Trinket (Reverse Harem)

The God Of Barren Branches

Come back for me?

The words rattled around in my head, like they bounced through the goo holding the chunks of memories (if we could even call what was in my head memories) together. But it didn't land on any of the chunks and no memory surfaced. Just a weird echo. Reminded me of the sound of a small ball rattling around in an empty bucket.

My throat was dry. I focused on Ormiss and had to shape the words sort of carefully. "Come... back for me?"

Why did that just make me feel hollow? Spooked, maybe.

All these random feelings and sensations were getting old. You don't realize how much you feel until you just have random feelings that aren't connected to anything and are just happening to you.

"They were going to come back for you." Ormiss wrapped his fingers around my hand.

"How... how do you figure that?"

Itek, still lounging on the divan, said, "Because nobody goes through that much effort of hiding something unless they intend to come back for it. If you aren't going to come back for it, you kill it or destroy it, then hide the evidence."

Everyone seemed to agree Itek and Ormiss had it right. And I didn't much like that, because it meant whoever had hidden me... well. Maybe they'd died a long time ago.

Itek, sensing my denial, said, "They had to imprison your mind too. So they created a menagerie authentic enough you never questioned if it was 'real' or not."

"And was she actually a child or is that part of the illusion?" Korr pondered. "Or, perhaps more importantly, is whoever put her there still around and looking for her. Someone powerful enough to create something like that would, presumably, have figured out how to evade Death."

"Or fell prey to their own ambitions," Ormiss said. "The gods do not take those who tamper with the natural order lightly. They suffer it, and are impressed with our resourcefulness, but equally amused when we set ourselves on fire. A mage capable of creating a pocket-realm to hide a unicorn surely didn't stop engaging in dangerous ambitions once they'd hidden her away. They went to extraordinary lengths for an extraordinary reason and that reason didn't disappear with her."

Great. Another bajillion questions, and every single one of them was going to have an answer I didn't like. Like why did you do this to me? There wasn't a chance I was going to like that answer. What did you do to me? Wouldn't like that answer either. So Someone was now hunting me? I touched my scars. Had that person given me these scars, or tried to fix me?

Asund paced across the carpet. "We can assume the person who put her in the dream realm wasn't doing it for benign reasons."

"Why would we assume that?" I asked. I was stupid, everyone else seemed to know why. Or maybe they always just assumed the worst.

"Because you have us," Asund said. "The gods led me to you to wake you. The gods put all of us together. The gods wouldn't get involved if you were being hidden away for a nice reason. They chose me for it because I'm not an elder shifter race like dragon or gryphon. I'm also not a Hippocamp, because why would a Hippocamp come that far inland? I'm a wolf, and a wolf showing up wouldn't mean anything to your dream. And it wouldn't mean anything to anyone else in your dream. Maybe I wasn't supposed to leave with you. I knew it was a dream. Maybe you had to leave on your own. You knew, instinctively, to sneak out, right?"

The pieces of my brain threw a few sparks and maybe some tinder started to catch fire. I'd left before dawn, when it'd been gloomy but not too early. I'd been afraid of getting caught and mocked, but I'd also been afraid of... well, getting caught. Which was dumb, because nobody would have stopped me from leaving, they'd just have pointed and laughed at my back. And it wasn't like I'd ever been banned from leaving the enclave. I'd come and gone as I'd needed to, and the only hassle had been getting in or out after dark because the guards had been pricks about that.