Broken Fairy Tales

7

I awoke with a start. My body flew into a sitting position as I looked around the room frantically. Sure someone had been in here. I could faintly smell sage smoke, but it was stale and hours old. Someone had been in here, and smudged the place? Why?

I looked over at the table and saw a simple picnic basket, which was unusual. Well more unusual in this enchanted castle. I was starving so I went over and found a few sandwiches on very fancy bread, with some extra meats, cheese, and fruits in the basket as well. While simpler than any other meal I had enjoyed in the enchanted castle, it was still several levels above what I had grown used to eating in my recent past.

“Valentina was in your dreams.” Rin said, sending a thrill of ice down my blood and to my core.

My hand went to the nearly invisible scar I had been carrying on my neck for years now. The cold burning mark that linked me to a real monster. As my hand searched my skin, looking to find the mark it wasn’t there. I felt as Rin quested our body, searching for the dark thread that had been an unwelcome parasite in my soul for so long. “It’s gone. The link is gone.” Awe obvious in the wolf’s voice in my head.

I’m free? I asked in my mind, not wanting to get my hopes up only to have them dashed again. I had tried to sever the link before, paid vast sums of money to different covens trying to free myself. None had been strong enough to remove the link without removing my life as well. “We’re free, there has to be someone else in this home, someone with strong magic. Someone who is helping you, I don’t think this castle is actually enchanted, just its owner.”

Why would they help me? I asked, only for silence. Not the silence of being shut out, I could tell Rin just didn’t have an answer for me, and he was thinking deeply on the change in events while I arranged the contents of the picnic basket on the table before diving in with a voracious appetite. I looked out the large window, the suns were high in the sky meaning it was somewhere near midday. I hadn’t slept this late since I was a teenager.

I closed my eyes after my lunch, and meditated, it had been so long since I had felt my heart without the threads of darkness that Valentina had wove through my core eating at me. I felt better, which then only fueled my guilt to roar louder. I didn’t deserve to feel better, the darkness I had been carrying had fit me. I was spiraling down, when I felt a flood of calm from Rin.

“The past can not be changed, you have been given a chance to forward, to redeem yourself. Do not waste this gift.” His tone was firm. Scolding me for wanting to sink deeper into my own depression. He was right, he always was. I had been given a gift, maybe there was someway I could use this gift to redeem myself like Rin suggested. I should have always listened to him.

I went to the door, it was unlocked as it had always been, no torches lit a path for me.  It was strange, making me feel alone, abandoned.  I didn’t feel like I was being watched this morning. The castle felt even more empty than it had every other morning. Making me worried something had happened to my unseen host.

“You don’t think Valentina hurt the owner of the castle for helping me do you?” I asked Rin as I wonderly aimlessly down corridors. Worried that the cost of helping me had been too high for whoever had pulled Valentina’s link from my body. A soft whine in my head was my only reply from Rin. He was worried about our unseen benefactor too.

Some of the corridors that intersected with the one I was following were almost cavernous in their size.  “Why build a castle big enough for a dragon to walk in, if they are shifters? Wouldn’t it be more practical to build homes on a human scale?” I asked inside my head. Rin shifted from his worried magical link to the supernatural, questing through the house searching for something alive to ponder my question. But he didn’t have an answer and still wasn’t able to sense anything in the home.