The Golden Enclaves Quotes
"The last thing Orion said to me, the absolute bastard, was El, I love you so much."
"Her arms were full of flowers: poppies, for rest; anemones, for overcoming; moonwort, for forgetfulness; morning glories, for the dawn of a new day."
"Most people can’t summon anything larger or with more willpower than a hair bobble."
"I tried and tried, shouting Orion’s name until the crystal and my voice were spent."
"I spent the next day sitting blankly by the dead firepit."
"So I followed her back to the yurt and let Mum give me a bowl of vegetable soup that tasted like it had been made with real vegetables."
"I wasn’t ready to be told that Mum had, that she and Dad had—I didn’t even know what to call it."
"I don’t actually advocate for this approach—in retrospect I still think I would quite have appreciated a dose of soothing potion once in a while—but it did mean that I wasn’t any good at blocking Mum’s magic, at least not instinctively."
"It wasn’t anything like being inside the Scholomance gym."
"It was like old fairy-tale illustrations of gardens, where the flowers and vines and trees just pile up improbably on top of one another, everything blooming at once and forever in blithe disregard of the laws of nature."
"This wasn’t a lie. This was a story, a fairy tale: it wasn’t pretending to be real, it was just a place that couldn’t be and hadn’t been, a place of perfect beauty."
"I wanted to punch Alfie in his sad anxious face for being part of it."
"It would only have made an even worse waste of it all."
"You could do a lot with a group of determined wizards working together and the greater-than-magic power of the assembly line, but you couldn’t build a fairy city into the void, a stately pleasure-dome decree, and light up a new sun just for you and yours."
"Instead it felt like Pompeii just before the flames, a thin blanket of ash already laid down and more coming."
"All my Scholomance-honed instincts told me maleficaria were lurking on the other side of every dark doorway."
"The very worst of the worse, and we were heading straight on towards it."
"The sound of distant voices drifted out towards us, too muffled to make out words, clear enough to carry anxiety and fear."
"It would be like trying to put a single cow back together out of a butcher’s case."
"The others knew it too; I could hear them all breathing raspily, loud in the narrow corridor."
"I couldn’t have been inside it for long. It had only burned through nine of my mana crystals."
"I wasn’t going to let it have them, and if that meant it had to die unreasonably fast, it just had to die, that’s all."
"It was going to be worse than the one in the library, too."
"I wasn’t getting anywhere: I’d been going down at least twice as long as it had taken to walk the entire corridor the first time."
"I drank the rest of it in small swallows, letting each one linger on my tongue."
"The only useful thing she was doing was blocking the way out, which meant I couldn’t actually run away."
"I fixed that perfect certainty in my head and drew a breath to tell it so in clear small words."
"I just stood there shocked and still shaking with adrenaline."
"I’d become sorry in a few days if I couldn’t get rid of Alfie, but not right now."
"I’d noticed the mild oddness of his going by Alfie at school, like a kid in primary."
"You know you don’t cast on the baseline scale!"
"I didn’t want to sit here thinking it, in this garden that I’d saved instead of Orion."
"I wasn’t going to risk doing it until I find out how many times it would take."
"It made sense to me of what Liesel was doing in ways I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted."
"Keeping the Scholomance going takes about fifty lilims per day, per seat."
"You just build as much as you can, and when you need to cast a spell, either you have enough mana or you don't."
"Fortunately, the major enclaves can't pull out that easily."
"The way things are going right now, about half of the school’s mana supply will be gone by next week."
"Does it matter? Do you need me to tell you another story about it?"
"We’ll make more than we kill. Did you think it was all crazy maleficers in secret labs cackling?"
"The only solution we’ve got so far for that are enclaves."
"It’s a numbers game. The malia it takes to make an enclave and keep it going might look like a lot, but it’s still less than what you’d get if the same wizards were all cheating on their own."
"You didn’t get Orion killed. The plan worked. You were at the doors. All he had to do was jump out."
"You can live your whole life without cheating once, like you’re trying to do, and still your kid’s just as likely to get eaten."
"Don't be afraid, daughter of the golden stones."
"Do as I say, and not as I do, and what I want, I'll make you."
"Those are your choices. Don't bother looking for a third."
"I wish to say that if there is not enough room for all of us, then if Xi'an will agree to save Beijing, I am willing to give up my own place."
"The longing of a circle of wizards for a place where they and their children can be safe and powerful. The bottomless hunger that makes us willing to devour others down to their bones."
"I can see you’re very angry. You have every right to be. But we don’t have much time."
"You might not think an eighteen-year-old would be the best choice for serious combat, but an eighteen-year-old wizard fresh from the gauntlet of the Scholomance graduation hall is often in the best fighting trim of their lives."
"We have all made as many enclaves as we could, as quickly as we could, even though we knew that in the end, we were building our own destruction together."
"I wasn’t sure if I was going to forgive her either. Like Sudarat might not forgive me, when she knew the truth."
"Sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I’ve tried to make others choose, even when I knew that would be enough to take the choice away."
"There is only one gift that you can give to the devoured. The gift only you can give him."
"We’re not coming to fight an enclave war. We’re coming to help you stop one."
"I wasn’t sorry to have saved their gardens; I wasn’t sorry Beijing and Dubai were still standing, now with more people safe inside them. And I was sorry about Salta and Bangkok."
"But come at me again, and you too can spend the rest of the night chipping your way out of a slab of granite."
"It barely took any mana at all. I was just telling the obvious truth."
"They were already dead, and that was horrible and unfair and agonizing, but it was the truth, and it did, actually, set them free."
"You’re already dead," I said. "But stay anyway. Stay with us, and shelter all the wise-gifted children of the world."
"Stay and be shelter," and even as we were speaking I felt more jolting sparks going through me.
"Enough. Of course we have more important things to do."
"Stay," getting louder and louder even as the Scholomance and Orion both shook from their foundations.
"I’ll stay. El, I’ll stay," and kissed me, through our tears.
"I’ll find a way to be," I said, firmly, and meant it.