"Only an idiot would venture into the center of the Heap. For one thing, there's the obvious problem that you never know when a junkfall is coming. At any moment trash could start raining from the sky, a light shower of shattered concrete or chunks of steel the size of buildings. They emerge like turds... Continue Reading →

"The fallen devil lay exactly where he had been. Mag stared again at that grey face with anguish stamped on its every feature. It came to him to wonder then whether the devil had been dead even before his cataclysmic fall. Why should one topple, after all, if he were strong and hale? Belike he... Continue Reading →

"But that's magic for you. It doesn't ask what you want- it only offers, and you can either refuse that offer or take it with all your heart. We took it...we saved each other's lices, we drove each other mad, and every day learned each other's bodies and minds and stories anew."-The Witch Below The... Continue Reading →

"But the world had never been safe, not for everybody. It had been broken for a very long time, and the war had only shown those cracks for what they were. It couldn’t be patched over. It needed to shatter if it was ever to be rebuilt into something glittering and new."The Scholar and the... Continue Reading →

"Almost no one was paying for magical boarding school because of the magic. The magic was an interesting quirk, a historical curiosity, in a few cases a genuine passion being indulged by a loving parent—but you didn’t pay fifty thousand pounds a year for magic tricks, any more than you paid it for Shakespeare or... Continue Reading →