Crier's War

“If a spider weaves her web to catch flies and catches a butterfly instead, what does the spider do?”

Benjy stayed silent.

“She eats the butterfly,”

If longing is madness, then none of us are sane.

Act only when the odds are on your side, Ayla. Gamble with bread and coins, not your life.

better to do what was right than to be kind.

Justice was a god, and Ayla didn’t believe in such childish things.

She believed in blood.

You couldn’t depend on much in this world, but you could depend on this: love brought nothing but death. Where love existed, death would follow, a wolf trailing after a wounded deer. Scenting blood in the air. Ayla had learned that the hard way.

“Their views on humankind are too extreme for my taste. It is one thing to subjugate those who are inferior and another thing entirely to behave as if they don’t exist. We must build policy around the reality of where we came from. We were not created in a void, history-less. It is ignorant to think we cannot learn from humanity’s existing structures.”

not like the stars but like the soft darkness that enfolded them.

Crier could not force herself to sleep. Ayla was there, always, in the shadows of her mind, looking back, her gaze

Crier had been Designed. Crier was Made. But in the moment Ayla first touched her, Crier had learned what it felt like to be born.