City Of Bones, Page 62:

Shâh-mât

The King is down

Scene from Chain of Iron by @cassandraclare

i'm dying to know what Cordelia asked Alastair - - did she tell him about the paladin situation? did she really give him Cortana? If she did, what was his reaction? How did she get through it? Did he comfort her? Did they plan to find a way out of the whole thing?

There's also something grand about Alastair as a child, demanding the blade be his, to Alastair now as an adult refusing to wield the sword at all. He doesn't just love Cordelia, he respects her as a Shadowhunter and fighter and will not take her weapon for himself 😭 I really doubt, even if she gave it to him, that he would use it.

The heather in bloom

“Dear friend, — Your sweetness intimidates” Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Sarah Tuckerman (January 1880)

did it hurt? when you forget your headphones and couldn’t romanticise your walk home?

somewhere off in the distance i can hear the herondales readying to battle the man behind this account

The way it was talked about before the book came out made me think there was going to be more of Elias and his interactions/relationship with Alastair and Sona. I mean, there must've been a scene where they each first interacted with him alone. Idk, it felt really meh to just have a total of about 3 scenes wherein Elias was either being weird, drunk or just horrible and then he dies. Like, "here hate him for being bad before I kill him." I think the whole thing should've been explored more, idk.

We also get one line that suggests he doesn't want to have the new baby, which is another thing that was hinted at a bunch and which I thought would actually be talked about openly at some point and explored, not just tucked away in a rant before he dies and never really formally addressed. And I might be misremembering, but weren't Alastair and Cordelia going to have secret and important meetings about him or something? There was one scene where they talked after dinner but that's it? And Sona was so sure he'd changed and needed to be given another chance - - why?

I realize the writing must be based around whatever drives the plot, so such scenes would seem add-on but that only calls into question why Alastair isn't so much more important to the plot 😤 smh,,,, I just think there could've been a lot more Carstairs scenes in the book that would've helped in understanding each of the Carstairs characters.

cordelia was basically anna in ‘do you wanna build a snowman’ that time alastair came home and wouldn’t talk to her lol

maybe it's time for Thomas to stop ‘waiting for Alastair to look back’ and start going after him

“Goodnight and great love to you. We see the same stars.”

— George Mallory, from a letter to his wife Ruth during the 1921 Everest Reconnaissance Expedition (via archaeologicals)