but Reina had never been overly thrilled by the prospect of living in the same place in perpetuity.

A uniquely upsetting curse, really, how little he knew how to exist when she wasn’t there;

Some people are taking too much, making themselves sick, and it kills them. The excess is poison; even food is a poison to someone who’s been deprived. Everything has the capacity to turn toxic.

incendiary

“A flaw of humanity,” said Parisa, shrugging as they walked. “The compulsion to be unique, which is at war with the desire to belong to a single identifiable sameness.”

The world was mostly entropy and chaos; magic, then, was order, because it was control.

when history is written by the victors the narrative can often misrepresent that shape. In reality, time as we experience it is merely an ebb and flow, more circular than it is direct.

we have always been a species highly susceptible to the call of the distant unknown.

All the knowledge the world possessed existed at their fingertips, and all they had to do in return was nurture it, make it grow.