“WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!”

I whip around to face Daphne, glaring at me through the leaves.

“I-I’m sorry-“ I stutter. “I j-just though that-“

If looks could kill, Daphne would have killed everything in twenty square miles with the glare she was giving me.

“Oh. I didn’t realize you were _thinking _at all.”

I look over for help, but my friends look as helpless as I do. Especially because they’re in another tree, so by the time they could come over to help, Daphne would already have my head on a spike.

I turn back to Daphne, who glares at me, waiting for a response.

I take a deep breath, trying to rein in my nerves, although my voice still shook when I spoke. “I didn’t mean to-I was just trying to…pray to the gods…I thought they would help me…”

Back where I came from, that response would have been completely acceptable, normal even. Here, Daphne’s staring at me like I suddenly grew a second head that started speaking in Klingon. Then she buries her face in her hands in the universal gesture for _how is they this stupid._

After a few moments of silence, she looks me dead in the eye.

“Look, I don’t know how things work where you come from, but they don’t work that way here. When a furious animal comes charging at you, intent on murdering you, you do NOT look up at the sky and pray to your precious storm god for help. You do not just stand there and hope the gods will come down, smite all you enemies, give you a cookie, and send you on your merry way. Do you hear me?”

I wilt from her glare. “I’m sorry, I just-“

“Look,” she says, cutting me off. “I know where you’re from, the gods put up this little pretense of caring, but that’s not how it works in the real world. The gods don’t listen or care, and they haven’t for millennia. So when you get little boo-boo, you do not sit there and hope it fixes itself. You grab a bandage, slap it on, and get on with your life. And when the day comes when everything seems hopeless, you do not just pray for things to fix themselves. You pick yourself up by your fucking bootstraps and deal with your own shit. And if you can’t handle that, then I suggest you go back to your little fantasy land where the gods pretend they care. Got it?”

I don’t respond. I can’t. The only thing I can do is sit there and numbly feel tears drip down my face. When I recover my wits, I climb down the tree and storm off as fast as I can.

But I still hear them.

“Why would you say that?” Sofia cries. “Look what you did! She’s crying, you upset her so bad!”

I can practically hear Daphne roll her eyes when she says, “She needed to learn how the world works sometime. Might as well teach her now, before the world does it itself.”