Adam McOmber

“Call it what you like: The Upper Sky, the Unmade, even the Empyrean. Men have given it so many names over the course of history. But those names don't really matter, in the end. It's the unchanging matter. A place without qualities. Neither hot nor cold, wet nor dry. The aether remains while all else shifts and fades...The aether is the opposite of creation. It's always there, invisible but burning bright. It's the pale web that holds the universe together.”

“A diet of rations etched his figure, and the sea air and sun peeled back a layer of his essence...It's as if he's passed through some cloud of aether, and he's come back to us with the outer reaches of the universe still clinging to him.”

“I had no lock that could be picked. If anything, I was the landscape behind the door, and even on that day in the ruin, I was still only beginning to comprehend my own flora and fauna.”

“I was familiar with the realms of unnatural, for I myself was an unnatural. Not a monster in appearance; I looked like other young women, though perhaps not as primped and manicured. But I wasn't the same as other girls. My friends believed I was sick or gifted. Either way, I was unfortunate. Something entirely new upon the earth.”

“Just before he passed behind the hedge at the end of the drive, he turned to look back at Stoke Morrow and caught me spying on him. His shining eyes were so cruel, and before I could close the curtain, I saw the flash of an awful grin on his face. It was a grin that said he knew I'd come around. Sooner or later, I'd fall in line.”