Elly Blake

My eyes were closing, my head lolling onto the pillow. “But Arcus the Angry has decreed I’m to be cleaned up. Do you not fear his wrath?”

He smiled, his hand on the door. “There are things I fear much more.”

“But the world has grown weary of stories now,” she said, slowing her voice to signal the end of the story. “And only children listen.”

Memory shuddered through me. My grandmother had always ended her origin story with the same phrase.

A sort of truce formed between Arcus and me.