Fire Scarred *Un-Edited Version*

Chapter Twenty-Four

Now I laid on the bed in the small room feeling a dream come over me. It'd been a long day. I let it.

The fire licked at me while I laid close to its bosom. The children laughed and screamed. The adults hollered to take a few steps back. My stick was still firm in my palm, and Leo was still next to me.

Then the fire died away.

A sea of grass surrounded me, and I was an island lost at sea. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to breath. I was swaying in the wind. I was singing in the top branches of a tree. I was digging through the earth. I was being dug through.

I was the grass; the bird; a worm; the dirt.

Power coursed through me, and I could feel it in every part of me. I was the world, and had the powers of it. No one could touch me.

Then I shrunk to the size of a pea, feeling very dead and cold. A baby fresh out of the mother's womb, I blinked, shivered, and tried to remember how to breathe again. Instinct was gone. It had fled, and I, no longer the world, laid in the clasp of a larger man. A giant man towered over me and the mountains and the sky and the sun.

His shadow cast its face over me. His long fingers of roots tightened on me, and his face appeared. I knew it. Even in my sleep, I knew I'd dreamt of it.

Sorrel's big face came close to mine, and he spit and snarled. "Tick-tock," he growled. "Time is running out."

My arms flailed in attempt to push his large self away, only they passed through him like smoke. "I'm trying!" I cried, but he shook his head in anger.

"Not hard enough. Find him!"

The room was dark, and smelled faintly of Sorrel's muddied hands. A hand was on my arm, and I jumped out of their reach, tumbling onto the floor on the opposite side of the bed.

"Geez, calm down," Noah said. He reached over the bed to offer me a hand up.

The dark covered my fire-hydrant cheeks, but they still burned. I wriggled against my burrito wrapped blankets unable to free myself. After a few moments filled with unladylike grunts and psychotic wiggling, I freed an arm enough to grab hold of Noah's hand.

After settling me back in bed, he asked, "Are you okay?"

"Yeah. Just another nightmare."

"Figured. I'm surprised you didn't wake the whole inn up. You sounded like someone was trying to murder you." He tried to keep the subject light saying it with a joking tone, but his face was tight. The concern for me filled his eyes. He kept on forcing his smile. "What were you dreaming about? Me, I hope."

I looked at him funny, and he explained, "I wanna be the scariest thing you dream of."

"But you're not scary at all," I said with a goofy grin trying and failing to block out his care and concern.

"Exactly."

My arms wove around him and I pulled him to my side. I remembered how it was for him to be my best friend, and I smiled.

"Thank you," I whispered into his chest. I hated myself for it, but I liked having him near me. Even after everything, he was still my best friend.

"No problem." He smiled and his breath ruffled my hair. We slept like that for the rest of the night, the way a brother and a sister would.

The next morning, it was raining. The sound of the drops pelting against the window woke me up. Noah still rested against me, and he smelled like soap and ashes. It shocked me for a moment because instinctually I expect the scent of trees and nature, the scent of Leo who'd been the one I've woken up from a scare to in the past.