“The day Aaron chose how he would live the rest of his life, he woke up early, tucked a machete in his belt and a paperback in his coat pocket, and rushed out before sunrise…”

"Sometimes what you needed was for someone else to know what you had been through."

"Flames flickered to life in the dusty timbres of the broken buildings as the monstrosity struggled..."

"Hesa only responded, at first, with the long-suffering sigh of every person who had ever uttered some variation of the infamous phrase: ‘Let’s see what happens.’"

"Hesa and the Golden Paladin had already had an emergency meeting inside the wagon and distributed orders to their army. This was an obvious ambush."

“It was the hectic but organized chaos of people who had put their all into being as prepared as one could ever be for war.”

“With Hesa’s discovery that the towers overlapped the leylines, she and the other magi could — finally — begin the laborious process of untangling the connections between them.”

“The silence in the war room was the thick tenor of many people anxiously and impatiently waiting.”