The Golden Yarn

Once upon a time...There’s a reason all fairy tales begin like this. But the ‘and they lived happily ever after’ at the end? That has to be earned.

How clear one’s own desires become once they are made impossible.

Her heart pounded as he kissed her. Or was it his heart? She hadn’t been able to tell the difference ever since he’d freed her from that trap.

Love makes cowards of us all.

If she’d known him better, she might’ve tried to explain to Will that life never lets you hide. Plant, animal, or human—life forced them all to grow and learn. The more you tried to run, the harder your path got, and you’d still have to travel it.

You humans love mirrors. You have to constantly make sure you still have the same face. Nothing scares you more than if someone changes it.

They slept with each other for the first time while waiting out a storm in an abandoned shepherd hut. The hours the storm granted them, surrounded by raw wool and rusty shears, felt like a month, a year, all the years they’d been waiting for this, full of fear of their kisses, of their too-familiar skins. So far from all their memories, it felt as if they were meeting each other for the first time all over again. The horse scraping around in the discarded fleece, the storm, the sound of rain, Jacob gathered it all, like jewelry he would put around Fox’s neck whenever they would remember this first time.

Love didn’t deserve the nice reputation it had.

You can’t expect the wolf to turn vegetarian because of one Pup.

Love scared him. It was soft. And vulnerable.

True love, selfless and deep as the oceans in their most fathomless depths." Orlando let the glove run along the thread, which glistened like a ray of sunlight. "But I fear this one is not meant for me. This kind of thread is not spun in mere days." He let his hand drop, and the gold disappeared as though it really had been nothing but a ray of sunlight. "The Golden Yarn… or the inseverable bond, as it is also called. As inseverable as the threads of fate. And there is only one who can spin them and who can cut them.

Love is always a prison.

It had always been a myth that it was those who loved you who could see through you. It was those you feared who could see through you most clearly.

Life is so simple when you’re young, though of course that’s not what it feels like to the young.

It was hard to let go of love. Once woven, its ribbon was hard to tear, and this one she’d woven quite firmly herself.

Courage was not a given; it was acquired, earned.

There it was, that familiar fear, love’s terrible price.

She’d been so certain she knew every crevice of his heart, but Jacob was like a country she’d only traveled through halfway.

Yesterday. Was there a more merciless word?

The darkness of the world made no distinctions; it entered its palaces as it did its huts.

Together. Even in death. His fingers tightened their grip around her hand. A double statue of silver. Romantic. What would their faces show? Fear? Or love?

Sometimes Fox thought all the men she knew had the dreams and wishes of nine-year-old boys—at least all the men she liked.

Was she happy? Yes. And no. Because now the words were back, and with them the name that had spun gold around her heart for so long she hardly remembered how things had felt before him.

What else but death could you hope to reap when you gave your heart to a mortal?

She was gone. And his heart was beating too loud and too fast. Into nothingness.

And that everyone has to find their own path, even brothers.

To never let the other forget who they are—love is also about that.