Alexis Hall

He wouldn’t kill Tristan with a knife, he’d kill him with such cherishing. He’d offer to take Tristan to the movies, he’d feed him grapes, he’d brush his hair. He’d make a meal for him, the kind his mother had always insisted on when she was in a good mood, food that was meant to be eaten with leisure. He’d peel an orange for Tristan, share the slices of a clementine, drizzle him with honey. It would be embarrassing and he wouldn’t die of humiliation. He would simply live with the providence of it—the sacred proffering of shame.

Nico’s brow arched with prompting and Gideon, wretched and helpless—Gideon, little motherfuck that he was, a true idiot prince—wanted nothing more than to sink to his knees and kiss Nico’s feet. He wanted to buy Nico’s groceries, to write Nico poetry, to sing Nico the songs of his people in terrible Spanish and passable French. He wanted midnights in Brooklyn, golden hour in a galley kitchen, coffee with cream.

“I feel like [said Tristram] we’re in a pretentious film about tortured geniuses.”
“Yes.”
“But actually we’re just babies with expensive glassware.”

This was it ... the only meaning Parisa had left in life. It wasn’t a secret society, it wasn’t an ancient library, it wasn’t an experiment that had taken two decades to design, it was waking up every fucking morning and deciding to keep going. The tiny, unceremonious, incomparable miracle of making it through another goddamn day. The knowledge that life was mean and it was exacting. It was cruel and it was cursed; it was recalcitrant and precious. It was always ending. But it did not have to be earned.

The question is not whether the world can end. There’s no question that it can, that it does every day, in a multitude of highly individualized ways ranging from ordinary to biblical. The question is also not whether one man is capable of ending the world but whether it is this man, and whether such destruction is as inevitable as it may seem. What is the problem? The constancy of fate. The liquidity of prophecy. The problem is Einstein’s theory of relativity. The problem is closed-loop time travel. The problem is Atlas Blakely. The problem is Ezra Fowler. The problem is the invariability of the particular strand of the multiverse in which Ezra and Atlas meet.

He wouldn’t kill Tristan with a knife, he’d kill him with such cherishing. He’d offer to take Tristan to the movies, he’d feed him grapes, he’d brush his hair. He’d make a meal for him, the kind his mother had always insisted on when she was in a good mood, food that was meant to be eaten with leisure. He’d peel an orange for Tristan, share the slices of a clementine, drizzle him with honey. It would be embarrassing and he wouldn’t die of humiliation. He would simply live with the providence of it—the sacred proffering of shame.

Nico’s brow arched with prompting and Gideon, wretched and helpless—Gideon, little motherfuck that he was, a true idiot prince—wanted nothing more than to sink to his knees and kiss Nico’s feet. He wanted to buy Nico’s groceries, to write Nico poetry, to sing Nico the songs of his people in terrible Spanish and passable French. He wanted midnights in Brooklyn, golden hour in a galley kitchen, coffee with cream.

“I feel like [said Tristram] we’re in a pretentious film about tortured geniuses.”
“Yes.”
“But actually we’re just babies with expensive glassware.”

This was it ... the only meaning Parisa had left in life. It wasn’t a secret society, it wasn’t an ancient library, it wasn’t an experiment that had taken two decades to design, it was waking up every fucking morning and deciding to keep going. The tiny, unceremonious, incomparable miracle of making it through another goddamn day. The knowledge that life was mean and it was exacting. It was cruel and it was cursed; it was recalcitrant and precious. It was always ending. But it did not have to be earned.

The question is not whether the world can end. There’s no question that it can, that it does every day, in a multitude of highly individualized ways ranging from ordinary to biblical. The question is also not whether one man is capable of ending the world but whether it is this man, and whether such destruction is as inevitable as it may seem. What is the problem? The constancy of fate. The liquidity of prophecy. The problem is Einstein’s theory of relativity. The problem is closed-loop time travel. The problem is Atlas Blakely. The problem is Ezra Fowler. The problem is the invariability of the particular strand of the multiverse in which Ezra and Atlas meet.

The sky was the color of corrupted memory.

‘The last time you were here,’ the king said finally, ‘you set fire to something.’
Arthur grimaced down at his hands. ‘Yes. I mean–my apologies.’
‘What was it, do you recall?’
Arthur pretended to think about it. ‘Er– I believe it was your wife, sire.’