(
anothertroy Jun. 8th, 2012 08:55 am)
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[Tim&, Xan&]
in case you guys both wanted this, idk. this is my devotional tribute to a book that changed my life by way of basically being about my life, as these things tend to do, & I am proud of it & I love all the songs, but fanmixes are so personal, so it's totally fine with me if you hate it all, I promise<3 it is broadly speaking in chronological order; the last song doesn't get a quote from the book because I'd have to quote the whole book. I hope you get it, even if you don't like it? idk :x

we are savages, you and I
I Quentin
Savages - The Indelicates
Like most people Quentin read the Fillory books in grade school. Unlike most people - unlike James and Julia - he never got over them. They were where he went when he couldn't deal with the real world, which was often. ... In Fillory things mattered in a way they didn't in this world. In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place. ... But this wasn't a Fillory novel.
II Brakebills
The Bad Beginning - Thomas Newman
In the middle distance beyond the wide lawn a large house stood, all honey-colored stone and gray slate, adorned with chimneys and gables and towers and roofs and sub-roofs. ... Quentin's mind spun. Maybe he should ask to see a brochure. And no one had said anything about tuition yet. And gift horses and all that notwithstanding, how much did he know about this place? ... And then a vast stony weight suddenly lifted off Quentin's chest. It felt like it had been there his entire life, an invisible albatross, a granite millstone holding him down, and all at once it just dropped away and disappeared without a splash. His chest expanded. He was going to bob up to the ceiling like a balloon. They were going to make him a magician, and all he had to do was sign.
III Alice
White Rabbit - Emiliana Torrini
She showed no surprise at being picked; she looked like the kind of person who expected the worst at all times, and why should today be any different? ... Such a tender soul, he thought. But she's the one I'll have to beat. ... But Alice always knew how you screwed up. Of the three of them she was the prodigy.
IV Penny
Ulysses (Franz Ferdinand cover) - Vitamin String Quartet
He had no sense of humor at all. He practiced by himself, murmuring and watching his pale hands sign and flutter in a massive baroque gilt-framed mirror leaned up against the wall. ... Penny just stared at the green, overcast landscape in the mirror, waiting for his pale, stoic face to reappear so he could keep practicing. He didn't look up as they left.
V The Physical Kids
Travel In Time - Marching Band
Six months later, in September, Quentin and Alice spent the first day of their Third Year at Brakebills sitting outside a small square Victorian outbuilding about a half mile from the House. It was a piece of pure folly architecture, a miniature house ... If they were going to be Physical Kids, apparently they would have to prove it by getting in the front door. ... "So you have this whole place to yourself?" Quentin didn't want to let on how much he wanted to belong here, even now that he did, officially, belong here. "Pretty much. So do you, now."
VI Eliot
Sparkle - My Life Story
Quentin hadn't realized how hard-won Eliot's air of ludicrously exaggerated insouciance must be. That facade of lofty indifference must be there to hide real problems. Quentin liked to think of himself as a sort of regional champion of unhappiness, but he wondered if Eliot had him outclassed on that score, too. ..."Never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink," he said. "Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn't drink."
VII Josh
The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades - Timbuk 3
Josh always wore the standard school uniform but managed to make it look like he didn't - his jacket never quite fit his wide, round build, it was always twisted or rumpled or too narrow in the shoulders. His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling. It took Quentin a while to figure out that Josh expected people not to take him seriously, and he enjoyed - not always kindly - the moment when they realized, too late, that they'd underestimated him. ... Josh had successfully defended the square - he'd abolished Eliot's will-o'-the-wisp - but he'd gone too far. Somehow he'd created its inverse, a black hole: he'd punched a drain hole in the afternoon, and the daylight was swirling into it.
VIII Janet
Europe - The Indelicates
Pretty rather than beautiful, she had a flat, flapperish figure, but she used what she had to maximum advantage - she sent her uniforms back home to be tailored - and there was something vibrantly sexy about her ravenous, too-wide gaze. You wanted to meet it and be devoured by it. Janet was about as annoying as a person could be and still be your friend, but Quentin was never bored around her. She was passionately loyal, and if she was obnoxious it was only because she was so deeply tender-hearted. It made her easily wounded, and when she was wounded she lashed out. She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.
