I am sorry to add directly to this post but for my own obsessive reference:
Glendower: ‘Cousin, of many men
I do not bear these crossings. Give me leave
To tell you once again that at my birth
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
The goats ran from the mountains, and the herds
Were strangely clamorous to the frighted fields.
These signs have mark'd me extraordinary;
And all the courses of my life do show
I am not in the roll of common men.’
‘ “When I was born,” Niall Lynch told his middle son, “God broke the mold so hard the ground shook.”
“It was a proper earthquake,” Niall clarified, as if anyone had asked him — and knowing Niall, they probably had.’
“And you, Ronan,” Niall said. He always said Ronan differently from other words. As if he had meant to say another word entirely — something like knife or poison or revenge — and then swapped it out for Ronan’s name at the last moment. “When you were born, the rivers dried up and the cattle in Rockingham County wept blood.”
Glendower: ‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep.’
Hotspur: ‘Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?’
Glendower. ‘Why, I can teach you, cousin, to command
The devil.’
And from The Dream Thieves:
‘Ronan Lynch believed in heaven and hell.
Once, he’d seen the devil. It had been a low, late morning at the Barns when the sun had burned off the mist and then burned off the chill and then burned the edges off the ground until everything shimmered with heat. It never got hot in those protected fields, but that morning, the air sweated with it. Ronan had never seen cattle pant before. All of the cows heaved and stuck their tongues out as they frothed with the heat. His mother sent Ronan to put them in the shade of the cattle barn.
Ronan had gone to the searing metal gate, and as he did, he’d glimpsed his father, already in the barn. Four yards away from him had stood a red man. He was not truly red, but the burned orange of a fire ant. And he was not truly a man, because of the horns and the hooves. Ronan remembered the alienness of the creature, how real it had been. Every costume in the world had gotten it wrong; every drawing in every comic book. They’d all forgotten that the devil was an animal. Looking at the red man, Ronan had been struck by the intricacy of the body, how many miraculous pieces moved smoothly in harmony, no different from his own.
Niall Lynch had had a gun in hand — the Lynches had an enormous number of guns of all sizes — and just as Ronan had opened the gate, his father had shot the thing about thirteen times in the head. With a shake of its horns, the unharmed devil had presented its genitalia to Niall Lynch before bounding off. It was an image that had yet to leave Ronan.
And from Blue Lily, Lily Blue:
‘[Gwenllian] broke off with a hysterical laugh that perfectly matched the one that had come out of Chainsaw earlier. Rolling onto her back so that she was looking straight up at Ronan’s disgusted features, she cooed, “Cut me free, raven prince.”’
janainaart
stormborns
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
jbbartram-illu
