Erm... I'm sorry for disappearing for a year...?
Thank you all of you that have kept me on you alert andfavourite lists, seeing how many of you enjoyed my little musings has brought light into what's sometimes seemed a very dark year. Your reviews have been a treasure.
Obviously, Queen of Shadows is now out and as such this little ramble contains spoilers. Yes, SPOILERS.
Manon has been bouncing around in my head since I finished the book on Tuesday. Reading it again only made it worse and this is the result.
There's other ideas floating around in there too: the relationship between Aelin and Rowan is just so so beautiful and I particularly like the idea of Aelin's having hero worshipped Rowan as a child... That could well lead somewhere too...
Hope.
It was such a foreign word, such a foreign concept.
Such a human concept.
Witches weren't human.
Oh, they were sired by human men, and the occasional Fae, but they weren't human. Their blood ran blue as true as the Valg's ran black. The odd human was born to a witch but it was rare.
Hope was a human feeling, a Crochan feeling.
Hope was a feeling that now tugged at Manon's frozen heart.
In all the years of her life, Manon had never doubted the existence of the Three Faced Goddess, the Goddess was a force, like the sun, not active but there and insurmountable. Yet in the last weeks Manon had felt the Goddess' touch several times, like a thread pulling her or a wind pushing her. First with the Terrasen Queen, Manon had felt fate pulling the young woman back to her in that temple; then with Elide, urging her faster, faster, faster; then finally, with Dorian, the Prince become King who's face now plagued her dreams.
The day the King of Adarlan had finally died, when magic had returned in that blissful wave, Manon had felt that pull again,calling her to Adarlan. For days it was a steady, gentle nudge. Then it became insistent.
A pull toward Dorian.
She had landed just moments before he stepped onto that balcony and Manon had known that the Three Faced Goddess was at work.
She wasn't relieved, wasn't happy, that he had survived and been freed of the monster that had imprisoned him within his own flesh. She felt... Content. Almost like Abraxos' satisfied rumble as he settled down for the night with a full belly.
Contentment. Another human emotion.
Manon had had never known that human emotion sympathy, either. Not until that day with Asterin when the world she had known was turned upside down. Now it crept in when she thought of those other unnamed witches's her grandmother had branded, when she thought of the struggles and hardships that Elide would have to face on her own, when she dreamt of the horror in those beautiful blue eyes of a human King.
And sadness.
That was yet another emotion that Manon had never felt before. Not until she had returned to Morath, until she had looked into the faces of her witches and realised that she had never seen any one of them smile the way Asterin had. That many of them didn't know how to. And that others did.
The Blackbeak Matriarch was Manon's flesh and blood but she was now also Manon's enemy. She was the one condemning witches to become nothing more than breeding stock, their treasured witchlings defaced, substituted for the vilest mockery of life. She was the one who had bowed to a mortal, placing witches in the position of plaything to the Adarlan King and this Duke Perrington. Fury was a familiar feeling to Manon. The feeling of her blood thrumming with the lust of ripping out her prey's throat. The time had come for change and it would be heralded by her grandmother's blue blood staining the ground. If it even still ran blue.
Hope was something Manon had never felt before now, but she recognised it's embers smoldering inside her icy heart, found that she wanted to nurture it in herself and her witches. Found that it was strengthening the pull towards both the blue-eyed King and the Golden Queen of Terrasen. Towards a very different way of life.
