Literature
Jadis (excerpt)
Excerpted from my book Her Unwelcome Inheritance, a story about Faerie, going off to school, family tensions, and what to do when people you respect reveal that they believe in something absurd and impossible.
She was burning
Burning behind walls of ice
Grey was on her lips, on her bare throat, on her exposed arms. Her eyes were glassy, the pupils fallen as if grown weary of staring straight ahead, and had, as the centuries passed, slid imperceptibly downward.
Her hands rested in her lap, grey with grey nails. Nothing set her apart from the hundreds on hundreds of other figures sitting in that crowded room, grey and still, clad in clothes