IX Flying to Antarctica
Carnival of the Animals : Aquarium - Saint-Saens (London Sinfonietta conducted by Charles Dutoit)
Days, weeks, maybe months and years passed. Who knew, or cared? Quentin had never experienced peace and satisfaction like this. ... And he served whatever force sent him gliding along the invisible magnetic rails, always southward, down the rough, stony coast of Peru, spiny Andes on his port, the sprawling blue Pacific on his starboard. He had never been happier.
X Quentin & Alice
Better Than Love (live) - Hurts
He locked his teeth in the thick fur of her neck. It didn't seem to hurt her any, or at least not in a way that was easily distinguishable from pleasure. Something crazy and urgent was going on, and there was no way to stop it, or probably there was but why would you? ... "I have to ask you something," she said, her voice full of crisp determination. "Are you in love with me? It's okay if you aren't, I just want to know." She made it almost all the way through, but she couldn't quite say the last phrase full voice and whispered it instead. ... "I don't know," he said. His voice was scratchy from lack of use. The words felt more frightening than any spell he had ever cast. ... "It's okay," she said, with a quick little smile that strained the ligaments that held Quentin's heart in his chest. "I didn't think so. I was more wondering whether you would lie about it."
XI Alice & Quentin
Recognition - Susie Suh
"You have to promise me we'll never be like them, Quentin." Their noses were almost touching. Her weight on top of him was arousing, but her face was angry and serious. "I know you think it's going to be all quests and dragons and fighting evil and whatever, like in Fillory. I know that's what you think. But it's not. You don't see it yet. There's nothing out there. So you have to promise me, Quentin. Let's never get like this, with these stupid hobbies nobody cares about. Just doing pointless things all day and hating each other and waiting to die."
XII New York
Little Faith - The National
New York's magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious. And you could get drugs here - actual drugs! They had all the power int he world, and no work to do, and nobody to stop them. They ran riot through the city. ... In Manhattan, with no professors watching over them, and no classes to be sober for, Eliot was rarely without a glass of something in his hand from one in the afternoon on. Usually it was something relatively innocuous, white wine or Campari or a big dilute tumbler of bourbon and soda clunking with ice. But still. ... They lavished a ridiculous amount of effort on these parties, all out of proportion to any actual fun they might get in return. ... Janet dressed the set: she formulated the night's dress code, chose the music, and hand-wrote and illustrated amazingly beautiful one-off menus. ... "No one gets punished for anything. We do whatever we want, and that's all we do, and nobody stops us, and nobody cares." ... and then, in the last act of the strip tease, it revealed itself to be what it truly was: a terrible, really awful, hurtful betrayal. At some point during this slow, incremental fall from grace Quentin became aware of Alice sitting at the foot of the bed, just her back, facing away from where he and Janet and Eliot lay, resting her chin in her hands. ... The dinner table was like a shipwreck. The kitchen looked like a crime scene. Their little planet was ruined, and there was nowhere left for him to stand.
XIII Penny discovers the Neitherlands
Go Film - Covenant
"Ladies and gentlemen," Penny said, gravely and grandly, "we are all going to Fillory." ... No one knows where this transitional world is. It may be an alternate plane of existence, or a place between planes, interleaved between them like a flower pressed between pages, or a master plane that contains all planes - the spine that gathers the pages and binds them together. To the naked eye it looks like a deserted city, an endless series of empty stone squares, but it serves as a kind of multidimensional switchboard. In the center of each square is a fountain. Step into one of them, so the story goes, and you'll be transported to another universe. ... It was absolutely silent: no wind, no birds, no insects. Broad paving stones stretched away in all directions, clean and bare as if they'd just been swept. On all four sides of the square stood a row of stone buildings. They gave off an impression of indescribable age - they weren't decrepit, but they'd been lived in. They looked vaguely Italianate; they could have been in Rome, or Venice. But they weren't.
