She Who Became the Sun (The Radiant Emperor Duology Book 1)

He had the image of his relationship to Esen being a thin strip of metal that Ouyang was deliberately bending back and forth. Each time it bent, it hurt. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt after it finally snapped, but Ouyang couldn’t make himself believe it.

There was a strange, ill satisfaction there, as if Esen had proved something Lord Wang wanted—but in having proved it, had killed some other part that was still holding out hope.

For the first time since her adolescence she looked down at her body and didn’t feel aversion, but simply the fact of herself.

I suppose he was a cherished son, the kind brought up believing he should bring honor to his ancestral line. But then he was cut, and made to serve the very ones who did it, and he knows his ancestors would spit at him rather than receive his offerings.” Then, slowly, because talking about her girlhood still felt wrong, she added, “But that’s the d

How could her body be a woman’s body, if it didn’t house a woman? Zhu wasn’t the grown-up version of that girl with the nothing fate.

The sight seemed oddly familiar. It made her think of undressing in her storeroom in the monastery, and how the changed and threatening body she had uncovered had always seemed to belong to someone else. But this invisible agony-hand was undeniably hers, and so was the stump.

Not-wanting is a desire too; it yields suffering just as much as wanting.

Why insist on chasing the shadow of something lost, when you could make something new and even greater?

The unfamiliar Han’er name for Khanbaliq gave Ouyang a discombobulated feeling, as if he and Zhang were denizens of different worlds who had chanced upon each other in the uncanny space between.