The Unraveling of Emlyn DuLaine (The Rivenlea Sphere Book 1)

by Lindsay A. Franklin

I don’t like being told how to feel, what I must be thinking.

“What ten-year-old book lover doesn’t want to visit a magic library?”

Or forever. For all I know, it’s always autumn in Rivenlea. It is my favorite season, after all. And I’m quite sure I made up this place.

“Stories, Miss Emmy, are what bind us. Stories hold us together and help us think through problems, work through emotions. They take us on adventures, allow us to escape, but even more than that, they help us see the universe more clearly. Through stories, fantastical though they be, we see reality in greater detail.”

“I mean . . . being different doesn’t automatically make you unpleasant.”

But that isn’t true, is it? We can never tell a person’s journey just from looking at the outside.

The golden Gryphon girl has excellent boundaries. My therapist would be so proud.

It would not do to become consumed with that which I cannot change. Would it?”

“I don’t see why it would be. Rivenlites, of all people, should understand that every world has a creator. Every sphere was imagined by someone, and I don’t see why your world or my world should be any different.”

Gymnastics or software engineering or playing

Stories hold space for us in our broken, messed-up world—space to escape, to grow, to grieve.

The question catches me off guard. I’d made a point to set aside storytelling years ago, consuming the stories and ideas of others instead.

We have all the information. We know the risks. You must allow us to decide whether we feel they are risks worth taking.”

I could lie, but the basis of trust is honesty. So I opt for the truth.

the rays fighting through an abundance of particulate matter, trying to light the world, to do the work with which they were entrusted.

Only that she shouldn’t judge this world based on its brokenness.

When you love a story person, they feel real.

“That’s a nice thought, dear girl. That what we needed was inside us all along.”

I know how trauma seeps into your bones and your body remembers, even if your brain loses the details.

“Please listen, Rhyan. Everything is that way for us because we are that way. We’re not storybook characters—all good or all bad. Every Earthling is capable of immense good and depraved evil.”

We write tidy heroes and hopeless villains. But real people? We are both hero and villain. The struggle of good versus evil resonates with us because it’s in us. I can’t help but see things as complicated.

Apparently all one has to do is break the universe, then put it back together incorrectly, and they squeeze you onto the calendar within twenty-four hours.