Trinket (Reverse Harem)

Grovel, dog

"No," I told him.

Asund seemed confused.

I tapped my foot. "No, it's not enough."

"But it was a bad dream."

A bad dream? "You don't get to call little foundling me a liar even in a dream. Just because I won't let them kill you doesn't mean I like you. I'm just not like you."

"Like me?"

He clearly isn't getting the message. "I don't think people are trash just because they're foundlings. You still walked away from me in the dream. You still said some really cruel things."

"I thought it was a dream," he said.

"Guess that shows what kind of person you are. Why are you here anyway?"

"You're my perfect mate," he said, following as I step away from the blood-strained grass. He'd stopped bleeding and started healing, like wolf shifters do. Itek madly preened his ruff, which now is missing a huge clump of feathers and he looks about as dignified as a plucked chicken.

I rolled my eyes. "Whoop de do. Let me sit down from the weight of my happiness."

"I thought it was a dream," he repeated, frustrated. "I didn't think you were real."

"That makes it worse. You talked to me like that because you thought it didn't matter because it was a dream?

"Our Trinkets don't match. I couldn't have brought you back to my enclave."

Look at him doing his little dance, trying to make it seem like I was making something out of nothing. He'd told me he couldn't be with a foundling, but now I was good enough because of Korr, Ethat, and Itek? The three of them didn't buy his bullshit anyway, and Ethat practically announced the many ways he planned on killing Asund when I wasn't looking. "Why are you here? Because you want to be, or because you've lost your honor?"

"I'm trying to figure out what the hell happened."

So was everyone else. "Stop talking to me. I already know how you really feel."

He shuts up.

Korr shifted into human form. The hot breeze starting across the plains tugged at the luxurious bound-silk, sending it drifting and whipping in the breeze like he's barely real. His long white hair drifts too, and he smiled as his brother glared at Assund, Ethat's green scales souring to an unhealthy yellow-tinged shade from the contamination rising up through the ground.

"What should we do with him?" Korr asked. "Leave him here?"

"No," I sighed.

Now Ethat shifted into human form, glaring at me, "What do you need a wolf shifter for when you have us? We can bring you ten dozen wolf shifters if you want to amuse yourself with them. Though I do not know why you would want to. I am curious to see what you'd do."

"I need him because he was in the dream or bubble or whatever it was with me," I said, annoyed. As much as I hated the idea of having anything to do with Assund, and I wanted to send him back to his enclave burning with the humiliation he'd visited on me, the truth was simple: Asund had been the one to... I don't know. Jar me loose, wake me up, break me out. Ethat, Itek, and Korr, for all they were way more magical, hadn't been.

And why did I have as many as I did? And where had I been the past however many years? How old was I? Who was I? Had the Ravens found me and hidden me in a pocket realm, or had I been found and put into a pocket realm? Had that happened fifteen years ago, like I thought, or had it happened centuries earlier? Millenia? Had Tynne been real? Lucinda? Had it all been someone's dream—someone who had dreamed of my home enclave—or had it been "real"? Whatever real meant anymore.