The Gracekeepers

We don't belong anywhere, because we can belong everywhere.

When people are cruel it's often said that they have no heart, only a cold space or lump of ice in their chest. This was never true of Avalon. She had no heart, everyone knew, but there was nothing cold about her. In her chest burned an enormous coal, white-hot, brighter than the North Star. North knew the truth about Avalon: she was made of fire, and she would burn them all.

Many ways to fly, but only one way to fall.

On the outside, grief was expressed in judders, faltering and unsure, but inside it felt as constant as breathing.

It’s a grace feather. See how its colors shift from green to blue, like the sea? It means remembrance. It shows that no distance, no amount of water between two people, will make them forget. Someone gave it to say that they remembered you.

Spectacle is grounded in the illusion of control.

What’s the use of a clown who doesn’t subvert?

Is it really a choice when we have no other option?

they were two halves of the same whole

Whatever the truth, over time the landlockers had learned to blame the banks, the relentless drive for more money, for the rising seas and the loss of their land. Once upon a time they’d had a whole planet of fields and plains and deserts and forests. Now they had to make do with the patched-up corners of gutted cities, to cluster their homes around half-dead copses, to scrape what they could from their tiny footholds in a swallowing sea.