Trinket (Reverse Harem)

Sing Me, Sing Me Back To Sleep

 I surged upward, screaming and clawing my way towards the hand that held mine. My body didn't obey, all jumbled pieces and stitches and pain burned through my face and down my neck through my shoulders, fire pouring through all of me while everything compressed while it tried to rip apart.

"Theia," Itek said as he hauled me, flailing, off my bed, into his arms. Or maybe I clamped myself onto him and held on for dear life.

I shuddered on something that might have been sobs while my brain turned into a mirror (or window pane?) that broke and re-formed over and over again. Those footsteps echoed through me, the fluttering, strange lights, that hallway.

"Shh," Itek whispered, smoothing my hair, and I realized I'd been (and still was) screaming. "Shh, shh."

I clung to him and twisted my hands into his gold hair, and stared at the drawn curtains over the windows of my bedroom, but my brain saw a dozen different other things, and saw them all at the same time. Not jumping from memory/vision/dream to memory/vision/dream, but it was like seeing a reflection in a broken mirror, except every shard was something different. Even shards of my life back in my home enclave were in there, along with shards from the Priestess' of Dreams encounter.

Asund pressed himself into my back, squishing me between himself and Itek.

I dug my fingernails into Itek's back. Itek crushed me against his chest, and Asund crushed us both.

Korr, Ormiss, and Ethat were suddenly there (or I realized they were there).

"Shhh," Itek murmured, stroking my hair, and crooning in his throat.

I tried to will the shaking to stop, but it didn't. Not for what felt like forever.

Itek smoothed my hair with both of his hands while Asund held me against his chest. Itek steadied my face in his hands, staring at me with intent, golden eyes. "We're all here. Even Ethat."

Ethat, fiddling with his fingers and crammed into a far corner, nervously watched, expression ghoulish. "I will kill that bird, I will--"

"Not now," Korr snarled.

"What..." happened, was that, what's happening... My scars ached, scorched and raw, like Cook had held me over boiling water.

"We don't know," Itek said. He stroked his thumbs along my temples, stroking me like I was a cat getting its ears and cheeks rubbed. "but we will figure it out. I promise."

I looked at Ormiss. He stood just behind Itek, drawn and anxious, staff nowhere to be seen. The memories of whatever I'd seen--memories? dreams? hauntings? visions?-- were right there, like shards of glass in a pond.

"Don't struggle with it," Itek said. "Just let it settle."

"I--I think I'm... better now." I slowly lifted my fingers off his back, testing if I started to shake or spin around, but nothing happened, so I lifted my hands completely. "Oh."

My fingertips were bloody and I had skin buried under them.

"It's nothing," Itek said with a charming, reassuring smile, and a wicked glint in his golden eyes.

I studied my bloody fingertips. Then, sort of dazed, I went to go wash them and pick the flesh out from under my nails. Walking helped ease the weird drifting feeling, and I prayed for my headcheese to congeal more so I'd stop being so aware of all the weird chunks.

What was I seeing? They felt like memories. But they were a jumble of memories, all strung together and detached.

A mirror hung in the bathroom. I looked at my reflection. Put my palm over it to block out my face, thought of the snowy scene in the mountains, so warm, so wonderful, so... cozy.