Lore

the cage was only as strong as your mind made it.

He called her “darling,” a word Lore was fairly certain no one else, not even her parents, would have used to describe her.

I’ve never forgotten them, I’ve just learned how to live inside on my own terms.

You always knew exactly who you were and who you were meant to be.

“Fear is a foreign land I shall never visit and a language that will never cross my tongue,”

“You are the strongest person I’ve ever known, Castor Achilleos, and it wasn’t because of how fast you ran or how hard you hit. It was because even when you got knocked flat on your back, you fought your way back up. You have to do it again now. Whatever you’re feeling, you have to leave it on the mat and get back up.”

Sometimes you just have to survive to fight another day.

She’d seen a ghost in place of a god.

In that moment, the past became the present, and the present the past, and it was just the two of them in the shadows of their city, the way it had always been.

The way it should have been forever.

Their old, hidden route still waited for them, as if they had never left, and had never lost one another.