Nocturna

Who you are when you’re angry is still you. It doesn’t have to be all of you, but it’s a piece of you all the same. If you deny that, you might as well deny your whole maldito self and be done with it

She'd spent so much time drowning in her past that she hadn't been able to swim to the surface and see a future for herself that wasn't stained with blood and fear

We all carry good and bad within us, light and dark. That is what makes us human. And remember, no matter how far into the darkness we may fall, it is never too late to seek the light.

He hadn't seen her as something to bend into whatever shape would better serve him. He'd seen her as a person. A person who said no.

People like me, we’re ants, and rulers are just a big foot looming over us ready to squish us into the dirt. Doesn’t matter whose body the foot is attached to, the purpose is still the same.

What a soft life he must lead to not see the freedom in what she could do. In the power of being so many people that you became no one at all. People with one face, one story, have weaknesses, vulnerabilities, things to exploit and dangle over their heads. But to be no one was to have nothing to lose and nothing to gain. That was true freedom, plain and simple.

Freedom, she was coming to understand, could be found in a person instead of a place.

But the more he begged the magic, the more he tried to grip it in his shaking hands, the more it boud away from him, skittering away from his touch. Alfie nknew what this meant. "If magic shies away from your touch your intentions are not the right ones. You must let it go.

- I'm tired. It's been a hell of a week and I came in here through a damned pig! I don't have the energy to lie! Alfie wondered if "coming in through a pig" was some sort of slang he had yet to hear.