Love is a luxury.""No. Love is an element."An element. Like air to breathe, earth to stand on.

I...I sang," she whispered, "if that matters," and Karou felt her heart pulled to pieces. This Misbegotten warrior, fiercest of them all, had crouched in an icy stream bed to sing a chimera soul into her canteen, because she hadn't known what else to do.The singing wouldn't have mattered, but she wasn't going to tell Liraz that. If Ziri's soul was in that canteen, Karou would happily learn whatever song Liraz had sung and make it part of her resurrection ritual forever, just so that the angel would never feel that she'd been foolish.

Brimstone once told me that to stay true in the face of evil is a feat of strength.

She'd spoken of their happiness as though it were an undeniable fact, no matter what happened--apart from everything else and not subject to it. It was a new idea for him, that happiness wasn't a mystical place to be reached or won--some bright terrain beyond the boundary of misery, a paradise waiting for them to find it--but something to carry doggedly with you through everything, as humble and ordinary as your gear and supplies. Food, weapons, happiness.With hope that the weapons could in time vanish from the picture.

And they were quiet but their blood and nerves and butterflies were not—they were rampantly alive, rushing and thrumming in a wild and perfect melody, matched note for note.

My tiny scary friend is coming

Don't I deserve to finally be free of you?

It was sadness, lostness, and the worst thing about it was the way it seemed like a default—like it was there all the time, and all her other expressions were just an array of masks she used to cover it up.

Your soul sings to mine. My soul is yours, and it always will be, in any world.

..and when he let her go, it was as if she had been filled and didn't realize it until he pulled away and the absence rushed back in.

There was darkness, and monsters vast as worlds swam in it.

In one of his darker moments, the irony started him laughing and he couldn't stop, and the sounds that came from him, before finally tapering into sobs, were so far from mirth they might have been the forced inversion of laughter-like a soul pulled inside out to reveal its rawest meats.

Liraz snorted, caught off guard, and the tension between them ebbed away. "I'm sorry of my almost dying interrupted your almost kissing.