XIV Alice in the Neitherlands
Lovely Head - Goldfrapp
Her fist caught him smack in his left eye. She hit like a girl, without any weight behind it, but he hadn't seen it coming to roll with it. The left half of the world flashed white. ... "I could kill you. Do you understand that?" Her face was terrible. There were two white-hot points on her flushed cheeks. "I could burn you to nothing right where you stand. I'm stronger than you. Nothing you could do would stop me." ... "Do I have to do absolutely everything for you? Or you know what it is? You hate yourself so much, you'll hurt anybody who loves you. That's it, isn't it? Just to get even with them for loving you. I never saw that before now." She stopped at this, shaking her head, lost in a dream of disbelief. Her own words had brought her up short. In the silence the fact that he had cheated on her, and with Janet of all people, hit her all over again, as fully as it had the first time, two hours ago. Quentin could see it: it was like she'd been shot in the stomach.
XV Quentin in the farmhouse
I Don't Care If It's True - The Indelicates
He picked up the lamp and threw it on the floor. It flashed and died. Quentin had never felt like this before. It was kind of amazing: his anger was making him superpowered. He could do anything. There was literally nothing he couldn't do. ... The pain was a falling feeling. It was a little like coming off the ecstasy, that long descent. He was like a cartoon character who falls off a building. Pow, he hits an awning, but he punches straight through it. Pow, he hits another one. And another one. Surely one of them will catch him and sproing him back up, or just fold up and embrace him like a canvas cradle, but it doesn't, it's just one flimsy busted awning after another. Down and down and down. ... He never did fall asleep. The idea came over him around dawn, and he waited as long as he could, but it was just too damn good to keep to himself. ... "People! Get up, get up, get up! It's time! Today's the day!"
XVI Fillory
Bard Dance - Enya
"Welp," Josh said finally, breaking the silence. "I guess that pretty much tears it. We're in Fillory." ... Every time a bird perched overhead for more than a few seconds Josh would say, "Okay, this is the one," or "I think it's trying to tell us something," or eventually, "Hey asshole, fly away from me, please. Okay, thanks." ... Ten minutes later Quentin was sitting in a booth in a dimly lit bar with a pint of beer on the table in front of him, as yet untasted. Though unexpected, this felt like a good development for him.
XVII Quest
Occupying Force - Unto Ashes
What it involved, Farvel explained, was a visit to a perilous ruin called Ember's Tomb. Somewhere within the tomb was a crown, a silver crown that had once been worn by the noble King Martin, centuries ago, when the Chatwins reigned. If they could recover the crown and bring it to Castle Whitespire, then they could occupy the thrones themselves - or four of them could anyway - and become kings and queens of Fillory and end the threat of the Watcherwoman forever. But it wouldn't be easy. ... She and Dint were both adventurers by profession. "There aren't many of us now," Fen said, her short sturdy legs somehow devouring distance faster than Quentin's long skinny ones. She never looked at him as she talked, her bulgy eyes continuously searching the horizon for potential threats. "Humans, I mean. Fillory is a wild place, and getting wilder."
XVIII This is not your war
Thousand Year Dream - Jocelyn Pook
"Jesus," Quentin heard himself say. "Jesus jesus jesus." He wasn't ready for this. This wasn't magic. This was the opposite of magic. The world was ripping open. ... Now the scene tilted and slid into nightmare. Four more Black Elves scrambled through the open door carrying an assortment of weapons, followed by two goat-legged men and two terrifying flying giant bumblebees the size of basketballs. Also present was something fleshy and headless that scrambled along on four legs, and a silent, wispy figure composed of white mist. ... Janet was hugging herself against the back wall, her face wet and shining with tears. Her eyes were blank. She was gone. ... Somewhere along the line Quentin left his knife in a furry Fillorian stomach. He never saw the creature's face - it was a creature, not a person, not a person - but later he would remember the sensation of jamming it in, how the blade punched through the tough rubbery muscles of the diaphragm and then slid easily into the underlying viscera, and how the muscles gripped the blade after it was in.
