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21 " He laughed suddenly, a rough, light sound that filled the small space effortlessly, and Kieran let himself say the words in his head, examining them at every angle, let his tongue curl around the syllables and taste them, around the eight vowels and fourteen consonants, without making a sound:If I am anything, it is light.They all tasted oddly familiar. "
― Grace Curley , Finding Lost Stars
22 " At long last, his parents no longer symbolized immoveable fixtures that scared him, but rather a chance of a future, a future where he could come into this house without knocking, because he had been given a key. "
23 " The words would circulate through the wintry air, and not even a little bit of time would pass before he would awaken again, in the morning, with his hands clutched to his chest and his throat stinging of pure joy. "
24 " Silences like these were never uncomfortable for them, never an awkward space squabbling for meaningless words to fill it. It was acceptance, of a sort, an understanding. These were the people who had lived long and fitfully enough to discover that they were not alone, that there were people out there who would love and fight with them. "
25 " Here he was now, stuck in the labyrinth of his mind, a labyrinth of demolished roses,staring at the cosmos between his eyelids and feeling the star spots on his skin. "
26 " He looked at all the people in that room, their tears and their smiles merging together as one, and at the care they all had for him, as if he was worth something great. "
27 " Art is contemplation’,” a voice said out of nowhere. “‘It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which theredivines the spirit of which nature herself is animated. "
28 " The gods may have spoken, but Nature only bends to a goddess. "
29 " Each night he would give up on sleeping in his pain and drowning in his silence; he would watch the few stars that were in the sky that night, but he would never be living them. Something has taken his warmth and replaced it with a starless sky. "
30 " There was something beautiful about his scars, something lovely about his fallibility. "
31 " He stayed under the fluorescent street light until the sounds of traffic and nightlife faded into silence, and only then did he look up into the night sky, the way he usually did when he was looking for answers. "
32 " Their gazes locked, and together they saw the squandered mirages slain beneath their feet, cemeteries of lonesome dreamers who gave up their wings under the name of love, salt-soaked kisses half-forgotten and twice-remembered. "
33 " Either way, his dreams were filled with bronzed faces and heavenly wings, hallucinating millions of eyes and Angels staggering on tenement rooftops, screaming unworldly oaths over the tops of cities, and drowning in their imagination. "
34 " The relief Kieran felt was staggering. The sick-satisfaction of justice burned through him like an oil spill, waiting for him to drop a match, to let it all go up in flames as he laughed through the rain of hellfire. But he didn’t. He pocketed the metaphysical match. He vacuumed the torrential oil spill. He had just turned his wasteland into a rain forest; he would not let his resentment burn down the trees he had grown out of the garden of his own mind. Kieran himself had come too far to let the angry hand of vengeance burn away his fertile terrains, ruin his harvests of the pure flora kingdom and slaughter his animals to ribbons in sacrifice to greater demons whose jaws never shut. Homeostasis was a hard-earned tendency. Bonfires were clumsy and unwarranted; if he let it consume him and everything he’d built, all he had cultivated would be for nothing. He did not want his flowers to die. "
35 " Imperfect. Beautiful. The most extraordinary thought of all. "
36 " But the dream is over. He has no one to fly to now. He is among strangers, and his memories would only be a murmur in a darkened room lit by one, snuffing candle. "
37 " Some would say that the winged boy loved the sun, loved him with his very own soul and every fibre in his body. His father had warned him: Don’t fly too close to the sun, boy, you know better. But who was he to listen? "
38 " I’m fine,” is the reply he gives. I think I am surviving, in all the wrong ways, is the reply he thinks. "
39 " Daedalus’s blood ran cold. “No?” he shook off his son’s arm. “For once you have tasted flight …” His voice was desperate now. “…you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skywards, for there you have been and there you will long to return. "
40 " No.” The word burned in his mouth and sizzled on his tongue. “A wind has blown the rain away and blown the sky away and all the leaves away, and the trees stand.” His last words were with finality, his eyes no longer sparked. “I think, I too have knownautumn too long. "