Mountain Of Black Glass Quotes

Every man is the hero of his own song. ~ Tad Williams

He roused from a joyous dream of feasting, of drinking blood and sucking warm marrow from the bone. His sons and daughters swarmed like ants upon the surface of the Earth, ripe in their terror, delectable in their anguish. He swept them into his mouth and their insides ran in black streams between his lips and matted his beard. This sweet dream rapidly slipped away as he stretched and assessed his surroundings. He shambled forth from the great cavern in the mountain that had been his home for so long. ~ Laird Barron

And cried for mamma, at every turn'-I added, 'and trembled if a country lad heaved his fist against you, and sat at home all day for a shower of rain.-Oh, Heathcliff, you are showing a poor spirit! Come to the glass, and I'll let you see what you should wish. Do you mark those two lines between your eyes, and those thick brows, that instead of rising arched, sink in the middle, and that couple of black fiends, so deeply buried, who never open their windows boldly, but lurk glinting under them, like devil's spies? Wish and learn to smooth away the surly wrinkles, to raise your lids frankly, and change the fiends to confident, innocent angels, suspecting and doubting nothing, and always seeing friends where they are not sure of foes-Don't get the expression of a vicious cur that appears to know the kicks it gets are its desert, and yet, hates all the world, as well as the kicker, for what it suffers.'
'In other words, I must wish for Edgar Linton's great blue eyes, and even forehead,' he replied. 'I do - and that won't help me to them.'
'A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad,' I continued, 'if you were a regular black; and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly. And now that we've done washing, and combing, and sulking - tell me whether you don't think yourself rather handsome? I'll tell you, I do. You're fit for a prince in disguise. Who knows, but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen, each of them ~ Emily Bronte

One of his hands slides over my stomach, tracing the shape of my skin. He kisses me again, and it's like falling off a cliff. Like a mountain slide, building momentum with every touch, until there is only destruction ahead.
I have never felt anything like this. ~ Holly Black

When I was a kid and brought friends over , I was defiantly proud of the chaos. I liked that I knew how to jump over the piles and the shattered glass while they stumbled. Now it just seems like an ocean of crazy that I have no way to explain. ~ Holly Black

She was a very pretty woman. She had dark red hair and her eyes -- her eyes are just like mine, Harry thought, edging a little closer to the glass. Bright green -- exactly the same shape, but then he noticed that she was crying; smiling, but crying at the same time. The tall, thin, black-haired man standing next to her put his arm around her. He wore glasses, and his hair was very untidy. It stuck up at the back, just like Harry's did.

Harry was so close to the mirror now that his nose was nearly touching that of his reflection.

"Mum?" he whispered. "Dad?"

They just looked at him, smiling. And slowly, Harry looked into the faces of the other people in the mirror and saw other pairs of green eyes like his, other noses like his, even a little old man who looked as though he had Harry's knobbly knees -- Harry was looking at his family, for the first time in his life.

The Potters smiled and waved at Harry and he stared hungrily back at them, his hands pressed flat against the glass as though he was hoping to fall right through it and reach them. He had a powerful kind of ache inside of him, half joy, half terrible sadness. ~ J.K. Rowling

They come and go, without the drowsy observer's participation, but are essentially different from dream pictures for he is still master of his senses. They are often grotesque. I am pestered by roguish profiles, by some coarse-featured and florid dwarf with a swelling nostril or ear. At times, however, my photisms take on a rather soothing flou quality, and then I see - projected, as it were, upon the inside of the eyelid - gray figures walking between beehives, or small black parrots gradually vanishing among mountain snows, or a mauve remoteness melting beyond moving masts. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

The Night-Swans
by Walter De la Mare

'Tis silence on the enchanted lake,
And silence in the air serene,
Save for the beating of her heart,
The lovely-eyed Evangeline.

She sings across the waters clear
And dark with trees and stars between,
The notes her fairy godmother
Taught her, the child Evangeline.

As might the unrippled pool reply,
Faltering an answer far and sweet,
Three swans as white as mountain snow
Swim mantling to her feet.

And still upon the lake they stay,
Their eyes black stars in all their snow,
And softly, in the glassy pool,
Their feet beat darkly to and fro.

