Watch Me Run - Part 21
Masterlist - Series Masterpage - Part 22 (epilogue)
Summary: You inherit a family relic that gives you the gift of foresight but there are others who are interested for more nefarious reasons. You turn to the Avengers for help. (Bucky x reader)
Chapter: The rest of the Avengers arrive, and you - reeling from the confrontation with Loki - try to decide what future you want.
Word Count: 4386
When a shimmering orange ring grew between the trees, you did not stir, though Bucky raised a weapon. You didn’t share in his surprise when Dr. Strange and the others walked through the portal and into the horror you’d made of the forest.
“What happened here?” he asked.
You didn’t answer, only stared at the bloodied ground and the stone, cold and dark on your chest. Bucky spoke with only a glare. He’d been consoling you for a while now, sweeping an endless river of tears from your skin, rubbing your arms to keep them warm, murmuring comforts like, “I’m here. It’s over now,” and, “It was your life or his, you did the right thing.” But it didn’t feel right.
It felt wrong, and corrupt with power, and not like you at all. You’d been given your first challenge, your first trolley problem, and you’d chosen to trade a life for a life. You’d wanted to be a wise stone-keeper, a selfless seer who led with a compassionate heart, who saved, not took. Now, holding two stones and hands tacky with drying blood, you wondered how you’d lost yourself so thoroughly.
“You’re injured,” Natasha observed quietly, withdrawing her fingers from the place where Loki’s pulse should have been.
“This was a mistake,” you muttered while Tony knelt beside you in an Iron Man suit you’d never seen before: leaner, more like an integrated exo-skeleton than armor.
“I’m sorry we didn’t get here sooner. You shouldn’t have had to do this alone,” his gaze shifted momentarily to Bucky. An array of light flashed over your skin from Tony’s suit, nano-molecular technology began reprinting your flesh, knitting it back together. Dr. Strange stepped closer, to see the nanotech in action as Tony moved on to Bucky’s wounded shoulder.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.” Your eyes remained locked on Bucky, pleading with him to understand, to forgive you, absolve you. “I don’t know what else to do.” He hushed you, comforted you with a gentle hand over your trembling fingers.
“You're pretty banged up,” Strange observed, lifting your elbow to examine another scrape. This one was dark and scabbed, new puckered skin blossomed at the edges. His scrutiny landed on a bruise kissing the curve of your jaw. It was a sickly shade of blue-green and fading to yellow at the rim. His eyes met yours and held your gaze, demanding answers to questions he’d not yet asked.
“It can’t end like this,” you whispered, voice tight in your throat and wet with grief. Slowly your eyes lifted to meet this stranger. “I didn’t want to kill him. I don’t want anyone to get hurt. I just… I’m out of choices.”
“How long have you been doing this?” His voice was soft, but his face still held the sternness of judgement, of unimpeachable intelligence. It made you laugh to know what he couldn’t.
“Wrong question, Doctor,” you chuckled, dry and pained.
“What the hell does that mean?” Steve asked, mistrusting your demeanor and eyeing the scepter and its blue stone that he knew could bend minds and crush will.
“Just let her rest,” Bucky growled, helping you to your feet.
“I don’t think so, Buck,” Steve answered slowly, “Not yet.”
Dr. Strange’s scouring gaze turned to a frown. He didn’t like riddles. “so what’s the right question?”
“Time isn’t linear for a stone-keeper,” you explained, stepping forward out of Bucky’s protection. “How do you measure time when you can leap across it? When you spend as much time moving backward as forward? What you really want to know is…” you paused with a raised eyebrow, waiting for his answer.
“How many times,” Steve and Dr. Strange finished together. Steve’s entire body rolled at the realization. The gravity and loss contained in this knowledge. The failure. Strange only stared, somewhat awed and angry that he’d so underestimated you.
“To be honest I’ve lost count of how many times I have relived this moment.”
Bucky was stunned. His jaw, usually so resolute, hung slack. He looked you over with fresh eyes. The healing scrape on your elbow – days old. The mud on your boots caked thick like you’d been in the woods for hours. Your eyes looked tired. No, not tired, drained, exhausted, worn. Even your hair was longer than it should have been, tangled and heavy. The shape of your arms was harder and stronger from fighting the same fight over. Your legs were leaner from running again and again and again. All the gentleness he so loved seemed to have been leeched from your body.
