Sublime

Em had a slight lankiness to her. She wasn’t just slim, she was skinny, scrawny maybe, in a way Pat noticed other women noticing.

acerbically

Fundamentally, Tianming was not suited to live in society, nor out of it. He lacked the ability to thrive in society, but also the resources to ignore it. All he could do was hang on to the edge, suffering. He had no idea where he was headed in life.

Those people weren’t crushed or eaten. They starved to death because their land was slowly being swallowed by the mists.”

whispering French to herself because all the horror in her life had transpired in English and she thought switching languages might save her,

propriety.

Other elements had the ability to unsettle, however. Long ago, towns had existed here, and we encountered eerie signs of human habitation: rotting cabins with sunken, red-tinged roofs, rusted wagon-wheel spokes half-buried in the dirt, and the barely seen outlines of what used to be enclosures for livestock, now mere ornament for layers of pine-nee