The Everlasting

“If there’s something lost, there’s something to restore. If there’s sacrifice, there’s something worth sacrificing for. There are only two kinds of stories worth telling: the ones that send children to sleep, and the ones that send men to war. I needed the second kind…A nation is not a boundary on a map or a flag on a pole…a nation is a story we tell about ourselves, and stories change, if you let them. Because where there is power, someone will oppose it…It’s not freedom, if it can be taken away.” “History is the mirror that remembers us unto ourselves and and the pen that we might write our own ending…History is mostly happenstance. Accidents piled on top of mistakes, a series of dice rolled in dim rooms by careless hands. It is not a lesson, until we learn it. It is not a story, until we tell it. And every story serves someone.” “The story of Dominion had many villains over the years, shifting along with the borders of her empire, and many storytellers. But it only ever had one hero, and her name was Una Everlasting. Una the dragon-slayer, Una the queen-maker, Una the tragedy. Una, who died and was resurrected a hundred times, until she fought as no mortal could fight, with the memory of every battle burned into her very bones.” She was “a knight with no master and a mother with no children; a manly woman and a womanly man; a hero whose name would be sung for a thousand years, and an orphan whose name had already been forgotten.” She was Sir Una, who Owen Mallory had loved long before her birth and long after her death, in the past and the future, and here, now. Always. He was “the lonely, scrape-kneed boy who had found [her] in the green shadows between centuries…the scholar who had written nothing but lies and the soldier who had fled the field of battle; the bravest coward and the cleverest madman and the traitor with the truest heart;” the man who led her to her death and the man who had died for her. He was the bastard who had left her here alone, all these years, and he was her best beloved, who always, always came back to her. “This is a book about love: defiant love, endurant love, love born in a bad world and determined to build a better one.” Alix E. Harrow’s The Everlasting is a triumph.