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‘‘A goddess of death. Not causing it, nor relishing in its frequency, but overseeing that inevitable and necessary facet of reality, facilitating its place in the great Balance of all things, shepherding the transition of souls from our side into the unknowable other. She has many names, Matron of Death, Mistress of Winter, yet most know her as The Queen of Ravens, and she is commonly named The Raven Queen. Her first name, her secret name is not known, not even to the other gods. Her ascension to godhood is a tale lost to the mists of eternity. Yet in her ascent she struck forever from the annals of memory the name of the god who preceded her so that even the fabric of time and space now know it not, and within that powerful change was her own name also lost. It is known she was once a mortal woman of some learned renown, a practitioner of the wizardly arts many lifetimes ago, in the Age of Arcanum...’’

‘‘Yavanna, the Giver of Fruits. She is the lover of all things that grow in the earth, and all their countless forms she holds in her mind, from the trees like towers in forests long ago to the moss upon stones or the small and secret things in the mould.’’        ―   J.R.R. Tolkien 

“And this, she saw, her dream had done. She had built against that fear a vision of power not wholly selfish—power to protect not only herself, but others. And that vision—however partial it had been in those days—was worth following. For it led not away from the fear, as a dream of rule might do, but back into it. The pattern of her life—as she saw it then, clear and far away and painted in bright colors—the pattern of her life was like an intricate song, or the way the Kuakgan talked of the grove's interlacing trees. There below were the dream's roots, tangled in fear and despair, nourished in the death of friends, the bones of the strong, the blood of the living, and there high above were the dream's images, bright in the sun like banners or the flowering trees of spring. And to be that banner, or that flowering branch, meant being nourished by the same fears: meant encompassing them, not rejecting them.”         ―   Elizabeth Moon   

Have you never kissed a boy?       Well I didn’t know if it counted...        What was the situation?         I was drowning.          How did it make you feel?           Like I was not dead.            Well, yeah! That is the feeling. And did it make your heart beat faster?             Yes.               If I had to do my first kiss over again, I would want all of those things. It’s someone you care about. It means something. Afterwards, you just can’t stop thinking about it. You just sort of feel this softness pressing against you. You can almost taste him for a little bit, and it doesn’t go away for a while. You’ll remember it forever.

//yusuf_zmirlin/