You watched a film reel of emotion dance over Bucky’s face. First horror that he hadn’t seen it before. Then anger for the danger he had failed to protect you from. Then a deep sadness for the tenderness, the playfulness you’d lost – he’d lost. In a breath, he understood why you wouldn’t be consoled. It wasn’t only grief for Loki, it was grief for the person you’d lost. If you could go this far, were you still the same?
“What have you done?” the words slipped out in a heart-broken whisper before he could catch them. They broke across your skin like the sting of sleet and you turned to him with eyes wide, brimming, and desperate.
“I did what I had to!” you cried, grabbing both his hands in yours, clinging to him, begging him to understand, to see you through the carnage. “Don’t you see? It’s my turn now. I have to protect us, to save you. And I will re-write history until the end of time; until there’s nothing left of it to write, if I have to.”
“But you can’t, can you,” Strange’s voice seemed so far away. Yet in one sentence it crushed the dream you had been building. “You can’t save them all.”
“Yes I can,” your gaze never left Bucky’s, your eyes pleading through the hurricane at the gates. “I can. And I will. I w—I would call in every last one of you Avengers. I would demand an army, armies you can’t even dream of. I would rain hell. I’d try anything before I walked away from you.”
Bucky let out a short huff of breath, heavy and fraught. He was stunned by the fire you carried. In seconds he’d watched you turn into a falling star, burning across the sky, growing with anger and desperation until you were consumed.
He shook his head slowly, minutely while he grazed the weeks-old bruise on your chin. He wondered how many battles you’d fought now, how many hits you’d taken. He’d been meant to protect you. He wondered too, when that had changed.
“None of it will help. You’ve created a time loop. The rest of us are frozen until you break it,” Strange explained. “This isn’t your happy ending; it’s a moment between breaths.” You never broke eye contact with Bucky, begging him to understand, to fight with and for you. “You can’t outrun the future forever.”
Your eyes turned to molten steel just before your gaze snapped to him. Your voice was a blade dipped in poison. “You watch me! You watch me run. I am the stone keeper! I will run to the end of this universe and back if I have to. I will run until time gives up and crumbles into ash before I let him die! I will fight until the very last star burns out like a cinder under my heel.”
Bucky struggled to breathe. Watching you was like succumbing to a wildfire. All consuming and raging with grief, you directed all of that heat at Dr. Strange until you felt the cool glide of metal slip into your hand. Cold fingers eased between your own, pulling you back from the dark sky you burned against.
“Enough,” he breathed, just loud enough for you and you only. He stood quiet but certain as you turned back to him. “Enough.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You’ve given enough. You’ve done enough.” He traced a line down your cheek with the backs of his knuckles, gentler than a kiss, softer than a breath, even as you shattered under the new meaning he gave to your own words. “You have to stop this.”
You never even noticed the tears, as they streaked your skin. The tightness in your throat was a nuisance. But the crushing weight on your chest was unbearable, like being cleaved in two.
“I can’t,” you managed, sobbing as you spoke. “He would have your life but I can’t let you go. Haven’t they had enough from us?? I won’t let them take you.”
“I’m already gone,” he soothed, drawing you close until your forehead pressed to his, until you could see no one else, hear no one else. Only you and him. “This… time loop, buying me time… it’s only hurting you. And I can’t have that.”
A breath of a chuckle escaped through your tears.
“It’s making you something you’re not,” he continued. “You’re not a warrior. You’re a Seer. Warm as the sun; you see a cold hurt world and you can’t leave anyone to suffer in it. But this, what you’re doing, it isn’t compassion.”
“I know.”
“You’re holding the universe hostage for one life. And an old one. My number’s come up a few times already.”
You rolled your eyes. “I’m trying to save you.”
He chuckled and shook his head and yours, with foreheads still together. “That’s my job – the saving.” He swept a fresh tear from your cheek with the pad of his thumb. “Yours is to be you, no matter what. You’ll choose the right thing. You were made for more than this... this fight.”
You nodded, met his sure gaze and swallowed hard. “I don’t think I’m a very good stone-keeper.”
He pulled back and shook his head with a gentle curl to his lips. “You’re just scared.”
“No,” you disagreed. “I’ve been scared before. This is something else. I think my grandfather saw you, saw this coming. He told me you’d protect me and all this time I thought it was an instruction, but I was wrong. It was a warning.”
Bucky listened, and watched, his hand slipping over your skin, up your shoulder, cupping the back of your neck and stroking your hair. Holding on for as long as he could.
