"Ink Blood Sister Scribe" by Emma Törzs
Everybody liked her, and like many well-liked people, she worried that if people really got to know her, if they managed to penetrate that glancing shield of likability, they wouldn't actually like her one bit.
It was that she missed Pearl despite her presence. An anticipation of missing
'Arctic' comes from the Greek word for bears - Antarctic means no bears.
She was an expert in every place her sister had been.
It's a trauma response. He thinks if he talks about bad things that have happened, more bad things will happen.
There was never a single "correct" answer, but rather many possible factors, and Joanna had memorized everything from innate magical properties (vervain for protection, datura for knowledge and communication, belladonna for illusion) to physical correspondence (delicate herbs for delicate magic) to geographic specificity (chamomile for Polish spells, chinch for Peruvian). This last was helpful only if Joanna knew roughly where a book had come from, and yarrow was one of her most-used herbs because it was circumboreal and grew widely across the world.
Everything smells metallic and mouthy like pine needles and coming winter.
a spell that mended broken objects, a spell that coaxed perfect spheres of juicy red tomatoes from any living plant, a spell to trap someone within an invisible barrier
ring out in the cold air like struck glass
How dare she ever long for a different life?
Long, heart-beaten minutes passed.
the Egyptian goddess of writing, Sestet, mistress of the house of books. Her name meant She who is the scribe.
It felt like the volume and color of the world had been turned down, everything quiet and beige, dull and exhausting.
She was at the point of tiredness where nothing seemed real, as if she'd already started dreaming.
In all the photographs, she looks like nobody's mother.
The first stories are for you; this story is for you; and every story until the end, for you.