The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter
Lekan was self-impressed, condescending, and the single best argument against making firstborns heirs to anything.
So your eyes are open. You see the world for what it is. Is it enough? The world as it is?”
Tau was frustrated and had been bold with his umgondisi. He tempered his answer and lowered his eyes, out of respect. “You know it isn’t,” he said, wanting to say much more.
“And perhaps it never will be. But, while we breathe, the best of us never stop trying to make it better, even if just by a little.”
I’ve been a soldier for most of my life and I’ve learned hard lessons. Fight for too long and you lose sight of the things you started the fight for. Fight for too long and you lose anyway.”
Tau sneered. “What then? Surrender? That’s your answer? Surrender, when the fight becomes hard?”
“No. Fight for what’s right, but never forget that fighting can also be done without violence. It can be done as it is now, with words, ideals, people seeking a better path, together.” Jayyed put his hands on Tau’s shoulders. “You can’t imagine a world where we work as hard at peace as we do at war?”
Vera Wong’s Guide to Snooping (on a Dead Man) by Jesse Q. Sutanto
Vera should be content. And she is, really. But she’s also kind of–dare she say it–bored. Sometimes, all an old lady wants is a murder to solve. Is that too much to ask for ?
Jump by DL Orton
“Love has a way of slipping in through the side door—usually while you’re fixing the hinges.”
“I’m fine.”
“Nobody’s fine,” I say. “We all fake it in shifts.”
“If I fake any harder, I’ll need a union break.”
Operation Bounce House by Matt Dinniman
But did they really deserve that? All of them? The soldiers, the gamers, yes. But what about the children? And the old folks who’d never done anything wrong? That was the problem with war. It was impossible to color within the lines.
What could they have possibly done for us? …We were a cause to them. And causes were these floating nebulous things that lived on screens and online forums. A ribbon one could put on their profile picture. They were something one could wear like a pair of sunglasses or a new jacket. A way to present themselves to the world. A way to say, “Look at my halo. Look at how much I care.”
I thought of my grandmother, and what she’d said that day she died. I didn’t understand it at the time, I was pretty sure I’d never understood it until just now. “The closer we are to the end, the more we need to embrace our happiness.”
Banners of Wrath by Michael Michel
“Governance is a lot of hard decisions and cold food. In the end, you sacrifice such comforts in the hope that all the hard work amounts to something. Riches and power are one type of freedom. A warm meal and an hour undisturbed, another, more desperate kind…Never forget, we work to ensure the mantle of rule remains in the hands of those who appreciate the latter kind of freedom.”
“I—I can’t.” He wrung his hands together. “You fight them. You have Darkhorn. I’m just a kid. ”
“We’re all kids at first, and then one day we aren’t. We look around and find it is we who must fight. We who must do what others are too afraid to do, because if we don’t the good of this world slips through our fingers until there’s nothing left but the ashes and dried blood of the innocent.”
Death may be the price of warriors, but grief is the price of the ones they leave behind.
Barodane scratched his beard. In the month and weeks it had taken them to voyage across the turgid waters of the Sea Forest, he’d given up shaving. Any man who held a knife that close to an artery with the sea bucking underfoot was either mad or so dumb they deserved to die.
“Tyrants oft arrive in velvet slippers but they always leave in iron-shod boots.”
Hate made an odd bedfellow for love. Nevertheless, the motto brought peace to her heart. It was like cleaning a pot before cooking in it. If she didn’t do the dirty work of scrubbing first, whatever rotten or molding thing that had been there would soil the next.
All she desired were clean memories. Stainless images of love.
“Old women like me need plenty of rest. Sleep though…” Thruna tapped a fingertip against her own temple. “Brain knows the next nap could be the last, so it keeps me vigilant.
It wasn’t ideal, but so few things in life were. For as long as he could remember, he’d been trying to force that truth to be different, stepping over a passing moment of joy to hunt the great mythical beast of happiness.