“In a single night he let me lose everything I ever loved, and in the same night he told me about you. I think he was warning me that it wasn’t over. That I’d love and lose more than I’d ever known.” You took a shaky breath and spoke with a tremble, “I was never meant to carry this stone for long, I can see that now. I’ve lost so much; I won’t lose any more. I’m a selfish stone-keeper, Bucky. I would let this entire planet crumble to dust before I let anything to happen to you. I have to find a way to end this.”
“So, what comes next?” he whispered, a life between breaths.
“I don’t know. I can’t see that far, but we’re in this together now, okay? We can choose for ourselves. We can choose to end this legacy of blood. As long as I carry this stone, I’m in danger, and the world is in danger of me,” you smiled ruefully. You’d proven your strength and the lengths you’d go. You’d seen Loki’s vision, seen half the universe eliminated and still chose this. Truly, you were a danger. “As long as I carry this stone, I will run to this fight. And as long as you are beholden to answer when they call, you will too. Neither of us asked for this but now it’s up to us.”
He took a deep breath. Your eyes were resolute, honest, while he looked like he might startle at a sneeze. He’d been ready to sacrifice, but not like this.
“I saw a future for us once, in a dream. I don’t know if we can still have that but I want it so badly.” You spoke with urgency and conviction, but he still looked so startled and conflicted. He’d been a soldier for the better half of a century and you stood with the power of time asking him, for once, not to be a hero.
“Bucky, I want to be where you are,” you pressed on. “I want to wake up slow in a place where we don’t have to worry about who’s behind us or what fight is ahead. I want to make garbage eggs with you, with real hot sauce not something we scavenged because we’re too afraid to open the front door. I want to take a walk with you where you’re not looking over your shoulder. I want to see you as happy and as unworried as I dreamed. We can have that. We can!” You shook his hands firmly. “We can make that choice. I’m choosing us, Bucky. I think… I think I finally see what that means. But you have to choose for yourself if you need to keep up this fight.”
His hand gently curled over yours, not holding on, not demanding, not promising, only pressing you closer for this moment you had. For a moment between breaths, he had everything. Even if the next breath ended it all.
Too quickly, your fingers slipped out of his, and you stood before Dr. Strange, talking in surreptitious murmurs. Furtive glances down at the stone hanging about your neck had the breath catching in his throat.
This had been his mission. You were his mission. You were more, and he hated this new plan and his role in it, but his protests had been dismissed. If it were up to him, absolutely nothing would entice him to put you in such danger. He knew now that you were powerful, more than him realistically, but still. It angered and saddened him to think you’d already been making yourself so vulnerable on your own. Over and over and over.
At least now, he supposed, he had some control. It was his only solace as he notched the long-range rifle into the v he’d cut into a pine bough twenty feet high. He could still smell the sharp scent of pine sap on his gloves from the work of it.
It would require every ounce of self-control to follow through. The weapon was only a rip-cord. It had been a mercy, really, to allow him a scope with which to watch over you. He could not – under any circumstances – give away his position or it would all be over and they’d be right be right back where they were with you frantically trying to undo time, re-stitch his wounds, and rewrite the future. Loki couldn’t know his position.
Plan A: he only watched and waited, hating every second. Plan B: he made a kill shot and they tried again.
With endlessly rehearsed steps you moved toward the cabin’s malfunctioning generator. You climbed over the downed tree, just as before, just as always. You recited the same words like a spell to conjure the trickster god. Calling to Bucky who, just this once, would make no answer. The black dagger flew by your head as you feigned tripping. Your boots were tied tight this time. You were prepared.
“Loki,” you breathed, drawing him forth from the shadows like a sleeping memory hidden in the deep.
“Stone-keeper. I’d hoped to keep this between the two of us,” he looked irritated, but you didn’t startle, not this time.
“So do I,” you snarled and clutched the amulet in a tight fist close to your body.
A wicked smile dragged over his features. It curled his lips, lit his eyes, and drew his shoulders forward. He looked more like a prowling cat than a man as he matched each step you took away from him. When finally, you turned at a full sprint into the cold damp woods, he stood for a moment, surprised, before a laugh bubbled up his throat.
Wet musty earth erupted beside you, spraying dark rain over your head as you ducked beneath the shelter of an ancient pine. Chest heaving, lungs burning, you hazarded a look over your shoulder. While you ran, he strolled, letting the scepter do the heavy lifting. Another streak of blue electrified fire ripped through the trees sending splinters and cosmic energy out in ripples.
