Chapter 13
A Note to the Reader:
Emeline and the Glass Coffin
She was Pretoria’s first love. Her death was the hammer that broke the Guild’s tenuous grasp on my sister, and turned her discontent into a bitter, driving force.
Her name was Emeline and she was, for five years in the Guild’s hallowed halls, as good as a sister to me.
Forcibly relinquished to the Guild by her Separatist parents at the late age of thirteen, she staunchly clung to her parents’ views.
Her willfulness and passion collided with Pretoria’s natural inclination towards self-governance and petty insurrection, and together the two of them began to sow ever-increasing discord among the young mages at the Harren Guild Academy for the Instruction and Edification of Young Women.
The Guild paid little mind to love affairs like her and Pretoria’s, so long as no unsanctioned children could be conceived and one still fulfilled marital obligations to the Guild.
But rebellious ideals were another matter entirely.
Young mages began to defect, their perceived poison to spread beyond the walls of the Women’s Academy, and action was taken.
When I recall Emeline’s face now, I remember it only in her final moments—submerged in water behind walls of glass, her auburn hair glistening like flame and her skirts of pale, sodden white adrift as she screamed and spasmed and drowned before a hall of mages.
That, dear reader, is the final punishment for a rebellious mage—the Glass Coffin.