And missing it. Missing it every time.
Regret, he decided, was the greatest curse of man and the cruelest gift of the gods.
“You are here to make trouble?”
“No, sir. No trouble.”
The taller guard arched an eyebrow. “You reek of trouble.”
“So my mother used to say.” Hymobi raised a palm. “I assure you, that smell is merely my armpits. Nothing a bath won’t cure.”
First Do No Harm by S. J. Rozan
…the question becomes—”
“What was O’Brien hiding?” I finished.
“Took the words—”
“Right out of your mouth.”
“Do you think he was—” Bill stopped but I didn’t pick it up. “Hey, I thought you were reading my mind.”
“I left. It was dark and spooky in there.”
“I thought this was a hospital. I thought everyone was in the business of saving lives, not their own butts.”
“In the business,” Elliott said. “Start from there.”
Robert B. Parker’s Big Shot by Christopher Farnsworth
Hanrahan blinked twice at Jesse. He didn’t get the joke. Or pretended not to. A lot of people reacted that way to Jesse’s sense of humor.
Molly would have told him that was a sign he wasn’t all that funny, but Jesse didn’t really tell his jokes for any outside audience.
Nine Goblins: A Tale of Low Fantasy and High Mischief by T. Kingfisher
Algol wasnt a bad sort, really. He was bigger than usual for a goblin, a whopping four foot ten, with broad, knotty shoulders and enormous feet. He had the ocher-gray skin of a hill goblin, and he wasnt all that bright—but then, he was a goblin officer.
Smart goblins became mechanics. Dim goblins became soldiers, Really dim goblins became officers.
His clothes were odd. Elves usually looked immaculate. It was how you could tell chey were elves. You could cut an elf’s leg off, and he would contrive to make it look as if two legs were unfashionable. Elves were just like that. It was one of their more annoying traits.
Goblin tea resembles a nice cup of Earl Grey in much the same way that a catfish resembles the common tabby. They share a name, but one is a nice thing to curl up with on a rainy afternoon, and the other is found in the muck at the bottom of polluted rivers and has bits of debris sticking to it.
There were cattle in the town square. Some of the humans had died when the cattle crushed them. It was a mess, a horrible mess, which was a laughably ineffective word for the scene before them.
At least if she thought of it as mess, she didn’t have to think of it as people.
Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books by Hwang Bo-reum, translated by Shanna Tan
Just as how the seaman finds a barrel to save himself in the rough seas, I keep myself afloat with stories. Books may not solve all my problems, but at least they prevent me from sinking into the abyss.
There are how-to books out there introducing ‘hacks’ to increase reading speed, and when we’ve just made up our minds to get into the habit of reading, it’s easy to fall into the impatience of wanting to read quickly and read more. But reading is about understanding the world and ourselves, not finishing as many books as possible. We aren’t reading to become faster, but to feel and understand more.
The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
“I have never understood potatoes,” Sissix said. “The whole point of a potato is to cover it with salt so you don’t notice how bland it is. Why not just get a salt lick and skip the potato?”
Sethi was a quiet place. Out of the way. Modestly prosperous. Uncomplicated. No gaming hubs or prefab stores. There wasn’t even a real shuttle dock, just a wide, unattended area suitable for landing small spacecraft and supply drones. Looking around, Rosemary understood why a young adult would want to leave such a place, and why an elder would want to come back.
Jenks knew a thing or two about time. It was hard to be a tunneler and not pick up some of the basics. Time was a malleable thing, not the measured click that clocks would have you believe. Whenever the ship punched, Ohan had to be sure they came back out in the right time, as if it were all mapped out backward and forward and side to side, an infinite number of stories that had already been written. Time could crawl, it could fly, it could amble. Time was a slippery thing. It couldn’t be defined. And yet, somehow, he knew with absolute certainty that this was the longest ten minutes of his life.
(Image by DaModernDaVinci from Pixabay)
I don’t think I noticed last October when Southern Living named its 