XIX The Beast
Prelude - Celtic Legend
It wasn't loud, exactly, but it made everything else quiet around it, so that it was instantly the only sound in the room, and everything resonated with its pure, simple strength. It was natural and perfect, a single note that sounded like a grand chord. It went on and on. ... "O child," came the ram's deep voice. "Don't you know what you have done?" ... "Mind you, the kind fo things you have to do to work that kind of magic - well, your humanity is the first thing to go. You don't stay a man once you've done the things I've done. Once you know the things I know. I hardly miss it now."
XX Niffin
O.P.M. - Diamanda Galas
"I'm on fire," she said, almost in her normal voice. "I didn't think - I'm burning." And then in a rising shriek that could have been agony or could have been ecstasy: "I'm burning! Oh, God! Oh, Quentin, I'm burning! It's burning me!" ... She stopped speaking, just moaned on an ever-higher, ever-louder note. Finally as the blue fire rose up her neck she threw back her head and opened her mouth wide, but no more sound came out.
XXI Aftermath
Regélök, míg élök - Irén Lovász
The shock of it snapped his chest flat. It emptied out his lungs the way the Beast's jaws had, not just once but over and over again. He was helpless against it. He lay in his bed and sobbed until he choked. His weak body spasmed. He made noises he'd never heard a human being make. ... She had died for him, for all of them, and she was never coming back. He couldn't think about what happened, he could only play it back again and again, as if there were a chance it could come out differently, or even just hurt a little less, but every time he played it back he wanted to die. ... Whenever he slept, he woke up trying to warn somebody of something, but he never knew what, or who, and it was always too late. ... The grief he felt for Alice kept unfolding new dimensions he hadn't known were there. He felt like he'd only seen and loved her, really loved, her, all of her, for those last few hours. Now she was gone, broken like the glass animal she'd made that first day they'd met.
XXII The Magicians
Creation - Emmy The Great
in case you guys both wanted this, idk. this is my devotional tribute to a book that changed my life by way of basically being about my life, as these things tend to do, & I am proud of it & I love all the songs, but fanmixes are so personal, so it's totally fine with me if you hate it all, I promise<3 it is broadly speaking in chronological order; the last song doesn't get a quote from the book because I'd have to quote the whole book. I hope you get it, even if you don't like it? idk :x

we are savages, you and I
I Quentin
Savages - The Indelicates
Like most people Quentin read the Fillory books in grade school. Unlike most people - unlike James and Julia - he never got over them. They were where he went when he couldn't deal with the real world, which was often. ... In Fillory things mattered in a way they didn't in this world. In Fillory you felt the appropriate emotions when things happened. Happiness was a real, actual, achievable possibility. It came when you called. Or no, it never left you in the first place. ... But this wasn't a Fillory novel.
II Brakebills
The Bad Beginning - Thomas Newman
In the middle distance beyond the wide lawn a large house stood, all honey-colored stone and gray slate, adorned with chimneys and gables and towers and roofs and sub-roofs. ... Quentin's mind spun. Maybe he should ask to see a brochure. And no one had said anything about tuition yet. And gift horses and all that notwithstanding, how much did he know about this place? ... And then a vast stony weight suddenly lifted off Quentin's chest. It felt like it had been there his entire life, an invisible albatross, a granite millstone holding him down, and all at once it just dropped away and disappeared without a splash. His chest expanded. He was going to bob up to the ceiling like a balloon. They were going to make him a magician, and all he had to do was sign.
III Alice
White Rabbit - Emiliana Torrini
She showed no surprise at being picked; she looked like the kind of person who expected the worst at all times, and why should today be any different? ... Such a tender soul, he thought. But she's the one I'll have to beat. ... But Alice always knew how you screwed up. Of the three of them she was the prodigy.
IV Penny
Ulysses (Franz Ferdinand cover) - Vitamin String Quartet
He had no sense of humor at all. He practiced by himself, murmuring and watching his pale hands sign and flutter in a massive baroque gilt-framed mirror leaned up against the wall. ... Penny just stared at the green, overcast landscape in the mirror, waiting for his pale, stoic face to reappear so he could keep practicing. He didn't look up as they left.
