MommyFortuna

Mommy Fortuna is a character very very dear to my heart. She's powerful, and clever, and tragic. She embraces the place she has made for herself in the world, and knows her worth regardless of any outside opinion. She has strength of character enough to see the unicorn, despite her bitterness.

Also, when I was a small child, her assertion that her immortality would be in the form of the harpy's memories was an epiphany for me, it changed the way I saw the world forever. I... I just love her a lot okay?

[on the harpy] "Oh, she'll kill me one day or another. But she will remember forever that I caught her, that I held her prisoner! So there's my immortality, eh?"

"Do you think I don't know what the true witchery is, just because I do what I do? There's not a witch in the world hasn't laughed at Mommy Fortuna and her homemade horrors! But there's not one of them who would have dared..."

[Elli's song, from the book]
"Inside the cage, it was darker than the evening, and cold stirred behind the bars like a live thing. Something moved in the cold, and the unicorn saw Elli – an old, bony, ragged woman who crouched in the cage rocking and warming herself before a fire that was not there. She looked so frail that the weight of the darkness should have crushed her, and so helpless and alone that the watchers should have rushed forward in pity to free her. Instead, they began to back silently away, for all the world as though Elli were stalking them. But she was not even looking at them. She sat in the dark and creaked a song to herself in a voice that sounded like a saw going through a tree, and like a tree getting ready to fall.

'What is plucked will grow again,
What is slain lives on,
What is stolen will remain –
What is gone is gone.'"