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.
"Then who the fuck was the guy with the water cart?" I asked. "And--"
I hadn't thought about the gnarled root of a man with the strange eyes and miserable donkeys in a long time. He'd faded from my memory almost as quickly as I'd gotten to Haven.
"Theia?" Ormiss prompted once I'd gone quiet for too long.
"He tried to get me to stay with him," I said slowly. "He was telling me Haven was dangerous, and to stay with him, but I decided to leave anyway. He didn't try to stop me, he just shouted after me, and I wasn't afraid of him. But it was almost immediately after that the Ravens spotted me, and Korr found me. Like... maybe twenty minutes. And I never saw him again, and to be honest, I've never really thought of him again."
"So he found you..." Korr said.
"Dying of thirst next to an empty well six days out of my enclave. Or was in nine. I don't remember exactly. He liked to sniff my hair and jerk off in the morning. But..." I shrugged. "I told him I wouldn't pay him, and he asked if I could afford to die. He was... kind to me, I guess. In a weird way. But he was just hauling a cargo of sticks pulled by two donkeys that were the saddest things I'd ever seen."
"A cargo of sticks?" Ethat asked.
"Just this huge mound of sticks tightly hidden under canvas. I peeked at it one morning while he was finishing himself off and it was just sticks. But he told me about how when he was a boy, the world had been green, and flowers. And he specifically said when he was a boy and it wasn't a dream. Those were his words. Not a dream. He told me about how the taint had spread, and then mused that it was a weapon we turned on ourselves."
Korr glanced at Itek, and Itek lifted his head off the divan.
"I said maybe it had been done to us, and he said that would make it war, wouldn't it? And our enemies tell us we did it to them. He said everyone blames us because this country is the crown of the world." Why had I not thought of this until now? It'd seemed like rambling at the time--and I'd heard plenty of rambling--and mildly interesting, but... "I asked him how it happened, and he said a stolen talisman, a broken covenant, bad bargains, demons, nightmares, angry gods. I thought he'd just been listing off theories. But when we got to Haven's gates, he had a piece of paper with a purple wax seal that he gave to the guards, saying he had a delivery. But his delivery was a bunch of sticks. He said I harnessed his donkeys, and that's why I was with him. I asked him why he helped me and he said the crown is tarnished and we must all do our part to polish it."
At the time, I'd just been waiting for the old man to do something horrible to me and not paid his ramblings any mind. The whole thing had been bizarre and I'd run from it.
"And it wasn't thirty minutes later you arrived," I told Korr. "Who the fuck... what..."
"A cart of sticks drawn by two ragged donkeys," Ethat said behind me. "Were there pots and pans attached to it? Like more than he could have any reason to ever have? Did you see the seal on the wax?"
"No, just that it was bright purple, but the paper itself was filthy. That was why I decided I needed to away from him, because what the hell high-bred hired him to bring sticks?"
"Nobody here uses bright purple," Korr told Ethat and Itek. "Bright purple is reserved for the clergy and Temple. And I doubt the Temple ordered sticks."
Itek actually rolled back to a sitting position.
Ethat left my room. "Everyone wait. There's a book in the library."
Ormiss crackled with magic, while I held onto his hand with both of mine.
Ethat must have run, because he returned within two minutes, carrying a large, old leather-bound tomb with faded gilt edges. He flipped through it, knelt before me, and offered it to me unfolded on his forearms.
In front of me was just a bunch of text in an ornate hand I couldn't read. I flipped through the first page, then the next. There were some illustrations of creepy things, like skulls and magpies and piles of dirt and dancing skeletons, then some people wearing cloaks carrying staves, and a patchwork witch that I'd heard a story about once. Six pages later I flipped to a full-page illustration of--
"That's him," I said, struck dumber than usual. Staring back at me in black ink, was the gnarled root of a man who had had the donkey cart. It wasn't him exactly, but it was him. And behind him was the cart piled high with mysterious cargo covered in canvas, an absurd number of pots and pans and buckets jangling from it, and two sad, miserable donkeys wearing beaten up leather harness, their hides patchy in some places, and hairless in others.
I couldn't read the text.
"The God of Barren Trees, or Barren Branches," Ethat told me softly.
"What god is that?" I was no expert on the pantheon, but I'd never heard of a God of Trees.
"An Old God," Itek said. "One of the first gods. The original God of Death. The god who made the Phoenixes."
"Original God of Death?" Asund asked.
Korr and Ormiss also seemed slightly befuddled as well. Itek knowing about some obscure fable wasn't odd, but Ethat had never shown inclinations to being a book worm.
