Trinket (Reverse Harem)

A Lack of Hospitality

Ormiss is such an asshole. In fact, every hippocamp I've met so far is a huge asshole. Asshole has lost all meaning. Huge asshole has lost all meaning.

Ormiss wasn't lying about the whole we don't believe in hospitality.

"Wait here," Ormiss said.

"For how long?" I demanded, turning around to glare at him. I have no intention of staying put in these rooms for the gods knew how long while Ormiss did whatever he was doing to my consorts. "Those are my consorts, hippocamp."

"I know who you claim they are," Ormiss said, bristling with annoyance.

"Claim! They are."

"I wasn't arguing. I can't imagine why anyone would fight to have you as a consort," he said, voice deadpan.

I sat down on a chair and crossed one leg over the other, trying not to show how badly that stung, because it stung. I've asked myself that about a million times why three high-shifter lords would want weirdo mutt-me, with all her scars and I couldn't even get my maids to be civil to me and not tell me how lowly I was. "Because the gods ordained it, I suppose."

"I suppose," he agreed.

He closed the door, then threw the locks, and finally the clack of a heavy bar.

"Fuck," I groaned. I leaned my head back and stared at the seashell-decorated ceiling. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Great. And now I'm trapped with the hippocamps. Being a lost princess sounds like a bad time, but the only thing that might save our bacon right now is if I am the lost hippocamp princess. I wasn't an expert on politics, but if I was already mated to two dragons, a gryphon, and a wolf, then that didn't leave a lot of room for the raven-lord I was obliged to.

Unless the raven-lord liked sharing and then things were going to get weird, although maybe not, because the younger shifters had a bone to pick with the older shifters soooo...

Except the world was kind of ending so did it matter?

I groan again. I should never have dangled my feet in the water and asked for help. Never ask for help. You don't know who is going to answer, and suddenly you've got a super hot hippocamp dragging you into the ocean. Because you should always trust random hippocamps that come out of the ocean at night.

I touched my trinket. If I was the hippocamp princess, I was never supposed to go through the Churn. I wasn't supposed to have a trinket, because I'd been promised to the Lord Raven. And it was probably the Ravens who had hurt me and tossed me in some kind of weird pocket realm.

And what the hell had been those creatures that had chased us off-course and gotten us into this mess? Did the hippocamp know about them? Because nobody seemed to know what those had been.

Except they'd been scary. Really scary.

I prowled around the room, deduced there was no way out, and went onto my little balcony to sulk and watch the city. There wasn't any sunlight this far down, so everything was like twilight, but I realized that I could hear a bell tolling the hours somewhere in the distance. I had a nice enough view of the courtyard below, where various hippocamp in human form and wearing seashells and light attire, moved about and conversed.

Why didn't they just live in hippocamp form? Why did they live in a bubble? They were hippocamp. On land, I guessed the shifters chose to mostly live in human form because it was practical: human form was a nice compromise in size for fitting through doors and building streets. You could speak the common languages in human form. A lot of different types of shifters had to live together, and most of them were born in human form anyway, so human form was the default.