“Where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that…”

Could there be, even within all of these transitional ecosystems, one still more transitional—at the limits of the Tower’s influence but not yet under the border’s influence?

Already those initial phrases were infiltrating my mind in unexpected ways, finding fertile ground.

This feature functions as a sort of mirror to the lighthouse, and our narrator persists in calling it a tower, although its top is at ground level and the stairs lead downward. The rest of the expedition refers to it as a tunnel, and this difference in perception sets the narrator at odds with her fellow travelers in ways that will only deepen.

This was really the only thing I discovered in him after his return: a deep and unending solitude, as if he had been granted a gift that he didn’t know what to do with. A gift that was poison to him and eventually killed him. But would it have killed me? That was the question that crept into my mind even as I stared into his eyes those last few tim

You had to fade into the landscape, or like the writer of the thistle chronicles, you had to pretend it wasn’t there for as long as possible. To acknowledge it, to try to name it, might be a way of letting it in. (For the same reason, I suppose, I have continued to refer to the changes in me as a “brightness,” because to examine this condition too

There shall be a fire that knows your name, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you.

everyone immediately recognized what a lighthouse should look like. In fact, the surveyor and anthropologist had both expressed a kind of relief when they had seen the lighthouse.

“I’ll give you this scrap: The border is advancing. For now, slowly, a little bit more every year. In ways you wouldn’t expect. But maybe soon it’ll eat a mile or two at a time.” The thought of that silenced me for a long moment. When you are too close to the center of a mystery there is no way to pull back and see the shape of it entire. The black