c/w gore, loss of identity, body horror (ghosts)

“As we lay entangled, fingers on each other’s throats, the roots and tendrils of something new grew around us.”

c/w thought invasion, injury, explosions

“If we had one advantage, it was that we faced them on our own turf. Most of the fighting would take place amongst the gambling dens and race courses of Hinter Ward. If there were anywhere suited to turn the odds, it were there.”

c/w intense peril, kettling, implied death

“From Crown’s Ait, three columns of nim Shif soldiers marched on us, followed by Ministers and the Lanterns and the fucking Swifts. And at their head Valour and Vigor themselves, armour gleaming and spears in hand, come to remove the last bit of grit from the shine of their ambition.

The second siege of Tail’s End were upon us and we welcomed it.”

c/w mindreading, manipulation, surveillance, betrayal, break-ups

“But then our triumph broke, torn asunder not by those whose noses we’d bloodied to build it, but those who’d helped us fight for it. Boctive Deign, Xenarus Crow. They’d always held fear in their hearts. That fear would poison our fragile course.”

c/w murder, assassination, heavy wounds, explosions, jailbreak, unreality

“Already, there were tears forming in the fabric of our banners. Soon, we’d all be grasping at them, each claiming that we should be the ones to hold them aloft. We’d tear the whole canvas apart.”

c/w blood, threats, major injury, prisons, jailbreak

“I imagine in their heads, they were biding time and collecting their forces, ready at any moment to take the fight to the upstart nim Shifs. In truth, they were kidding themselves. Their doom were writ on Fate’s tapestry, their line would soon be done.”

c/w prisons, jailbreak, murder

“We declare now the institution of the Common Government of Embrace and proclaim immediate:

The dissolution of Embrace’s council.
The institution of an Assembly representative of the city’s common citizenry.
That this Assembly establish a constitution by which a future government will be formed. It will provide governance during this transitional period, and no person shall hold it back from these duties.
Citizens of houses Callad, Daker, Prilicent, Shif, their invested lesser houses and those serving the former council are forbidden from sitting in the Assembly.”

c/w political unrest, takeover of government building, protest, violence

“For one moment, the night before, I’d known something like peace. For hours half-a-dozen of us had written and debated and drafted, putting words to the cause that carried our bones. LV was the one to set it and I remember the clacking of their presses as they created copy after copy. The smell of the heat and the paper and the ink lives with me even now. I remember thinking that I should sleep, we should sleep, for the day ahead of us. But how could we, when the future long fought for was being given life before our eyes.”

“The early sessions were long and chaotic, stretching through night and dawn. We slept on the hall’s pews, rather than leaving. Fuelled by a freedom centuries hoped for, it would take time to find our structure and rhythm. There were proposals about fundamental rights alongside those for docking permits, debates about abolition of the swifts alongside those about local bridge tolls.”

“And so the first Assembly formed, as our whole revolution broad and various, came with their grievances and their doubts, their dreams and their ideals, and their hopes for what would come next”