His laughter began to echo as you skidded to a stop. The fear momentarily outpaced reason as your boots crunched onto the first few steps of frozen lake. The memory of your dream clawed at your brain like hoarfrost but you pressed on.
The water had begun to seep up over the ice in gurgles and your feet were wet and cold. Each step made a crude sloshing noise that matched the untethered rushing of blood in your ears. Fifty feet out, you slid onto your knees when the hard crystals beneath you began to creak and moan.
“You’re rather a difficult person to pin down,” Loki called out over the lake, voice calm and clear as a bell as he stepped onto the ice.
You didn’t speak. Fear and anger beat too strong for words. The ice shifted beneath you like a heaving boat as he moved closer with heavy, unrelenting strides.
“You’re right. Enough small talk. We’ve waited for this moment long enough, you and I,” the grin remained.
“You,” your voice came out an acrid hiss, “have destroyed everything I have ever loved.”
His tongue clicked against his teeth before an exaggerated frown curdled his features in mockery of you. “Well, that’s not quite true, is it? Not yet anyway.” He glanced purposefully up the hill in the direction you knew Bucky waited patiently with a rifle trained expertly on this spot, where you promised to be.
From his perch in the tall pine, Bucky’s jaw clenched. He could hear nothing, but he caught a flash of grinning white teeth as Loki looked up the hill. Too close to be coincidence. He considered firing; he’d always liked Plan B better anyway.
There was nothing more in this world that Bucky wanted than to gently squeeze the trigger. He was physically itching to do it, to pluck this murderous thorn from his side. But instead, he waited, because that’s what Strange told him he must do to keep you safe.
“Now, give me the stone and I won’t be forced to take any more from you.”
“It won’t help,” you almost laughed your answer back at Loki. “I know what you’re so afraid of, and it won’t be enough.”
“You know nothing,” Loki snapped, accustomed to being the smartest in the room. “You simple Midgardians have no idea what lies past your own noses. You least of all, cowering in the woods with the power to unwind time. You could remake the universe to your liking but you tremble at your own gift.”
“It won’t stop Thanos.”
For the first time, Loki stopped his slow progression forward. He eyed you carefully. “Did the sorcerer tell you this?”
You laughed, sharp and bitter. “Now it’s you who cannot see. This is not the first time we’ve met, Asgardian. I have been on this very spot, with you, more times than I can count.”
“Then the odds must be in my favor.” He stepped forward again. A wicked smirk made him seem bolder, wilder, more dangerous.
“No. You see, I’ve had the luxury of time. Of learning. I’ve seen you murder me and everyone I love,” your eyes instinctively glanced up the hill toward Bucky. “Over and over and over. And while those realities might not exist anymore, they were real. I haven’t forgotten and I know you.”
“And you expect me to grovel now, stone-keeper? You think you’ve out-witted me and you want me to what? To beg your forgiveness and weep? Tell you that I didn’t mean to do any of it?” Loki slid forward, gilded boots scraping against the ever-thinning surface of the lake. Suddenly the silver scepter smashed hard against the ice. Cold water bubbled up like a spring. “There is nothing I wouldn’t do to prevent Thanos from taking that stone. And if I must, I will slaughter you like I did your grandfather. You too will die in this barren, frozen waste. Completely alone.”
“No, I won’t. But I have seen you die,” you hazarded a step toward him, rage and hate building beneath your skin, deep in your muscles, down to the bone. “You will claw and gasp for even your very last breath in the emptiness of space. It won’t be my hand around your throat, but it will be the reality I chose for you. Remember that, Loki Odinson.”
His grin widened as heavy strides closed in on your resolute form. “You will decide nothing. I know true power when I see it, and you have none.”
When a splinter in the ice creaked to a waiting cavern between your muddy boots and his golden ones, you froze. He, however, lunged forward with incredible speed, as if there were lightning in his veins instead of ice. A tight fist closed over your wrist and he tore the talisman from your neck.
The chain bit into your skin and burned as it snapped. This was nothing to the fire in his Loki's clear blue eyes as he held the hurriedly welded replica in a trembling palm. This pain was nothing to the pressure he now applied to your wrist, overcome with frustration. Finally his fist closed over the painted stone and the entire trinket crumbled to pieces.
Your smirk faded when he slammed the palm of his hand against your forehead.