V The Physical Kids
Travel In Time - Marching Band
Six months later, in September, Quentin and Alice spent the first day of their Third Year at Brakebills sitting outside a small square Victorian outbuilding about a half mile from the House. It was a piece of pure folly architecture, a miniature house ... If they were going to be Physical Kids, apparently they would have to prove it by getting in the front door. ... "So you have this whole place to yourself?" Quentin didn't want to let on how much he wanted to belong here, even now that he did, officially, belong here. "Pretty much. So do you, now."
VI Eliot
Sparkle - My Life Story
Quentin hadn't realized how hard-won Eliot's air of ludicrously exaggerated insouciance must be. That facade of lofty indifference must be there to hide real problems. Quentin liked to think of himself as a sort of regional champion of unhappiness, but he wondered if Eliot had him outclassed on that score, too. ..."Never cook with a wine you wouldn't drink," he said. "Though I guess that presupposes that there is a wine I wouldn't drink."
VII Josh
The Future's So Bright, I Gotta Wear Shades - Timbuk 3
Josh always wore the standard school uniform but managed to make it look like he didn't - his jacket never quite fit his wide, round build, it was always twisted or rumpled or too narrow in the shoulders. His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling. It took Quentin a while to figure out that Josh expected people not to take him seriously, and he enjoyed - not always kindly - the moment when they realized, too late, that they'd underestimated him. ... Josh had successfully defended the square - he'd abolished Eliot's will-o'-the-wisp - but he'd gone too far. Somehow he'd created its inverse, a black hole: he'd punched a drain hole in the afternoon, and the daylight was swirling into it.
VIII Janet
Europe - The Indelicates
Pretty rather than beautiful, she had a flat, flapperish figure, but she used what she had to maximum advantage - she sent her uniforms back home to be tailored - and there was something vibrantly sexy about her ravenous, too-wide gaze. You wanted to meet it and be devoured by it. Janet was about as annoying as a person could be and still be your friend, but Quentin was never bored around her. She was passionately loyal, and if she was obnoxious it was only because she was so deeply tender-hearted. It made her easily wounded, and when she was wounded she lashed out. She tortured everybody around her, but only because she was more tortured than anyone.
IX Flying to Antarctica
Carnival of the Animals : Aquarium - Saint-Saens (London Sinfonietta conducted by Charles Dutoit)
Days, weeks, maybe months and years passed. Who knew, or cared? Quentin had never experienced peace and satisfaction like this. ... And he served whatever force sent him gliding along the invisible magnetic rails, always southward, down the rough, stony coast of Peru, spiny Andes on his port, the sprawling blue Pacific on his starboard. He had never been happier.
X Quentin & Alice
Better Than Love (live) - Hurts
He locked his teeth in the thick fur of her neck. It didn't seem to hurt her any, or at least not in a way that was easily distinguishable from pleasure. Something crazy and urgent was going on, and there was no way to stop it, or probably there was but why would you? ... "I have to ask you something," she said, her voice full of crisp determination. "Are you in love with me? It's okay if you aren't, I just want to know." She made it almost all the way through, but she couldn't quite say the last phrase full voice and whispered it instead. ... "I don't know," he said. His voice was scratchy from lack of use. The words felt more frightening than any spell he had ever cast. ... "It's okay," she said, with a quick little smile that strained the ligaments that held Quentin's heart in his chest. "I didn't think so. I was more wondering whether you would lie about it."
XI Alice & Quentin
Recognition - Susie Suh
"You have to promise me we'll never be like them, Quentin." Their noses were almost touching. Her weight on top of him was arousing, but her face was angry and serious. "I know you think it's going to be all quests and dragons and fighting evil and whatever, like in Fillory. I know that's what you think. But it's not. You don't see it yet. There's nothing out there. So you have to promise me, Quentin. Let's never get like this, with these stupid hobbies nobody cares about. Just doing pointless things all day and hating each other and waiting to die."
