Chapter 11 Is This Really My Fated Mate?
Is This Really My Fated Mate?
I stared at the gift in A.D.’s hands, mouth gaping open. Then up at him.
Tears welled in my eyes. “You got me a journal?”
At least, I thought it was a journal. The cover was made of overlapping scales the same shimmering white as the ones on his dragon form’s underbelly.
They were appliquéd onto what I guessed to be a thin sheet of pale wood and bound with delicate wire.
Not quite gold, a bronze alloy, maybe? The wire was the same color as its clasp, which was fused and seamless, like all the other god tech metals I’d seen so far.
The journal looked like it should be featured in the artwork for an epic holo—the kind that started with the opening of an enchanted book.
It had an unbelievably precious quality to it.
Something I’d admire in a store window but never go in to look at, knowing it would be ungodly expensive and too fine to carry my messy thoughts.
And now, A.D. was holding it out to me like he was the clerk in that store.
“Can I open it?”
“Of course you may,” he answered. “It is yours to do with as you please.”
As I pleased.
Wishing I had gloves, I lifted the scaled cover like a rare books librarian.
The pages inside were a soft vellum, carrying a faint musk of mega-deer. Hided and cured with smoke into thin sheets for this journal.
Tucked into the spine was a stylus. It was made of carved bone but glowed green at the tip. My hand hovered over it.
“Do not hesitate to take it, Dorcas. It is yours.” Aengus encouraged me with a smile. A real one this time that lit up his face. As if he was just as excited as me about this gift.
I pulled out the stylus, pointed it at the page, and tentatively pressed down on its grooved top.
I expected a metal tip to appear. Instead, a green light emerged.
“Press the pen into the page to write,” Aengus advised. “Then your words will appear.”
Hello, I wrote on the first page.
To my delight, a thin green version of the word appeared, glowed briefly, then settled into something permanently dark.
I looked up at him, delighted.
“We are very happy with the outcome of this effort,” he continued, “as we do not use such utensils in our culture. But be careful with it. Another click turns it into a metal engraving tool, and the third click allows you to make fire, since your kind does not have the ability to do so with your weak breath.”
I was too overjoyed to be insulted by him calling me weak. “You did this? You made this? For me?”
I looked up to find him once again watching my face with that unreadable intensity.
“We assumed,” A.D. answered carefully, “that you would like to record your thoughts of falling through the portal into our arms.”
He assumed right!
I could have hugged him. But I was too busy snatching the gift right out of his hands and gathering it to my chest like treasure.
Because it was. “Thank you!” I whispered, genuinely overcome.
That night, I made my first entry….
Hello, my name is Dorie Hamilton-Scotswolf, and I’ve fallen through time. Here’s everything I’ve learned about my new reality so far….
I didn’t get far in my recounting before succumbing to sleep.
And sometime after moonrise, I turned over to find A.D.—or, I guess, Orpheus—sitting statue-still at the edge of my bed. “Go away, Orpheus,” I mumbled sleepily. “Don’t kill me. That’s an order.”
The statue animated, making an ominous growling noise.
But then he stood in one liquid rise to his feet and departed the cavern, leaving me to fall back asleep.
Was it just a dream? I wrote in the journal first thing when I woke up the next morning.
Soon after, Aengus came through with another meal.
Aengus-Diarmuid-Orpheus and A.D.O. felt too unwieldy.
So I decided I’d just call him Aengus when he was being nice to me, like when he served me another plate meal of barbecued mega-deer, Pleistocene salad, and berry compote with a cheery, “Good morning, Dorcas. We hope this fare will sustain you well for this day’s training. ”
He also brought mega-deer for last meal, and the first meal the following morning was, yep, you guessed it, mega-deer and a Pleistocene salad. This time without the berry compote.
When he set the bronze plate in front of me again, my modern palette overrode my good manners.
I was tired and achy from the drills he’d put me through in Diarmuid mode, no closer to convincing him to let me take a look farther inside the keep, and just could not take another meal of crispy meat.
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but is there any other kind of food I can eat?”
“We will switch to another meat, and we are working on providing the variety you crave. During our free time, we scour the land hoping to find fruit and grains we might give you in offering, but so far our search has been futile.” He bowed his head.
“We were not quite prepared to host you. Our apologies.”
Something uncomfortably close to guilt wormed its way into my chest at the thought of him scouring the land while I hammered out possible escape plans in the gorgeous journal he’d given me.
“Don’t go to too much trouble for me,” I said. “This is probably more than I should expect, anyway.”
“There is nothing you cannot expect from us, Dorcas.” He spoke the words like a solemn vow. “We would do anything for you.”
His voice was quiet smoke, but his eyes burned with that hungry-but-not-for-food look that was beginning to become familiar.
I had to duck my head to get away from it.
“Anything except call me Dorie when you’re in nice mode,” I grumbled. “Or let me out of this room for anything other than exercise.”
“Anything except compromise your protection,” he insisted.
“Again, protection from what?” I set the fork down, no longer hungry. “You’re the only one here.”
