Come Tumbling Down

"Hope is a vicious beast. It sinks in its claws and it doesn't let go."

“New things are the best kind of magic there is.”

Eleanor West’s Home for Wayward Children was an island of misfit toys, a place to put the unfinished stories and the broken wanderers who could butcher a deer and string a bow but no longer remembered what to do with indoor plumbing. It was also, more importantly, a holding pen for heroes. Whatever they might have become when they’d been cast out of their chosen homes, they’d been heroes once, each in their own ways. And they did not forget.

Jill had always been the more dangerous, less predictable Wolcott, for all that she was the one who dressed in pastel colors and lace and sometimes remembered that people liked it when you smiled. Something about the way she’d wrapped her horror movie heart in ribbons and bows had reminded him of a corpse that hadn’t been properly embalmed, like she was pretty on the outside and rotten on the inside. Terrifying and subtly wrong.

#1 Every Heart a Doorway ★★★★★
#2 Down Among the Sticks and Bones ★★★★★
#3 Beneath the Sugar Sky ★★★★★
#4 In An Absent Dream ★★★★★
#5 Come Tumbling Down ★★★★★
#6 Across the Green Grass Fields ★★★★★
#7 Where the Drowned Girls Go ★★★★★
#8 Lost in the Moment and Found ★★★★★

Hope is a vicious beast. It sinks in its claws and it doesn't let go.

The gates slammed shut behind them with remarkable speed, and everything was quiet, and Christopher knew, with absolute certainty, that not all of them were going to make it home.

Whatever they might have become when they'd been cast out of their chosen homes, they'd been heroes once, each in their own ways. And they did not forget.

Jack laughed. It wasn't a happy sound, not exactly; it was the sound of someone clinging to the last vestiges of sanity and stability with all their might. It was the sound of slipping.

‘The world doesn't stop spinning because you're sad, and that's good; if it did, people would go around breaking hearts like they were sheets of maple sugar, just to keep the world exactly where it is. They'd make it out like it was a good thing, a few crying children in exchange for a peace that never falters or fades. We can be sad and we can be hurt and we can even be killed, but the world keeps turning, and the things we're supposed to do keep needing to be done.’

“No one should have to sit and suffer and pretend to be someone they’re not because it’s easier, or because no one wants to help them fix it.”

“He could have loved her in that moment, had loved her when she’d pulled the scissors free and used them to cut a hole in the wall of the world. She’d called her door out of nothingness, out of sororicide and hope, and she’d carried her sister’s body through it, into the bleeding light of a crimson moon.”

“Finally, Sumi leaned over and patted Jack on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry, we’ll still love you after you kill your sister.”
“How delightful for me,” said Jack, and urged the horses on.”

“I’m told the public house nearest the docks serves excellent chowder that practically never contains human flesh. I’m also told that ‘practically never’ is not the same as ‘never,’ and it’s better not to gamble with such things. Anyone hungry?”

“Apparently, the rest of you go around raising the dead when you don’t have anything better to do. It’s a miracle we have any graveyards left.”

“New things are the best kind of magic there is.”

“We can be sad and we can be hurt and we can even be killed, but the world keeps turning, and the things we’re supposed to do keep needing to be done.”

“Once a wayward child, always a wayward child.”

“No one should have to sit and suffer and pretend to be someone they're not because it's easier, or because no one wants to help them fix it.”

“…the fact that I’ve been damaged doesn’t make me broken…”

“A tool is only a weapon when it’s held by people who want to use it the wrong way.”

“The world doesn’t stop spinning because you’re sad, and that’s good; if it did, people would go around breaking hearts like they were sheets of maple sugar, just to keep the world exactly where it is…We can be sad and we can be hurt and we can even be killed, but the world keeps turning, and the things we’re supposed to do keep needing to be done.”

“Sometimes, after all, that’s what must be said to make a hero: the willingness to keep running even after it becomes clear that the entire exercise is doomed to failure. Sometimes heroism is pressing on when the ending is already preordained.”

“No one should have to sit and suffer and pretend to be someone they’re not because it’s easier, or because no one wants to help them fix it.”