Irina slowly rose from where she had been sitting, her eyes fixed on Voss as though she were trying to determine whether she had somehow misunderstood him. Eldric had been the village elder for years. He was the man everyone in Elaris looked toward when something went wrong, the man who spoke for the villagers, the man who welcomed them into his home with a smile and told them the history of the town as though he had carried its suffering on his shoulders.
Yet according to Voss, that same man had been at the center of the disaster that had destroyed the town fifteen years ago. Irina's expression hardened as the pieces began falling into place, but one question remained so absurd that she could not keep it inside. "Wait," she said, her voice carrying a mixture of disbelief and anger. "If Eldric was responsible for all of this, how is he still the village elder? How did nobody find out? How could the people of this town continue trusting him after everything he supposedly did?"