You gasped as a memory formed, unbidden, at least by you. The golden shimmering vision unfolded clear as the moment it happened, the moment you lifted the talisman off your neck for the first time since you’d opened the package from your grandfather on that fateful day so long ago. Loki shared in your memory now, watching intently as you passed the Eye of Agamotto, the time stone, into the hands of Stephen Strange.
“You fool.” A bitter laugh pushed through Loki’s sharp nose. “You are an ancient stone-keeper, it was your inheritance and legacy, and you passed such a treasure to a second-rate sorcerer! To a conjurer of-of-of cheap tricks and…” he finally lifted scowling eyes when he heard a sharp crack at his feet.
Bucky’s rifle had carved a blistering hole in the freshly formed ice between you and Loki. The second crack was deeper, solid and echoing. This time it was the lake itself. The chasm between you erupted, spilling water over the surface and soaking your feet.
It was just like your dream, and your feet moved, unbidden, pedaling backward. But Loki followed at the unrelenting pace of a predator.
“Do you think I fear the cold?!” he shouted to you and Bucky and anyone else who might hear. “You ignorant child. I am born of it.” He knelt down, forest green cloak pooling at his feet and pressed one bare palm to the ice. While your face morphed into cold shock, his grin widened as the cold seeped into his skin, turning it a pale, unearthly shade of blue. As he rose again, the color spread higher like ink in water until he was covered in it. “But you were born with tender, warm-blooded Midgardian flesh. Such paltry armor.”
With a single downward thrust he smashed the scepter into the ice with all his might, sending a burst of blue over the surface. The chasm between you yawned wide to swallow you both. Water, glacial cold, crawled up your calves as the ice heaved beneath your feet and you slid towards the opening.
You swallowed the fear, and glanced toward the shore, to where Bucky now stood, shouting. This was not fear, though. You knew fear. Knew it when a dark shadowy dagger had ripped the life from Bucky before your eyes.
No, this was not fear, this was consequence. Finally. The tears sprang forth with a laugh as hope bloomed in your chest. Hope for life, even if not your own. Hope for a future, for a man you saved over and over. Hope that these Avengers whose protection you once sought, would return the salvation you now gave to one of their own.
It came in a rush of golden, glimmering light. A bright orange glow spinning below the delicate wet ice at Loki’s feet. Within the ring, deep grey clouds rolled with lightning. It thundered angry and sharp as the ice burst open with a groan.
Loki fell into the thundering portal, to his brother, to Asgard and imprisonment. You, however, a few feet away, fell into a world so cold your lungs seized, your throat closed, and your eyes bulged. You couldn’t have taken a breath if you’d wanted to. The water slipped higher and higher until you were submerged, skin somehow simultaneously prickling with cold, and numb with it.
The broken ice shifted overhead until you couldn’t see the surface. Your fists slammed against the ice, begging for an opening that didn’t exist. As your lungs heaved, you realized the deal you’d made…
“You should keep it,” you’d admitted then. “But only if he lives.”
Dr. Strange had agreed, had vanished to find a prison worthy of a god from space. And your life? You’d wielded the power of an infinity stone for uncounted days. It hadn’t even occurred to you that you’d need to guarantee your own safety.
It was merciful then that the cold would cloud your brain before the oxygen starved your lungs and your limbs. Just as you allowed the darkness to close over you, to calm you, a silver fist crashed through the ice and plunged into the water, impervious to the cold.
Light streamed down around the glimmering metal plates as he reached for you. Too cold and hypoxic to grasp his outstretched hand, you drifted, watching with clouded eyes and heavy limbs. He closed a tight fist around the cloth at your throat and hoisted you, blinking, clinging in gasping breaths to consciousness.
Part 22 (epilogue) >>
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I Can Do Book Review
I review books. I am a responsible adult who knows how deadlines work. Yeah. This is true. I do not get distracted by unrelated book binges, head colds, work, lunch, or my cats. I definitely read all the ARCs publishers let me look at and then review them before they’re published.
Yup. I definitely do that. I mean, I’m not lazy or easily distracted. Definitely not. I mean, I can read more than one book at a time! I can multitask.
Uh...
I mean.
City of Broken Magic by Mirah Bolender!
So I told myself I’d be done with City of Broken Magic before it came out, have a clever review written beforehand, post it to tumblr and momentarily feel like I have some vague purpose in life other than getting up stupidly early to spend half my day in traffic and the other half doing work that has nothing to do with my Master’s degree.
You’d be surprised how often I tell myself this.
