Trinket (Reverse Harem)

Hippocamp or Not-o-camp?

I followed behind the attendants, with the Guards right behind me, through a network of corridors that were more circular and bending than straight, and it seemed like we were winding about instead of just walking somewhere. Maybe she was taking me for a walk like I was her newest pet.

I kept my eyes and ears out for any signs of my consorts, but nothing. We eventually got outside, and hippocamps whispered as I passed, but I couldn't make out the words. I couldn't tell from their tone what they might have been talking about, and I couldn't see anything except the road and paths under my feet.

She took me across a small bridge that crossed over a sparkling waterway populated with exotic fish, then through a courtyard where instead of flowers they had carved shapes out of the sandstone grounds so water could flow through it in exotic designs. Up stairs into what I guessed was a temple.

She pulled the fabric off my head.

Everything on the inside of the temple—if that's what it was, I couldn't quite tell—was covered in seashells, more of the strange branch-stone in many colors and shapes, and precious metals and gems and glass and the fins of I guess exotic sea creatures. Carved water-channels lined both sides of the aisle leading up to the front, and the lanterns from the ceiling reflected all the light in beautiful patterns on the walls and ceiling.

I got the impression that the arrangement of shells and such on the walls and ceiling told a story, like a strange mosaic, but I couldn't make it out.

It wasn't at all familiar, though. Nothing was familiar about this place.

The main standstone aisle ended at a broad square, around which more water flowed, and there was a raised dais made of more of the stone-branch substance, and inside it looked to be something. A relic, perhaps? But waiting at the strange altar was another hippocamp, also a female, her hair artfully arranged and heavily decorated, and she had bands of a lustrous material wrapped around her upper arms and on her wrists and ankles. A few more hippocamp lurked in the water, in hippocamp form, beyond the altar, their horse-heads just above the surface, ears pricked, and horns exposed.

"Do you have a name?" the female at the altar asked.

"Theia," I said.

"Is that your only name?"

"It's the one I know," I replied.

"Where you from, Theia?" she asked.

"I don't know," I replied.

"You have no memory of where you're from?" She peered at me with eyes the color of emeralds.

"No. My consorts tell me I'm a shifter, but I've never shifted, and they don't know what kind," I said, unsure what to say. How do you ask am I your lost princess?

"You are a shifter," she said. "I can't tell what kind either. Which is very peculiar. Usually we're able to tell, or even have a guess, except in the cases of the most mutt-bred. Your parents?"

"I don't remember anything," I said.

"Where did your consorts find you?"

In a dream? Another realm? I had no idea how to answer that, so I said, "Haven. We were flying to a southern island to find a Pantere Priestess who knows about dreams when we met some trouble over the ocean. Korr—the ice dragon—says that my connection to my past has been severed. Like a broken spine. That's why I can't shift. The only clue we have is a strange dream my wolf consort, Asund, and I shared before we ever met in person. They hope the Pantere will be able to help. I was just enjoying sitting in the waves braiding rope to try to go drag my three consorts to shore with my gryphon consort's help when Ormiss showed up and offered to help. And then he lied to us and dragged us all down here as prisoners."