He gathered up the plate with my half-eaten meal. “We hope to find sustenance beyond meat for you soon.”
Over the next two weeks, a lot of our conversations ended like that. He was a terrible tennis player, lobbing a couple of balls back that barely made it over the net before ending the game altogether.
Still, of all of his personalities, I liked Aengus the best.
Diarmuid barely spoke words to me that weren’t barked orders or corrections like, “Sustain your form,” “Endeavor to extend your time in this running activity,” “Lower, you can go lower,” and “Watch the rise of your anger burn, Dorie. You will never manage to beat us if you keep letting it get the best of you.”
Have I mentioned how not fun it is to have a trainer who literally sees you fuming on the inside?
Sometimes I thought I was only imagining the smoldering looks I occasionally caught him giving me, even when I was a sweaty mess.
He had to hate me. Why else would he keep pushing me so hard?
Diarmuid was cruelly adept at sensing which part of my body I could still move, when another had given out.
And no more sexy wall presses. Even though I had a knife and wolf strength, I’d found myself on my back underneath his dragon foot every day with a talon on either side of my neck.
He couldn’t communicate with me while in dragon form, but his eyes glowed in a way that definitely translated to, See how easy it would be to kill you, little she-wolf?
before he lifted his giant front claw to let me up.
I swear, if he had balls, I’d kick him in them.
Yet, he always knew when to stop.
Every day, just as I was about to give in to the urge to either cry or vomit, he dismissed me with a, “You may retire to your bath and write of this day in your journal.”
While I spent most of my meals grilling Aengus, I limped out of every session with Diarmuid with no questions asked, just happy for the torture to be over.
I sometimes get the feeling he is trying to tire me out. Like a dog with too much energy, I wrote in my journal after being informed during one particularly grueling workout that breaks were “not a thing we will be indulging.”
I was so tired most days that I could barely stay awake for last meal, much less put together a cohesive escape plan beyond, Keep on playing along and hope you get an opportunity to slip away and find that door.
Which was not going to work. Every moment we trained outside, Diarmuid’s eyes stayed on me.
But even the dragon’s cruel taskmaster personality was better than Orpheus.
I soon found out that second visit hadn’t been a dream.
Every single night.
Every single night, my sixth wolf sense jerked me awake, and I found him sitting at the end of my bed in seiza.
With a knife gripped in his hand, glinting in the low light.
It was almost as unsettling as the octopus tube toilet, and I guess I did need that knife Sadie’s armorer had given me. Not only did I use it for my training, but I’d taken to sleeping with the weapon under the pillow.
“Go away, Orpheus,” I had to mumble before turning over. “No killing me. That’s an order.”
It said a lot about Diarmuid’s workouts that I still managed to fall back asleep after he left the room, which he always immediately did when I gave him the order.
But seriously, eggplant that guy. He was the worst.
Which made Aengus the easy winner of the three-personality contest.
He fed me, walked me through every piece of god tech in the grotto bath, and often asked me questions instead of the other way around.
He was especially interested in my job as a holoscribe, and I guess my old boss at the WolfNet Gazette had been right about the much-shortened attention span of the general public.
Because here in the Pleistocene Age, Aengus acted like every story I told him about my boring life as the writer behind the Kiwi Koala avatar was his favorite holo series.
The truth was, he asked way more questions than he answered, but of all three personalities, he was the one most likely to reply to my queries.
Not that I ever tried to talk to Orpheus, because, you know—that part about him being the worst.
But still, after two weeks in the Pleistocene Age, the running list I’d made about my captors was embarrassingly short for a trained journalist.
Things I know about the Drakkon
They’re called Drakkon, NOT dragons. I don’t think they have plurals. Hard to tell since their language appears to be made up of hisses, roars, and truly unsettling Predator clicks. I only heard it once, and the memory still haunts me.
Uses we/us/our pronouns—but singular when referring to anyone that isn’t him. Unconfirmed diagnosis: Multiple personality disorder???
Drakkon —> biologically wired to be hunters.
Drakkon = Aliens??? Aengus said something about hailing from the planet closest to our fire star. But Mercury is uninhabited. Maybe he means another solar system. The our/we thing is so confusing.
He also said Earth has two moons, but won’t let me out at night to see them. For my “protection.”
Scary Work??? Aengus mentioned having “work to attend to” once, and when I asked what he did, he said, “We will not risk answering, for fear of displeasing you.” What the devil emoji?
Hypotheses/Guesses:
Do Drakkon = Irish Bear serpent gods??? Makes sense, but only one.
Hypothesis: Aengus Diarmuid Orpheus = all three of the gods that the Irish Bears worship.
If so, how did Sadie know to push me??? Aengus = main control personality?
Diarmuid = warrior? Security guard? Acts and moves like one.
Orpheus = some Freudian stuff about him hating me?
?? The part of him that maybe doesn’t want a fated mate.
More Questions:
1. WHY ME????
2. What does A.D.O. think he’s protecting me from?
3. How are they speaking perfect (if a little fussy) English when English hasn’t been invented yet???
4. Two moons??? What the devil emoji?
5. Is this really my fated mate?