XII New York
Little Faith - The National
New York's magical underground may have been limited, but the number and variety of its drinking establishments was prodigious. And you could get drugs here - actual drugs! They had all the power int he world, and no work to do, and nobody to stop them. They ran riot through the city. ... In Manhattan, with no professors watching over them, and no classes to be sober for, Eliot was rarely without a glass of something in his hand from one in the afternoon on. Usually it was something relatively innocuous, white wine or Campari or a big dilute tumbler of bourbon and soda clunking with ice. But still. ... They lavished a ridiculous amount of effort on these parties, all out of proportion to any actual fun they might get in return. ... Janet dressed the set: she formulated the night's dress code, chose the music, and hand-wrote and illustrated amazingly beautiful one-off menus. ... "No one gets punished for anything. We do whatever we want, and that's all we do, and nobody stops us, and nobody cares." ... and then, in the last act of the strip tease, it revealed itself to be what it truly was: a terrible, really awful, hurtful betrayal. At some point during this slow, incremental fall from grace Quentin became aware of Alice sitting at the foot of the bed, just her back, facing away from where he and Janet and Eliot lay, resting her chin in her hands. ... The dinner table was like a shipwreck. The kitchen looked like a crime scene. Their little planet was ruined, and there was nowhere left for him to stand.
XIII Penny discovers the Neitherlands
Go Film - Covenant
"Ladies and gentlemen," Penny said, gravely and grandly, "we are all going to Fillory." ... No one knows where this transitional world is. It may be an alternate plane of existence, or a place between planes, interleaved between them like a flower pressed between pages, or a master plane that contains all planes - the spine that gathers the pages and binds them together. To the naked eye it looks like a deserted city, an endless series of empty stone squares, but it serves as a kind of multidimensional switchboard. In the center of each square is a fountain. Step into one of them, so the story goes, and you'll be transported to another universe. ... It was absolutely silent: no wind, no birds, no insects. Broad paving stones stretched away in all directions, clean and bare as if they'd just been swept. On all four sides of the square stood a row of stone buildings. They gave off an impression of indescribable age - they weren't decrepit, but they'd been lived in. They looked vaguely Italianate; they could have been in Rome, or Venice. But they weren't.
XIV Alice in the Neitherlands
Lovely Head - Goldfrapp
Her fist caught him smack in his left eye. She hit like a girl, without any weight behind it, but he hadn't seen it coming to roll with it. The left half of the world flashed white. ... "I could kill you. Do you understand that?" Her face was terrible. There were two white-hot points on her flushed cheeks. "I could burn you to nothing right where you stand. I'm stronger than you. Nothing you could do would stop me." ... "Do I have to do absolutely everything for you? Or you know what it is? You hate yourself so much, you'll hurt anybody who loves you. That's it, isn't it? Just to get even with them for loving you. I never saw that before now." She stopped at this, shaking her head, lost in a dream of disbelief. Her own words had brought her up short. In the silence the fact that he had cheated on her, and with Janet of all people, hit her all over again, as fully as it had the first time, two hours ago. Quentin could see it: it was like she'd been shot in the stomach.
XV Quentin in the farmhouse
I Don't Care If It's True - The Indelicates
He picked up the lamp and threw it on the floor. It flashed and died. Quentin had never felt like this before. It was kind of amazing: his anger was making him superpowered. He could do anything. There was literally nothing he couldn't do. ... The pain was a falling feeling. It was a little like coming off the ecstasy, that long descent. He was like a cartoon character who falls off a building. Pow, he hits an awning, but he punches straight through it. Pow, he hits another one. And another one. Surely one of them will catch him and sproing him back up, or just fold up and embrace him like a canvas cradle, but it doesn't, it's just one flimsy busted awning after another. Down and down and down. ... He never did fall asleep. The idea came over him around dawn, and he waited as long as he could, but it was just too damn good to keep to himself. ... "People! Get up, get up, get up! It's time! Today's the day!"
XVI Fillory
Bard Dance - Enya
"Welp," Josh said finally, breaking the silence. "I guess that pretty much tears it. We're in Fillory." ... Every time a bird perched overhead for more than a few seconds Josh would say, "Okay, this is the one," or "I think it's trying to tell us something," or eventually, "Hey asshole, fly away from me, please. Okay, thanks." ... Ten minutes later Quentin was sitting in a booth in a dimly lit bar with a pint of beer on the table in front of him, as yet untasted. Though unexpected, this felt like a good development for him.
