I didn't realise that it was the Silver Queen's heart you were trying to get inside.

Patience, Sakura decides, is for people who aren't holding lives in the space between their mind and their fingers.

Who makes a backup plan when playing God? Claire spent seven years moving up the food chain of a now-extinct closed system.

Everyone is so focused on preparing for the hurricane that they miss a series of storms, each one longer than the last. You don't get to where Claire has without having a hell of a good method of compartmentalizing things that need to get done from things that don't have the luxury of happening.

The day her mother gives birth to a horse is the day Persephone decides that she really needs a plan.

Of course. The one day he decides to go above ground on his own volition, someone is raring to catch him.

Demeter wishes her daughter to be eternally virgin; gods line up to seek her hand; but no one bothered to ask Persephone what she wanted out of life. A retelling of the abduction myth.

"I'm sorry I mocked you, yesterday," Ning Yingying says at last. "About giving the demoness a shot with you. I am forced to admit we can maybe learn something from the way you do things." "The way I do things," Liu Mingyan repeats. "You mean not having sex?" "Yeah," says Ning Yingying. Liu Mingyan is unsure how to feel about "not having sex" being one of her defining characteristics. She never set out for it to happen, although it is true that she didn't set out for it to not happen, either. All she knows is she is entirely uninterested in sex with Binghe, and that is apparently enough to make her unique.