"It's an Old god. I guess more like a god of demise than death," Itek told Asund. "He is the God of Barren Branches. And burdens. You won't find much scholarship on Him. But the idea, from the myths I've read, is that he's the god of a kind of nebulous form of death. How trees go to sleep in the winter, or trees might seem dead, but they have a small bit of life left in them. But he's also the god of burdens, earned and unearned, assumed and forced. He travels about in a cart piled high with branches and pots pulled by two sad donkeys that He cares for, but always seem overburdened though they never stumble or go lame. Beyond that... not much is known. Old god, like I said."
"But he made Phoenxies," Asund prompted.
"Exactly. So demise, not death as we understand it. Sort of. In most myths, he's also one of the gods who bestowed magery upon mortals. Mostly seems to be a chaotic at-your-own-peril death-god figure. Also there aren't any myths around him meeting his own demise, as many other Old Gods did. There aren't many myths about him at all, though, and it's not clear that anyone ever worshipped Him, or that He was at all interested in worship. I don't believe any temples or sects devoted to Him ever existed."
"That's not odd for Old Gods, though," Ethat said quietly. "The temple, I mean. Most did enjoy the worship. The God of Barren Trees didn't seem to have much use for mortals in general."
Mythology got a bit murky in my head--the whole thing was complicated, with the Old Gods just sort of existing, and then the Gods appeared and took over some things, and some gods killed each other off and stole powers from other gods or tore gods apart and now there were multiple gods and made shifters to fight in their wars and somewhere in there humanity got involved and demons got loose and angels were made and...
I touched the engraving on the page. It was the same person who had been on the cart. "What does the text say?"
Ormiss skimmed it. "It's old tongue. It says that the God of Barren Branches is the god of passing and demise, burdens that have been shouldered by force or choice, and forged the Phoenix. The God travels by two-donkey cart laden with buckets, iron pots, and twigs. The two donkeys are thin and weak, but never falter. The harness is old and cracked, but never breaks. The God of Barren Branches has been spotted in many different places, but always with His cart, cargo, and donkeys."
That wasn't anything useful, but the engraving sure as hell (could I say that?) was. That was the man who had brought me to Haven. He'd insisted on giving me water to drink. He'd told me about how the world had once been beautiful. He'd told me we'd done it to ourselves, he'd told me the crown of the world had been tarnished, and he'd told me why: a stolen talisman, a broken covenant, bad bargains, demons, nightmares, angry gods.
What was the broken covenant? What was the bad bargain? What talisman had been stolen? When he'd told me nightmare, did he mean the dream I'd just come from or something else? What was this about demons? And the gods being angry seemed about right. But was he also one of the angry gods?
He'd also insisted on holding the ladle so I could drink from it, never letting me drink myself. And then he'd sniffed my hair and retreated behind the cart to get in his morning rub session, and we'd proceeded onwards towards Haven. I'd been so distracted by trying not to vomit from the disgusting water that I hadn't given a second thought to what he'd wanted as payment.
And of all the things he could have wanted, him sniffing my hair to get off was only "somewhat odd."
But within half an hour of being in Haven, I'd fled him... straight into the arms of my consorts.
Ethat closed the book and solemnly put it on the low table by my bed.
"You said that the God of Barren Trees gave you water to drink," Korr said.
"Yes. He never let me drink myself. He held the ladle to my lips. I always drank after the donkeys. It was the most disgusting water I've ever had to drink. He gave me as much as I wanted, but if I tried to feed myself, he'd chide me. I thought he was just guarding the water and being a creep." With gods, even the most tiny detail mattered. Nothing just happened with a god. "He would tell me it wouldn't be polite for him to not feed me by hand."
"That probably explains the beautiful blood," Korr said. "You've been god-touched. A god--an Old God--cared for you and sustained you. It might also explain your allure."
"Let's not forget what else He did," Itek said mildly. "Lover or dalliance wouldn't be accurate, but..."
"Not accurate in the way calling Him a god of death isn't quite accurate?" Asund asked wrly while Ormiss just looked offended.
Because leave it to Ormiss to be offended about something like that.
Itek groaned. "Fuck...you are probably right, wolf. I'm no priest, but that's got to leave grace all over her. Or some sort of... something."
"Or it's because she's a unicorn," Ormiss said stiffly.
"Does anyone else's head hurt?" I asked no one in paticular. "Because I am... I am really sort of over this."
Korr grinned. "My love, it would seem we're just getting started."
/*******
Peeps...
We have eaten so much food this week. My husband made homemade, from-scratch (as in, he made the condensed milk levels of scratch) pumpkin pie for me. I made saffron star bread for him.
And now it's time to go to the gym to do penance for my many, many sins.
But I think for penance to be valid, I have to actually be sorry...
~Merry
(pudgy pantster)
********/