Until the moment Greg woke her from her nightmare, Wendy felt as though she had fallen into a boundless abyss of darkness.
That feeling was hard to put into words.
When the members of the Demon King Cult charged into the square, shouting her name, she clearly saw the look in everyone's eyes change in an instant-from suspicion to certainty, from hesitation to anger.
The voices that had been defending her vanished, replaced by accusations, curses, and contempt.
She wanted to explain, to tell them that it was all a coincidence, that she did not know those members of the Demon King Cult at all, but her voice was so feeble amid the explosions and shouting.
No one believed her, and no one was willing to hear her out.
She was like an actress pushed onto a stage, every line already written, every ending already decided, her struggles nothing more than one final, laughable embellishment to the play.
Wendy was no stranger to the despair of being abandoned by the whole world.
She remembered something that had happened in the imperial palace when she was little.
She had been about seven or eight that year, an age when she was full of curiosity about the world.
Crown Prince Finn had lost a command seal that could be used to mobilize a small squad of the Imperial Guard. Though its authority was limited, its loss was still no trivial matter at court.
Finn insisted that Wendy had stolen it, on the grounds that she had recently been sneaking in and out of his study.
In truth, Wendy had simply become fascinated with old books about the Empire's history around that time.
But her daily lessons taught her only how to become a good wife, never touching on history.
So every day,