Trajan Quotes

“I don’t naturally look like this. I have to feed in order to have the power to hold it.”“Feed on what exactly?” Please don’t say blood, please don’t say blood, she whispered in her mind.“Death,” Trajan answered. Anya didn’t know if that was better or worse.”

“During the persecutions under the Emperor Domitian, John was summoned to Rome, where he was tortured by immersion in a pot of boiling oil and subsequently banished to the island of Patmos in the Aegean sea. It was there he wrote his Apocalypse. It was only after the death of Domitian, in A.D. 96, that he returned to Ephesus, where he was still living during the reign of the Emperor Trajan (A.D. 98-117). He became so old and frail that he could no longer walk and had to be carried to meetings and services. All he could manage to say was, "My little children, love one another." He repeated this over and over.”

“Ultimately, when he held your treasonous letter in his hand and saw how you had lied to him, the choice between me and you was the choice between someone who loves him and someone who didn't.”

“A dagger wants flesh, her father would say. Find it.”

“She had dreams that shamed her in the morning, dreams where Ronan gave her a white powdered cake, yet spoke in Arin's voice. I made this for you, he said. Do you like it?The powder was so fine that she inhaled its sweetness, but always woke before she could taste.”

“The guard hit Kestrel across the face. “I said, what did you give him?”You had a warrior’s heart, even then.Kestrel spat blood. “Nothing,” she told the guard. She thought of her father, she thought of Arin. She told her final lie. “I gave him nothing.”