“Some places are meant to be crossed once—and never lightly.”
“The dead do not ask to be remembered. The living require it.”
“Every cure opens a door. I decide which ones stay shut.”
“Rain does not arrive late. It arrives after you fail to listen.”
“The marsh already knows what you’ll choose. It just hasn’t decided how to answer yet.”
“Order is brittle. Chaos is honest. And I am very good at making honesty lethal.”
“You mistake me for a monster because you can see my claws. The real danger is that you never noticed the hand guiding yours.”
“Disorder is inefficient. Fear is educational. Obedience is permanent.”
“Resistance is inefficient. Pain, however, is remarkably persuasive.”
“Wars are not won by blades or blood. They are won by clauses… and by knowing which ones you’ll never read.”
A deceptively quiet wetland pocket: a murky, reed-ringed pond surrounded by worn footpaths and low stone outcrops, the kind of place that looks like nothing more than a hunter’s rest stop or an old animal wallow.
A drowned basin where the water turns deep green-black and the surface never sits still.