She rides upon her little boat,
Her swans swim through the starry sheen,
Rowing her into Fairyland--
The lovely-eyed Evangeline.

'Tis silence on the enchanted lake,
And silence in the air serene;
Voices shall call in vain again
On earth the child Evangeline.

'Evangeline! Evangeline!'
Upstairs, downstairs, all in vain.
Her room is dim; her flowers faded;
She answers not again. ~ Walter De La Mare

Jack, in his dark camp, saw Ennis as night fire, a red spark on the huge black mass of mountain. ~ Annie Proulx

And so the Red Cyclists duly arrived, accompanied by the Chief Cyclist (in Berlin he would be called General Director to the Messenger Boys). The box in question was big and oblong, and I had taken great pains to provide admonitions such as "Glass!", "Fragile!", "Careful!" and "This side up!" The old egg box contained nothing more than my humble remains, of course, but I had refrained from letting them nail the lid shut because I emphatically wanted to be seen as the beautiful corpse that I was. I also wanted to keep a watchful eye on the proceedings at hand.

"My Burial ~ Hanns Heinz Ewers

They watched storms out there so distant they could not be heard, the silent lightning flaring sheetwise and the thin black spine of the mountain chain fluttering and sucked away again in the dark. They saw wild horses racing on the plain, pounding their shadows down the night and- leaving in the moonlight a vaporous dust like the palest stain of their passing. ~ Cormac McCarthy

The mountain trembled like an earthquake. Dust flew into the sky. And the rock turned dark red, like the color of blood'.
'How would you know?' Asks Sindhi cap. 'You only have a black and white television'.
'But it's a very good one. You can almost see colours. ~ Mohsin Hamid

The dude feels right fatherly. Takes her down to the crick to wash the underground off of her. Just can't bring himself to shoot her while she's filthy and starving. There's time. Offers her a cake of French-milled soap he brought all the way out from Chicago. Smells like gardenias if you know your flowers, and the dude does. Snow White knows something's skewed but she grabs it, strips off like it's nothing and climbs in the water. She don't shiver even though that stream has to be as cold as a wagon tire. The miner's crud comes off her in black ribbons. The duded watches another girl come out of the blind mole-skin she was walking around it. This one has muscles like a mountain cat and a kind of pretty he doesn't know what to do with. For fairness he'd take her stepmother six days and twice on Sunday. The beauty Snow White's got has nothing to do with him. She's scarred up and suspicious an shameless. Her pretty's not for him. It's like saying the moon's got a fine figure on her. Maybe true, but what good is that to a man? ~ Catherynne M. Valente

At the railroad station he noted that he still had thirty minutes. He quickly recalled that in a cafe on the Calle Brazil (a few dozen feet from Yrigoyen's house) there was an enormous cat which allowed itself to be caressed as if it were a disdainful divinity. He entered the cafe. There was the cat, asleep. He ordered a cup of coffee, slowly stirred the sugar, sipped it (this pleasure had been denied him in the clinic), and thought, as he smoothed the cat's black coat, that this contact was an illusion and that the two beings, man and cat, were as good as separated by a glass, for man lives in time, in succession, while the magical animal lives in the present, in the eternity of the instant. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Michael: 'Hey, remember when I almost didn't let you into the house that first day you came?'
Claire: 'Yep'
Michael: 'Well, I was dead wrong. Maybe I never said that out loud before, but I mean it, Claire. All that's happened since ... we wouldn't have made it. Not me, not Shane, not Eve. Not without you.'
Claire: 'It's not me. It's not! It's us, that's all. We're just better together. We ... take care of each other.'
Shane: 'Stop vamping up my girl, man. She needs coffee.'
Michael: 'Don't we all. Vamping up your girl? Dude. That's low.'
Shane: 'Digging for China. Come on. ~ Rachel Caine

Outside the walls of the Crimson Cabaret was a world of rain and darkness. At intervals, whenever someone entered or exited through the front door of the club, one could actually see the steady rain and was allowed a brief glimpse of the darkness. Inside it was all amber light, tobacco smoke, and the sound of the raindrops hitting the windows, which were all painted black. On such nights, as I sat at one of the tables in that drab little place, I was always filled with an infernal merriment, as if I were waiting out the apocalypse and could not care less about it. I also liked to imagine that I was in the cabin of an old ship during a really vicious storm at sea or in the club car of a luxury passenger train that was being rocked on its rails by ferocious winds and hammered by a demonic rain. Sometimes, when I was sitting in the Crimson Cabaret on a rainy night, I thought of myself as occupying a waiting room for the abyss (which of course was exactly what I was doing) and between sips from my glass of wine or cup of coffee I smiled sadly and touched the front pocket of my coat where I kept my imaginary ticket to oblivion. ~ Thomas Ligotti

