First Lines Fridays | 20th of July 2023

Hello Hello! How are you today?

At the start of the week I intended to get a load of posts drafted and scheduled, but life has once again gotten in the way! I’m bringing you another First Lines Fridays post today because it’s quick and easy and because I’m super excited to read the book in this post.

Keep on reading to find out more!

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page.
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet — you need to hook the reader first.
• Finally… reveal the book!

Conscription Day is always the deadliest. Maybe that’s why the sunrise is especially beautiful this morning — because I know it might be my last. 

I tighten the straps of my heavy canvas rucksack and trudge up the wide staircase of the stone fortress I call home. My chest heaves with exertion, my lungs burning by the time I reach the stone corridor leading to General Sorrengail’s office. This is what six months of intense physical training has given me — the ability to barely climb six flights of stairs with a thirty-pound pack. 

I’m so fucked. 

But what book is this quote from?

Fourth Wing (#1 The Empyrean) by Rebecca Yarros

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away…because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.

With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant. She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom’s protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.

Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die. 

Ever since this book became “A THING” on Bookstagram and Book Twitter, I’ve been itching to start it and I have been seeing so many posts about it, raving about it! I know that I’ll be totally obsessed with it when I finally get around to it, so hopefully that’ll be sooner rather than later!

That’s all for now, I hope you enjoyed reading this post.

See you soon, stay safe,

Ellie xx