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Title: A Gathering of Shadows
Authors: V.E. Schwab
Category:supplementals
Number of Highlights: 20
Date: 2026-05-06
Last Highlighted: **
Summary
Document Note
Highlights
“Strength and weakness are tangled things,” the Aven Essen had said. “They look so much alike, we often confuse them, the way we confuse magic and power.”
Tags:magic,power,strength,weakness
“Politics is a dance until the moment it becomes a war. And we control the music.”
“Everyone thinks I have a death wish, you know? But I don’t want to die—dying is easy. No, I want to live, but getting close to death is the only way to feel alive. And once you do, it makes you realize that everything you were doing before wasn’t actually living. It was just making do. Call me crazy, but I think we do the best living when the stakes are high.”
Tags:death,life,perspective
People survived by being cautious, but they got ahead by being bold.
Tags:caution
Kell would say it was impossible. What a useless word, in a world with magic.
Tags:magic
“My point,” continued Rhy, “is that for every ten who worship you, one wants to see you burn. Those are simply the odds when it comes to people like us.”
“The trouble is,” Alucard was saying, “that metal heats much faster than it cools, so the punishment doesn’t end when they take away the rod.”
A fractured self is a poor vessel for power, spilling power without focus or mea-sure from every crack.
Tags:magic
“We all believe the same thing really, we simply give it different names. Hardly a crime.”
He could feel it, whatever it was, hovering in the air around him, waiting until the sun went down and the world got quiet. Quiet enough to think. Thoughts, those were the waiting things, and once they started up, he couldn’t seem to silence them.
Tags:anxiety,depression
A land map was an ordinary thing, but a sea map was a special thing, showing not only the open sea but its secrets, its hidden islands and towns, the places to avoid and the places to go, and who to find once you got there.
Kell raised a brow, his hand slipping from the tomb’s lid. “Your Majesty, you worship a thing you can neither see nor touch, whereas I worship something I engage with every moment of every day. Which is the more logical path?”
Delilah Bard had a way of finding trouble. She’d always thought it was better than letting trouble find her, but floating in the ocean in a two-person skiff with no oars, no view of land, and no real resources save the ropes binding her wrists, she was beginning to reconsider.
Thus Sasenroche was a well-guarded secret on land, and a legend at sea. Marked on the right maps (and known by the right sailors) as simply the Corner, Sasenroche was the only place where the three empires physically touched.
“Look, everyone talks about the unknown like it’s some big scary thing, but it’s the familiar that’s always bothered me. It’s heavy, builds up around you like rocks, until it’s walls and a ceiling and a cell.”
“I’ve seen people sin in the name of god, and in the name of magic. People misuse their higher powers, no matter what form they take.” “But no afterlife,” grumbled the king. “No eternal soul? It’s unnatural.”
Perhaps power had to be tended, like Tieren said, but not all things grew in gardens. Plenty of plants grew wild. And Lila had always thought of herself more as a weed than a rose bush.
But Tieren told him once it wasn’t so much about looking out as looking in, and Rhy wasn’t sure he wanted to spend any more time than necessary doing that.
Kell frowned. “I would rather be normal.” Now it was Rhy’s turn to wear the withering look. “Poor thing. I wonder what it feels like, to be put on a pedestal.” “The difference,” said Kell, “is that the people love you.” “For every ten who love me,” said Rhy, gesturing at the sprawling room, “one would like to see me dead.”
“You are far too familiar with your prince,” he warned. “So you confess it, then?” His brushed his lips against Rhy’s throat. “That you are mine.”