She ran and didn't slow until she came to a hallway that terminated in a multipaned window of thick, old-fashioned glass. Her breath rasped in her throat, but the dizziness and nausea eased enough that she stood steadier on her feet. She heard again the gentle ringing of metal sliding against metal. Musty air rose up with the same smell of leather and dust, an acrid undertone beneath. She whipped her head toward the end of the hall. At first she didn't see anything. The light shifted and swirled, and the swordsman materialized from the shadows. Gold and red emblazoned his tunic in a chevron against a cobalt background. The sword was back in its scabbard, strapped across his back. He was tall, with broad shoulders and dark hair, and he looked like Sebastian. Timed to the wind stirring the ivy outside, he vanished through the wall. ~ Carolyn Jewel

Hey Meg! Communication implies sound. Communion doesn't.' He sent her a brief image of walking silently through the woods, the two of them alone together., their feet almost noiseless on the rusty carpet of pine needles. They walked without speaking, without touching, and yet they were as close as it is possible for two human beings to be. They climbed up through the woods, coming out into the brilliant sunlight at the top of the hill. A few sumac trees showed their rusty candles. Mountain laurel, shiny, so dark a green the leaves seemed black in the fierceness of sunlight, pressed toward the woods. Meg and Calvin had stretched out in the thick, late-summer grass, lying on their backs, gazing up into the shimmering blue of sky, a vault interrupted only by a few small clouds.

And she had been as happy, she remembered, as it is possible to be, and as close to Calvin as she had ever been to anybody in her life, even Charles Wallace, so close that their separate bodies, daisies and buttercups joining rather than dividing them, seemed a single enjoyment of summer and sun and each other.

That was surely the purest kind of thing.

Mr. Jenkins had never had that kind of communion with another human being, a communion so rich and full that silence speaks more powerfully than words. ~ Madeleine L'Engle

I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being. And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy. ~ Black Elk

She was beautiful, too, with dark eyebrows and deep-set eyes outlined in black. Her image was like sharp glass cutting into me, I rushed to the surface to meet her with an urgency bordering on hysteria. Someone get gauze and bandages. I'm falling out. She's some dream I had. She's got part of me I didn't know I needed. ~ Bett Williams

Kerr found that a spinning black hole would not collapse into a pointlike star, as Schwarzschild assumed, but would collapse into a spinning ring. Anyone unfortunate enough to hit the ring would perish; but someone falling into the ring would not die, but would actually fall through. But instead of winding up on the other side of the ring, he or she would pass through the Einstein-Rosen Bridge and wind up in another universe. In other words, the spinning black hole is the rim of Alice's Looking Glass.

If he or she were to move around the spinning ring a second time, he or she would enter yet another universe. In fact, repeated entry into the spinning ring would put a person in different parallel universes, much like hitting the "up" button on an elevator. In principle, there could be an infinite number of universes, each stacked on top of each other. "Pass through this magic ring and-presto!-you're in a completely different universe where radius and mass are negative!" Kerr wrote.

There is an important catch, however. Black holes are examples of "nontransversable wormholes"; that is, passing through the event horizon is a one-way trip. Once you pass through the event horizon and the Kerr ring, you cannot go backward through the ring and out through the event horizon. ~ Michio Kaku

A face stared up at her from the mirror beside her hand. Was that really what she looked like? Was that really what she looked like, all sharp lines and huge silver-grey eyes? Certainly, no one would ever call those features beautiful, Jame thought ruefully; but were they really enough like a boy's to have fooled that old man the alley? Well, maybe with that long black hair out of sight under a cap. It was a very young face and a defiant one, she thought with a odd sense of detachment, but frightened, too. And those extraordinary eyes ... what memories lived in them that she could not share? Stranger, where have you been she asked silently. What have you seen? The thin lips locked in their secrets.
"Ahhh!" Jame said in sudden disgust, tossing away the mirror. Fool, to be obsessed with a past she couldn't even remember. But it was all behind her now. ~ P.C. Hodgell

