Crown of Exile.

It is a curse to live a long life. To slowly outgrow the things you love most, to have to witness every kind of changes without being capable to do so your own, to be left by fragile things I once arrogantly thought brought no significance.

To be a faerie is to be cursed with honesty, with loyalty, and immortality. Jude, if you were to leave
me, let my heart be burried with you in the strange soil of unknown land.

I have never been in too many places. I have never been in any places that is not my own, that much I know. I have familiarized myself once with the taste water on the leaves, the smell of dirty soil, the sound of broken ranches, the feel of rocks.

To be in a new place is to unlearn them all and to learn anew something that takes a lifetime to do.

And so, Jude, when you ask, "Have you ever thought of leaving? There is a big world out there."

I know for a fact that it is not ever an option for me; I can feel my legs as if they are being strangled and planted to the ground. I hear whispers that sound like sirens, begging for me to stay.

"Perhaps one day," Faerie cannot lie; and that is not a lie. If one day I am no longer to be cursed with nostalgia, maybe then I'll think about leaving—to where, I am not sure.

Even if I want to go, where can I go?
There is no place for a cruel boy with wicked mind in a world filled by false pretense and endearing lies. Will you, then, leave? Be the queen of nothing in a world you solemnly despise?

"Oh look, there's a deer. Let's follow it." You say with your sparkly eyes, before you turn to me and ask, "Do you want to come with?"

And I tell you, "You know I'll go with you."

Mortals might argue to be told only truths and to tell only truths are two of the most tender thing people can do to each other. Yet, that is a very shallow meaning of honesty, and a very infantile thought that comes only from lacking of it in the first place.

Honesty is hamstringing; humiliating and disarming. To tell the truth is to let yourself be stripped bare. Because if someone tells you that lies are only used for deceit and manipulation, that person must be the most foolish of all, or one who knows nothing on how to use it; you don't give guns to a swordsman, nor do you give katana to a marksman.

What do you do, if you can't lie, to hide your anger and want to snap at someone? Do you convince yourself it is not a problem, or do you exile yourself? What do you do when you are terrified, or nervous, or anything somewhere in between? Do you laugh about it, just like I always do?

What do you do, Jude, if you can't lie, if someone like you come to me and ask me if I desire you?

Do you answer like I do? With a laugh and shifted gaze, "What a gruesomely moronic question to ask."

Jude, you don't think monster girls and wicked boys deserve love?

I am tired of your stories; But oh, I think there's a lesson in it, princeling: A sharp tongue is no match for a sharp tooth.

Jude Duarte about Cardan Greenbriar: He's so beautiful, so perfectly, horribly, inhumanly beautiful that I can barely breathe.

Choose one way and a monster rends your flesh. Choose another and your heart turns to stone, or fire, or glass.

...if his cruelty had the sharp edge of despair, if slights and taunts were all that fell from his tongue now, what did it matter? He had always been awful. Now he was just worse.