Philip Pullman Novel Novels & Stories

"And he likes you, apparently." I'm not sure why, although Hale is known for being unpredictable. Larsen grins, flashing his perfect white teeth. "Because we are both tortured souls. How about you?" "Doesn't matter. I need sleep," I sigh. Tonight, I don't want to be entertaining a powerful Noble. I start toward my bedroom, wanting nothing more than to crawl under the covers and bundle up away from all these overwhelming men. "Death is a strange concept for me, as an outsider. Mortals die, they serve a sentence in another Realm ran by a tyrant immortal pureblood, and then emerge here, in the immortal realm where they can live out a long existence until their eventual death."

Above, the sky remained absent, a void of swirling nothingness. And in the center of it all, suspended like a frozen ember, was the Hollow Crown. It no longer flickered, no longer wavered between existence and absence. It had settled. It had chosen. A pulse rippled outward. Rael staggered, the book searing against his palms. The ink within twisted violently, reforming into a single phrase: THE CROWN WAITS FOR ITS BEARER. His breath hitched. He looked up at the others, dread curling in his stomach. “It’s not over.”

I flipped a page. More of the same. I didn’t understand any of it. I was about to close it when something caught my eye. A drawing. Different from the others. It looked like… A creature. My breath caught. It wasn’t like anything I had seen before. It looked human… but not. There were lines coming from its back. Like wings. But not wings. Something sharper. Something… alive. I stared at it longer than I should have. Something about it made my chest feel tight.

And after my death, you had me—the dignified daughter of the Chapman family—wrapped in a straw mat and thrown into a mass grave. I cocked my eyebrow at him. "I heard you did the same to Camilla after her death. You really have a thing for throwing dead bodies into mass graves, don't you? It's something you haven't changed even after two lifetimes!" "Gigi, you… you've been reborn, too?" he asked shakily. "I should've seen you for what you were in my past life, Maurice—a worthless piece of trash," I snarled. Maurice's strength left him when he learned I'd also been reborn. His knees buckled, and he collapsed onto the floor.