And sometimes I believe your relentless analysis of June leaves something out, which is your feeling for her beyond knowledge, or in spite of knowledge. I often see how you sob over what you destroy, how you want to stop and just worship; and you do stop, and then a moment later you are at it again with a knife, like a surgeon.What will you do after you have revealed all there is to know about June? Truth. What ferocity in your quest of it. You destroy and you suffer. In some strange way I am not with you, I am against you. We are destined to hold two truths. I love you and I fight you. And you, the same. We will be stronger for it, each of us, stronger with our love and our hate. When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.

I knew then that I would devote every minute we had left together to making her happy, to repairing the pain I had caused her and returning to her what I never known how to give her. These pages will be our memory until she drows her last breath in my arms and I take her forever and escape at last to a place where neither heaven nor hell will ever be able to find us.

It made the woman feel like a thousand seas had come together from all worlds, like faraway lands had been bridged together, and the vastness of the known and the unknown were somehow easier to comprehend.

Elijah: You are a dangerous woman.Valeria: You do not know the half of it, but I suppose you are not one to always dabble in safe waters either. So, do you still want to work with me?Elijah: It will be my pleasure.Valeria: Is there anything I need to know about you?Elijah: No!Valeria: That is a lie.Elijah: Is there anything I need to know about you?Valeria: No!Elijah: That is also a lie.Valeria, smiling: Then we are a pair of liars.

I never thought I__ ever leave Zerc. But after knowing Cricket, it occurred to me that I had no reason to stay. I had no family, no friends aside from her. I never even spoke to Enkai until she brought us together. It was she who first inspired me to dream of actually seeing those worlds I spent my every waking moment reading about. Her and her wild heart, her laughing spirit, so bright in her eyes whenever she spoke of her travels and all the wondrous places she had seen. When I was a boy, I envied her for her adventures. When I became a man, I only pitied her.

Dragons have wild hearts that need the open sky