First Lines

[storyopeners]

I gaze out the window at thousands of snowflakes fluttering to the ground. I press my face against the pane, aching for freedom. But it isn’t a thin layer of glass that’s blocking me from the outside, it’s the truth. --Unravel, Calia Read

[storyopeners]

By most accounts, Boric the Implacable was, while he was alive, an incomparable badass. Bu all accounts he was an even bigger badass after he died. 

--Disenchanted, Robert Kroese

[storyopeners]

I want to ascend so badly, I can taste it.

--The Legacy Human, Susan Kaye Quinn

[storyopeners]

“On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays it was Court Hand and Summulae Logicales, while the rest of the week it was the Organon, Repetition and Astrology. The governess was always getting muddled with her astrolabe, and when she got specially muddled she would take it out of the Wart by rapping his knuckles. She did not rap Kay's knuckles, because when Kay grew older he would be Sir Kay, the master of the estate. The Wart was called the Wart because it more or less rhymed with Art, which was short for his real name. Kay had given him the nickname. Kay was not called anything but Kay, as he was too dignified to have a nickname and would have flown into a passion if anybody had tried to give him one. The governess had red hair and some mysterious wound from which she derived a lot of prestige by showing it to all the women of the castle, behind closed doors. It was believed to be where she sat down, and to have been caused by sitting on some armour at a picnic by mistake. --The Once & Future King, T. H. White

[storyopeners]

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead. --We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson

[storyopeners]

She’s buried beneath a silver birch tree, down towards the old train tracks, her grave marked with a cairn. Not more than a little pile of stones, really. I didn’t want to draw attention to her resting place, but I couldn’t leave her without remembrance. She’ll sleep peacefully there, no one to disturb her, no sounds but birdsong and the rumble of passing trains.

--The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins

[storyopeners]

Empress Celene strode into the University of Orlais’s great Chantry Courtyard surrounded by her entourage of servants and guards and flanked by Ser Michel, her champion. The entire faculty had been assembled to greet her, and the professors bowed at her approach.

—Dragon Age: The Masked Empire, Patrick Weekes

[storyopeners]

“Run, Maric!”

And run he did.

His mother’s dying words whipped him into action. The image of her grisly murder still burning in his mind, Maric reeled and plunged into the trees at the edge of the clearing. Ignoring the clawing branches that scraped at his face and clung to his cloak, he blindly forced his way into the foliage.”

—Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne, David Gaider

[storyopeners]

Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pules beat in the moodriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will. 

--The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin

[storyopeners]

All our stars have not yet risen.

--Redwood and Wildfire, Andrea Hairston

[storyopeners]

It occurs to Brian Blake as he huddles in the musty darkness, the terror constricting his chest, the pain throbbing in his knees: If only he possessed a second pair of hands, he could cover his own ears, and maybe block out the noise of human heads being demolished. Sadly, the only hands Brian currently owns are busy right now, covering the tiny ears of a little girl in the closet next to him.

--The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor, Robert Kirkman and Jay Bonansinga

[storyopeners]

The assassin left the stronghold of Mein Tahalian by the great front gate, riding through a crack in the armored pine beams just wide enough to let him slip out.

--Acacia: The War with the Mein, David Anthony Durham

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I raced past the university's gates, splashing water onto homeless Vampires. The campus security Trolls would've caught me if I were Human. Mixbreeds didn't have Pureblood speed, but we could outrun Trolls.

--Fire Baptized, Kenya Wright

[storyopeners]

A flattened and drying daffodil was dangling off the little card that I had made my aunt Atie for Mother's Day. I pressed my palm over the flower and squashed it against the plain beige cardboard. When I turned the corner near the house, I saw her sitting in an old rocker in the yard, staring at a group of children crushing dried yellow leaves into the ground. The leaves had been left in the sun to dry. They would be burned that night at the konbit potluck dinner.

--Eyes, Breath, Memory, Edwidge Danticat

[storyopeners]

Someone had washed the mud off the body, but as Gaius Petrius Ruso unwrapped the sheet there was still a distinct smell of river water.

--Medicus, Ruth Downie

[storyopeners]

Once there was a city of women.

Its rulers were women, as were its judges and advisors. Female architects had laid out its streets and houses, and female masons had raised them. Its army was well provided and well trained, for though the city was isolated, in a remote desert region, it had had enemies in its time. And its arts and sciences flourished. Though there were few reports of anyone having visited the city—few, indeed, who could say in what direction it lay—its productions were well-known. From where else could they have come, the scrolls of poetry, the calligraphy and silk paintings, that circulated among the wealthy and earned exorbitant prices for any merchant lucky enough to get hold of one? Words and images to equal those of the masters, but no master laid claim to them, and where the master’s imprint should be there would appear a woman’s name: Soraya, Noor, Farhat; or an unfamiliar symbol of feather, leaf or flower.

--The Steel Seraglio, Mike Carey, Louise Carey, Linda Carey, and Nimit Malavia

[storyopeners]

Let me tell you something straight off. This is a love story, but not like any you’ve heard. The boy and the girl are far from innocent. Dear lives are lost. And good doesn’t win. In some places, there is something ultimately good about endings. In Neverland, that is not the case.

—Tiger Lily, Jodi Lynn Anderson