Page 14 of A Love of Wrath and Rapture

I want to wake up from this nightmare and return to my real life.

If this holds, my entire world is fractured before my eyes. Everything I know and trust will be reduced to nothing.

And I’ll probably die in the frigid cold.

“Perhaps you should have thought of that before you broke our one greatest rule,” Harold says, his face far sterner than I ever remember.

In my mind, he is dead to me. I almost can’t stomach the betrayal. I struggle to hold back my nausea.

“Your one greatest rule?”

If I weren’t buckling under my own weight, I imagine I’d feel terribly confident right now. But I know that I have nothing to lose.

“Where have you ever spelled this out?” I ask. “Many in your own village mock the custom. How can you say it’s law when it’s little more than superstition?”

“Do not challenge our customs, Evangeline,” Hilda bites back. “They have kept us safe for decades. We built our home in the mountains so that our predators would not find us, creating many struggles for our people in the process. And you want to invite our enemies to our front door?”

“You know that I never meant to do that! How many times do I have to tell you that it was only a joke?”

“Well, we are not laughing!”

Hilda’s reply is fierce and unwavering. I fix my posture, staring down at the hardwood floor, and the flickering shadows that threaten to consume me.

“As we’ve said countless times, we understand that you thought it was only a joke,” Harold replies. “We’re all too willing to listen to your testimony.”

I bring my head up, almost afraid to look at Harold directly.

“But that doesn’t change the facts. It was still a cruel joke played on a friend. And if that’s how you treat your closest friends, how will you treat strangers? Or enemies?”

I shake my head insistently.

“Renee is not a friend! How many times do I have to remind you of that?”

“Well, she seems to think she is,” Harold replies. “You should have seen how hard it was for her to come forward with this information.”

I chuckle under my breath to myself.

I can think of Renee as an acquaintance, even somebody I trust. But she’s rarely been kind to me.

“Be that as it may, how can you punish me for something I never did?” I ask. “Even if there was some kind of magical ritual I somehow channeled without my knowledge, nothing happened!”

I receive indifferent headshakes and grumbles in response.

“What Renee saw in the forest was enough to frighten her dearly,” Harold says. “Are you saying she’s a liar?”

At this point, I can hear the indignation in my voice rising up over my despair.

“Respectfully, Renee would be afraid of her own shadow,” I reply. “It’s the only reason I mess with her. She’s so affected by everything?—”

“So you’re admitting that you’re a bully.”

“I think we’ve heard enough, Harold,” Hilda says. “Let’s not drag this out any longer than we have to.”

That’s when my ears perk up. In the distance, I swear I hear the screams of an angry mob, gathering just outside the door.

My eyes turn toward the source of the commotion. For a moment, the noise stops.

The council is silent.

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