Imagine if you will - and you will - a mushroom cloud bigger than anything that you currently see out that window. Imagine jet planes and bombers the size of apartment complexes dropping technological marvels of deconstruction upon this city, this world, all around the epicenter of a blooming death cloud. Imagine that mushroom coming to a head, knowing that it is filled with unimaginable heat and concrete, dust, papers - human faces, eyes, and brains. Gray matter filling the radioactive cloud with electricity as all that is inside us leaves us and becomes one with the mushroom. Glass will melt and connect with steel, and we will melt and connect with each other as everything that made us whole is criminally dissected and rearranged. Everything below us, from the sewer tunnels to the subway line, will be consumed into the cloud and jettisoned into the stratosphere, where it will become nothing but silken ash, hardened to a black substance, and turned back to a black dust, transfixed into a black nothing. A stinking, glowing crater all that remains of where you had your first kiss and told someone that you loved them. A mess of a world where everything you've ever done quickly becomes all that you'll ever do. ~ Michael A. Ferro

The magnitude of these shattering changes can perhaps be grasped by imagining that the invasion had been in the reverse direction and that the Aztecs or Incas had arrived suddenly in Europe, imposed their culture and calendar, outlawed Christianity, set up sacrificial altars for thousands of victims in Madrid and Amsterdam, unwittingly spread disease on a scale that virtually matched the Black Death, melted down the golden images of Christ and the saints, threw stones at the stained-glass windows and converted the cathedral aisles into arms or food warehouses, toppled unfamiliar Greek statues and Roman columns, and carried home to the Mexican and Peruvian highlands their loot in precious metals along with slaves, indentured servants and other human trophies. ~ Geoffrey Blainey

I deliberately spilled the black ink of despair because my perfect soul was a stained glass illusion - can you understand that? ... ~ John Geddes

With the heady scent of yeast in the air, it quickly becomes clear that Langer's hasn't changed at all. The black-and-white-checked linoleum floor, the tin ceiling, the heavy brass cash register, all still here. The curved-front glass cases with their wood counter, filled with the same offerings: the butter cookies of various shapes and toppings, four kinds of rugelach, mandel bread, black-and-white cookies, and brilliant-yellow smiley face cookies. Cupcakes, chocolate or vanilla, with either chocolate or vanilla frosting piled on thick. Brownies, with or without nuts. Cheesecake squares. Coconut macaroons. Four kinds of Danish. The foil loaf pans of the bread pudding made from the day-old challahs. And on the glass shelves behind the counter, the breads. Challahs, round with raisins and braided either plain or with sesame. Rye, with and without caraway seeds. Onion kuchen, sort of strange almost-pizza-like bread that my dad loves, and the smaller, puffier onion rolls that I prefer. Cloverleaf rolls. Babkas. The wood-topped cafe tables with their white chairs, still filled with the little gossipy ladies from the neighborhood, who come in for their mandel bread and rugelach, for their Friday challah and Sunday babka, and take a moment to share a Danish or apple dumpling and brag about grandchildren. ~ Stacey Ballis

Although it is hard to visualize a landscape in a space of high dimensions, the more the number of parameters, the more likely it is that a walk of any finite distance, taken in a random direction from a place near the summit of a mountain, will go down rather than up. Thus, we may conclude that, if the hypotheses made here are true, most changes in the parameters of the laws of physics will decrease the rate at which black holes are produced in our universe. Because of this, the theory I am sketching here is actually subject to observational test. ~ Lee Smolin

Armenian Cognac

A bottle of cognac from Yerevan
is on my kitchen table
as closed as that history
and as silent
If I broke it down I'd lose a hundred years
of love
and if I opened it the ancestors
hanging here in black and white
would come down from the walls
to have a glass with me
I know a history that's been forgotten
and I know why that bottle of cognac
stands with such singular pride....