XVII Quest
Occupying Force - Unto Ashes
What it involved, Farvel explained, was a visit to a perilous ruin called Ember's Tomb. Somewhere within the tomb was a crown, a silver crown that had once been worn by the noble King Martin, centuries ago, when the Chatwins reigned. If they could recover the crown and bring it to Castle Whitespire, then they could occupy the thrones themselves - or four of them could anyway - and become kings and queens of Fillory and end the threat of the Watcherwoman forever. But it wouldn't be easy. ... She and Dint were both adventurers by profession. "There aren't many of us now," Fen said, her short sturdy legs somehow devouring distance faster than Quentin's long skinny ones. She never looked at him as she talked, her bulgy eyes continuously searching the horizon for potential threats. "Humans, I mean. Fillory is a wild place, and getting wilder."
XVIII This is not your war
Thousand Year Dream - Jocelyn Pook
"Jesus," Quentin heard himself say. "Jesus jesus jesus." He wasn't ready for this. This wasn't magic. This was the opposite of magic. The world was ripping open. ... Now the scene tilted and slid into nightmare. Four more Black Elves scrambled through the open door carrying an assortment of weapons, followed by two goat-legged men and two terrifying flying giant bumblebees the size of basketballs. Also present was something fleshy and headless that scrambled along on four legs, and a silent, wispy figure composed of white mist. ... Janet was hugging herself against the back wall, her face wet and shining with tears. Her eyes were blank. She was gone. ... Somewhere along the line Quentin left his knife in a furry Fillorian stomach. He never saw the creature's face - it was a creature, not a person, not a person - but later he would remember the sensation of jamming it in, how the blade punched through the tough rubbery muscles of the diaphragm and then slid easily into the underlying viscera, and how the muscles gripped the blade after it was in.
XIX The Beast
Prelude - Celtic Legend
It wasn't loud, exactly, but it made everything else quiet around it, so that it was instantly the only sound in the room, and everything resonated with its pure, simple strength. It was natural and perfect, a single note that sounded like a grand chord. It went on and on. ... "O child," came the ram's deep voice. "Don't you know what you have done?" ... "Mind you, the kind fo things you have to do to work that kind of magic - well, your humanity is the first thing to go. You don't stay a man once you've done the things I've done. Once you know the things I know. I hardly miss it now."
XX Niffin
O.P.M. - Diamanda Galas
"I'm on fire," she said, almost in her normal voice. "I didn't think - I'm burning." And then in a rising shriek that could have been agony or could have been ecstasy: "I'm burning! Oh, God! Oh, Quentin, I'm burning! It's burning me!" ... She stopped speaking, just moaned on an ever-higher, ever-louder note. Finally as the blue fire rose up her neck she threw back her head and opened her mouth wide, but no more sound came out.
XXI Aftermath
Regélök, míg élök - Irén Lovász
The shock of it snapped his chest flat. It emptied out his lungs the way the Beast's jaws had, not just once but over and over again. He was helpless against it. He lay in his bed and sobbed until he choked. His weak body spasmed. He made noises he'd never heard a human being make. ... She had died for him, for all of them, and she was never coming back. He couldn't think about what happened, he could only play it back again and again, as if there were a chance it could come out differently, or even just hurt a little less, but every time he played it back he wanted to die. ... Whenever he slept, he woke up trying to warn somebody of something, but he never knew what, or who, and it was always too late. ... The grief he felt for Alice kept unfolding new dimensions he hadn't known were there. He felt like he'd only seen and loved her, really loved, her, all of her, for those last few hours. Now she was gone, broken like the glass animal she'd made that first day they'd met.
XXII The Magicians
Creation - Emmy The Great
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MY FAVORITE WAS ACTUALLY THE JANET ONE? Like wow that is the perfectest song for her. 8D;
I also really liked the Hurts song, and would be interested in more of that band.
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Hurts are good, though I only really love a few of their songs - the original version of that track is an electronic rather than acoustic song, they're an electro band, but you are welcome to my favourites :
Wonderful Life
Better Than Love
Evelyn
they have a whole album but the rest of it was not so much my thing, they get fanmixed a lot though so worth checking out other songs in case you like them? <3