Sara Raasch

She shouldn’t be calmed. She’s right to be furious.

I am furious.

And I’m going to act.

Yes, the voice says, giddy. Yes. Act! Make them suffer!

and mutilate flesh with a snap of their fingers.

Their fear of us is not entirely unjustified.

And I feel that now more than I ever have. It would be so very, very easy to destroy them all.

But I would destroy myself in the process

I’m cursed if I didn’t know the truth.

It isn’t a curse.

It’s me.

My own actions have come to demand reparation. My own past has come to poison my future

I need to expel this fury, because if I don’t, I’ll realize it isn’t fury at all.

It’s fear

What in the hell am I thinking, smiling at the thought of that uncouth witch plotting my murder? But her rage is so… It’s like a storm at night, full of lightning, beautiful in its fury.

No. No. Where did that thought come from?

But he still says nothing, just stares at me in a long, weighted silence, and I know, in the clenched set of his jaw and the steadiness in his eyes, that he won’t break.

I thought I knew stubborn.

I thought I was stubborn.

This man makes it a religion

Normalcy has a way of breeding acceptance—when darkness is all people know, they forget to ask for the light.”

“God be with you,” the priest says in German, not Latin.

If He is with me, He is against you, I think.

I realize then that I hadn’t thought I’d see him again. And I’d been terrified by that idea.

Which is just maddeningly annoying.

And he has carried the weight of his own grief every moment since we met, but he looks at me like the world has gone silent. If I can be that for him, bring an end to his internal war, then I will, I will, I—