carried me from the edge of the daylight world, but they were scorched with humiliation, shackled with thorny vines, stained with the gratuitous blood of gangling youths. I’d beaten them down so many times, throttling them and denying them, smothering them with rules even as I begged them to obey me.

Wanting something badly enough doesn’t make it real. And it certainly doesn’t make it right.

There is honor in standing up for a cause. In protecting people who cannot protect themselves. There is honor in making the world a better place.

We steal a thousand scintillating moments of drinking and dancing and laughter and pretend that there will never be any cost for the choices we make. But the price of love if heartbreak. The price of pleasure is pain. And the price of power is always corruption.

There is something clean, and precise and fair about winter. It has no patience for wealth, or power, it only values vigilance.

Beauty is all the things we can see, but cannot touch. Beauty is a way of seeing the world, unsullied by convention and free from coveting.

No one is born belonging anywhere. Nothing valuable is ever given. You deserve nothing that you haven’t first earned.

You think your blood defines where you belong? You think being highborn means you deserve special treatment.” He sneered. “Our blood is nothing without the will that moves it. You can choose your own life.

There were many kinds of danger. And there were worse things than facing it.

Sometimes - sometimes we all must pay a cost for what others have stolen," he murmured. "And the empress always collects when a debt is owed.