If I broke it now I'd lose a hundred years
of my people's history ~ Najwan Darwish

cartridge belts. Maybe wood smoke somewhere. Jacob was dark-eyed and pale. He had a young man's beard, only potential, the hint of black whiskers along his jaw looking like something black pressed under a thick pane of smoked glass. At one point he pulled off a glove with his teeth and left it dangling from his mouth as he, what? - opened a K ration? lit a cigarette? The condemned man's last. His bare hand was as white as bone, as small as a child's. ~ Alice McDermott

Clary,

Despite everything, I can't bear the thought of this ring being lost forever, any more then I can bear the thought of leaving you forever. And though I have no choice about the one, at least I can choose about the other. I'm leaving you our family ring because you have as much right to it as I do.
I'm writing this watching the sun come up. You're asleep, dreams moving behind your restless eyelids. I wish I knew what you were thinking. I wish I could slip into your head and see the world the way you do. I wish I could see myself the way you do. But maybe I dont want to see that. Maybe it would make me feel even more than I already do that I'm perpetuating some kind of Great Lie on you, and I couldn't stand that.
I belong to you. You could do anything you wanted with me and I would let you. You could ask anything of me and I'd break myself trying to make you happy. My heart tells me this is the best and greatest feeling I have ever had. But my mind knows the difference between wanting what you can't have and wanting what you shouldn't want. And I shouldn't want you.
All night I've watched you sleeping, watched the moonlight come and go, casting its shadows across your face in black and white. I've never seen anything more beautiful. I think of the life we could have had if things were different, a life where this night is not a singular event, separate from everything else that's real, but every night. But things aren't different, and I can't ~ Cassandra Clare

After every battle, he ritually dips his hood into the blood of his enemies. I've seen the hood, kept under glass in the armory. The fabric is stiff and stained a brown so deep it's almost black, except for a few smears of green.
Sometimes I go down and stare at it, trying to see my parents in the tide lines of dried blood. I want to feel something, something besides a vague queasiness. I want to feel more, but every time I look at it, I feel less. ~ Holly Black

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor's lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Give me the strongest cheese, the one that stinks best;
and I want the good wine, the swirl in crystal
surrendering the bruised scent of blackberries,
or cherries, the rich spurt in the back
of the throat, the holding it there before swallowing.
Give me the lover who yanks open the door
of his house and presses me to the wall
in the dim hallway, and keeps me there until I'm drenched
and shaking, whose kisses arrive by the boatload
and begin their delicious diaspora
through the cities and small towns of my body.
To hell with the saints, with martyrs
of my childhood meant to instruct me
in the power of endurance and faith,
to hell with the next world and its pallid angels
swooning and sighing like Victorian girls.
I want this world. I want to walk into
the ocean and feel it trying to drag me along
like I'm nothing but a broken bit of scratched glass,
and I want to resist it. I want to go
staggering and flailing my way
through the bars and back rooms,
through the gleaming hotels and weedy
lots of abandoned sunflowers and the parks
where dogs are let off their leashes
in spite of the signs, where they sniff each
other and roll together in the grass, I want to
lie down somewhere and suffer for love until
it nearly kills me, and then I want to get up again
and put on that little black dress and wait
for you, yes you, to come over here ~ Kim Addonizio

He had dark, deepset, piercingly black eyes, overshadowed by eyebrows so bushy that he had to brush them away to see through the glass. But his most prominent feature was the thick growth of hair on his upper lip, long and black, lovingly maintained, measuring nearly a foot between its waxed and pointed tips. It was this feature that gave him his name, the most feared name on the sea: Black Stache. ~ Dave Barry

Tohrment spoke. "Bella's brother called. He's tabled the sehelusion request and asked that she stay here for a couple of days."

Z jacked his head up. "Why?"

"He didn't give a reason-" Tohr's eye's narrowed on Z's face. "Oh... my God."

"What the fuck are you looking at?"

Phury pointed to the antique mirror hanging on the wall next to the double doors. "See for yourself."

Zsadist marched across the room, ready to give them all hell. Bella was what mattered-

His mouth went lax at his reflection. With a shaky hand he reached out to the eyes in the old-fashioned leaded glass. His irises were no longer black. They were yellow. Just like his twin's.

"Phury?" he said softly. "Phury... what happened to me?"

As the male came up behind him, his brother's face appeared right beside Z's. And then Wrath's dark reflection showed up in the mirror, all long hair and sunglasses. Then Rhage's star-fallen beauty. And Vishous's Sox cap. And Tohrment's brush cut. And Butch's busted nose.