But I’m a slow reader. I’m easily distracted. I’m working on roughly 12 different projects at once. I was going to do NaNoWriMo! Yeah I gave that up on November 1. I’m roughly...38,041 words behind on my NaNo goal.
But you know there’s stuff to do like shopping and sitting and staring at the TV and looking at other books I want to read and attempting to crochet while left-handed and paying attention to the cat then paying attention to the dog when he gets jealous of the cat...
Also, Thanksgiving.
Also, out of nowhere I woke up with a terrible head cold. So basically
Wait, where was I?
Oh yeah, City of Broken Magic.
So the city of Amicae is built with a Minas Tirith-like tier system and exists in a world that seems an awful lot like Studio Ghibli’s Howl’s Moving Castle, complete with blob-slime-monsters called “infestations” that happen if you don’t keep your amulet plugged in or...something. I’m not 100% certain how the whole magic-infestation-system works here, but, to be fair, neither do any of the characters, so there’s that.
Anyway, it’s hard to pinpoint the time period Amicae is supposed to be reminiscent of - the city has trolleys, phones, radios, but is also very down with enforcing traditional gender roles for men and women. Also, there’s the foxtrot, a dance that came about in the 1910s, so...anyway I just started imagining Amicae as being if Studio Ghibli made Howl’s Moving Castle but with Minas Tirith.
If it sounds like I’m repeating myself, it’s because my brain is full of snot.
Anyway. So, our heroine, Laura Kramer, is a “sweeper” in Amicae: a person who deals with infestations of these magical blob Studio Ghibli monsters.
Laura is one of only two sweepers in the whole of Amicae - it’s just her, and her prickliest of the prickly pears, Clae Sinclair. Clae (pronounced Cly, and not Clay like I assumed for the first 20 or so pages) was once part of a whole family of sweepers - only, being a sweeper is a dangerous job, most of Clae’s apprentices have been killed on the job, and the higher-ups of Amicae are so desperate to avoid acknowledging the magic-blob-monster infestations that they’ve provided the sweeper department with almost no support. As a result, the sweepers have dwindled to literally just Clae and Laura. While dealing with a magical infestation at the mansion of a rich douchebag, Clae liberates one of the household servants, Okane, who, as it turns out, is a magi - no, he didn’t sell his watch to get a comb for his wife and his wife didn’t sell her hair to get him a watch chain, coordinate your Christmas gift-giving, people - a magi is someone who has more magic to them than normal people. Magi have, of course, been treated like shit throughout history, so most of them hide who they are, and sometimes rich douchebags will keep them in their houses as slaves, because they’re rich douchebags.
Anyway, Okane has the ability to sense infestations, but so far as sweeper training goes, he’s really, really bad at it.
So while Amicae is hell-bent on avoiding the infestation problem, Clae has been fighting to get more recognition for his department, Laura is stuck between societal expectations from her as a woman vs what Clae says is a natural talent for sweeping, and Okane is slowly but surely overcoming a lifetime of enslavement and abuse to become a somewhat adequate sweeper.
But while all this is going down, there’s a massive infestation taking root in Amicae. Like, supermassive. Like, No-Face from Spirited Away after he ate all that food levels of massive.
So massive that it could destroy the whole city and kill everyone in it.
And the only people left to deal with it are Clae, Laura and Okane.
I struggled with City of Broken Magic - I really liked the characters, especially prickly-pear Clae, but the worldbuilding seemed a bit shaky - as City is first in an intended series, we may have more to learn about the world around it, but much of this first book felt like the world was being built as the story was written. I could get over that, though, because I wanted to know more about Laura, Okane and Clae. To add more to the Ghibli-esque feel of the story, there are a lot of Japanese-inspired terms for the monsters. Okane’s name is mentioned, in-story, to mean “money” - which is does in Japanese (お金 , it’s considered the more polite form for “money” - for someone who spent four years learning Japanese, I’ve retained...uh...practically none of it).
So, to make a long story short: I really liked the characters. I want to know what happens to them. I can ignore some of the glitches in worldbuilding because I actually do want to know what will happen next to the Amicae Sweepers.
Me, right now:
RECOMMENDED FOR: Anyone who thinks characters > worldbuilding
NOT RECOMMENDED FOR: Anyone who thinks worldbuilding > characters, anyone who developed a terrible head cold the day after this book came out.
RATING: 3.75/5
GHIBLI RATING:
RELEASE DATE: November 20, 2018, so...Tuesday. I’m only a few days late!
ANTICIPATION LEVEL FOR SEQUEL: Lhotse
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