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”

c/w state/police violence (intro: 1:30-4:20), injury descriptions, discussions of death and post-death, family drama

“The rest knew only the ryne of power. They were blades singing to be used, even if by a tyrant’s hand. They came with their Bismuth nooses and gave Mawk’s Mantle its name.”

c/w bribery, death threats, family conflict

“Within a matter of weeks all manner of scandal and blackmail, violence and assassination incident brought the council to its knees. And we were left unsure as to whether to celebrate its demise, or fear what appeared in its place. The nim Shifs ascendant, a dictatorship ruled by Valour and Vigor. The Sunspear banners like summer’s flowers blooming on near every corner.”

c/w arrest, difficult parent/child relationships, lost pets

“You ever done much gardening Belka? You know how you never really see a sapling appear out of the soil. Just one morning it’s there? It was like that and, honest, it was hard to believe that it hadn’t always been there.”

c/w insects, eating of an envoy, temporary hearing loss

“The Gall, naturally, fell into Oken’s hands. That discarded thing, relic lost and living, vessel to a remnant’s power. I’m not sure whether then or later, he understood the potential of what he carried. Raised himself on power’s sap, could he truly read its dread portent? Maybe he saw it only as ember, in the carcass the jackal only sees a thing to be consumed, it does not behold the new life promised in the ground beneath.”

c/w insect-like envoy

“Lilylium was the second. Envoy born before there was Embrace, before there was Alamire. In many ways we were lucky that it was the Jubilant that faced them, even if it was to be in the labyrinth they’d made their hunting grounds.“

c/w arrest

“But while we fought for the right to weave our own fates, the Jubilant stood defiantly against the forces of regression. The Cut has always been the domain of the dead and the ghostly, weighed down by the heft what came before. The labyrinth echoed with the siren song of glories past.”

c/w possession, injury

“It shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that for some, the Cut were a better home than Embrace above. There were many who’d take dangerous strangeness over the hatred and oppression of the city proper.”