sturmhond:

“I don’t realize it until I speak it. And it’s different from the times I’ve said it before, or the way I’ve hoped it, as if dreaming something enough could birth it into being. I know it now with a certainty that has fitted into the lost core at the heart of me, as hard and angular as my hope was soft and shimmering. The King will not have me.”

(Natasha Ngan, Girls of Paper and Fire)

[image description: two red and black fan illustrations of Girls of Paper and Fire by Natasha Ngan, with the text overlaid: “We might be paper girls easily torn and written upon. The very title we’re given suggests that we are blank, waiting to be filled. But what the demon king and his court do not understand is that paper is flammable, and there is a fire catching among us.”]