One by one they reached out and touched him, their big hands gently on his shoulders.

"Welcome back, my brother," Phury whispered.

Zsadist stared at the males who were behind him. And the oddest thought that if he were to let himself go limp and fall backward... they would catch him. ~ J.R. Ward

I dived for it, caught it three inches above the cement, and found myself face-to-face with the salamander. Ruby-red eyes regarded me with mild curiosity, black lips parted, and a long, spiderweb-thin filament of a tongue slithered from the salamander's mouth and kissed the sphere's glass in the reflection of my nose. Hi, I love you, too. ~ Ilona Andrews

As he breathed the black and grey air into his body he no longer thought of anything as lovely, the way the retiring trees of his boyhood had been; for everything was made up of dirt-clods; and you do construct a mountain from molehills or other over-codified facts. If only the cities had been dynamited before it was too late for him! -- That Pol Pot sure had the right idea, blowing down those ticky-tacky rice paper offices and illuminating the middlemen with bullets of vanguardist light so everyone could get back to the country, don't you think? -- As things stood, even had Bug been able to cover the earth again with forests, after having lived so long in the excremental piles of cement and rusted steel he never could have seen trees as more than tedious identical dirty giant toothpicks unfit to be taken into the mouth' his summer camp, as a dishwasher jail where you breathed in the steam of bad food; and the islands to which he had rowed, as sad unwholesome protuberances, polyps and land-cancers still in the stink of the outhouse -- and all the girls had long since grown up completely to make travesties of their lives, even though some inherited great riches as we used to reckon riches in those days. -- But surely this change in him was necessary, for without wretchedness and degradation of self one will never accomplish anything. ~ William T. Vollmann

Horns. The skull had horns His heart sank. Only one pirate ship bore that flag - the Satyr.
To make sure, he looked for the figurehead. When he saw the telltale carving of the mythological half-goat, half-man, he groaned aloud. Then he lifted his glass, and saw the black-haired man standing in the bow. It was the Satyr, all right. And its demon owner Captain Gideon Horn.
Tis the Pirate Lord himself! ~ Sabrina Jeffries

Up until the mid twentieth century the mountain gorilla was considered a myth. Oddly enough, a legend not unlike bigfoot or the loch ness monster. The chance of actually seeing/experiencing this elusive shadow was as likely as finding ones soulmate. Rare. Precious. Even once discovered they seemed unapproachable. The only way to get close to this magnificent creature was to become empathetic. Abandon all pretense and preconceptions. To bare an open throat. To collapse into the arms of vulnerability. All but extinct, these beings/moments are threatened by the black hearted. The cold and oblivious. The empty eyed profit seekers that overlook these rare precious moments. ~ Maynard James Keenan

But neither could compare with the gargantuan natural edifice that was the mountain upon which Nachtstürm Castle rose. It was a mountain made of the darkness between two lightning bolts. It was made less of earth than Stygian frost. Whole towns fell away as they ascended, as though the ranks of black and frowning conifers waged war against the humans below. Even the path – rather narrow and rarely straight – seemed less made by centuries of pilgrim feet and more by the trace of some careless demon's claw.

It was, in fact, perfect. ~ Emily C.A. Snyder

When the air gets heavy so it's hard to breathe, you know what's coming. The birds come down from the ridges and hide in the hollows and in the pines. Heavy black clouds float over the mountain, and you run for the cabin.

From the cabin porch we would watch the big bars of light that stand for a full second, maybe two, on the mountaintop, running out feelers or lightning wire in all directions before they're jerked back into the sky. Cracking claps of sound, so sharp you know something has split wide open--then the thunder rolls and rumbles over the ridges and back through the hollows. I was pretty near sure, a time or two, that the mountains was falling down, but Granpa said they wasn't. Which of course, they didn't.

Then it comes again--and rolls blue fireballs of rocks on the ridge tops and splatters the blue in the air. The trees whip and bend in the sudden rushes of wind, and the sweep of heavy rain comes thunking from the clouds in big drops, letting you know there's some real frog-strangling sheets of water coming close behind. ~ Forrest Carter

He stood leaning on his cane, hair neatly pushed back from his pale brow, a black glass boy of deadly edges. ~ Leigh Bardugo