The Unwilling Queen

To sleep perchance to dream

Avery thought of nothing. It wasn't hard to shut down. Her mind was as numb as her body, slowly sinking into the mud. Rivulets of water ran down her face and neck, her simple shirt and pants soaked and stuck to her skin. She started to shiver at one point but forced herself to stop. Shivering was your body trying to warm itself up. It was your body trying to stay alive. That was not what she wanted.

She lay on the forest floor for hours, perhaps days, and still the sky stayed dark and stormy, the rain never stopped, and she never died.

Movement in the forest. She tried to ignore it but her mind was already tired of doing nothing. It could never stay blank for long. Even as she counted the seconds between lightning and thunder to focus--to prevent herself from wondering where it all began--her mind wandered. Her world had changed when Roedin fell from the sky. Or was it before that? Was the fox or the bird or the fire in her woodstove real? Was Ferrik just a dark, twisted part of her mind that wanted desperately to feel something?

Perhaps the Cabin wasn't real, and she was already cursed, a corpse locked in stone just as Rena had warned. Doomed to never meet the gods or the Ancestors or whomever was rolling the dice with their lives. Closing her eyes she prayed for oblivion, to know nothing.

Death was supposed to be the easy part, but it was just as hard as living.

The ground moved. Closing her eyes couldn't shut out the reverberations of an army marching by.

Curiosity betrayed her. Squinting against the torrent of rain Avery saw people in the trees. Their figures moved amongst the trunks and branches. Were they dancing? Exercising? What did it matter, nothing was real.

A wing poked out from behind a trunk. He was barely more than a shadow, his figure distorted by the intense downpour of rain. Her stupid heart lurched but she kept still. He's not there. It was just a dream of what she wanted, a life she couldn't have. Pieced together from textbooks and fairytales and wishes that would never come true. She had finally gone insane.

But she couldn't help it. If he was a fantasy--if that life wasn't real and Corinth didn't exist and she was never part of a pack--she didn't care. She would rather get lost back in that hallucination than spend another night alone.

"You need to let go."

Avery rolled her head to glare at the source. "Rena?"

Her friend, her sister, her mother, her keeper. "We've been trying to help you for so long."

"You're dead," Avery said. "I killed you."

She nodded. "You killed me because we got too close."

"Too close to what?" Avery pushed herself up on shaky arms.

Rena looked over her shoulder to a weaving mass of living vines that threatened to grow around the clearing. "We were trying to find a way to let Safira in. Combine her magic with a mind-prime and tear down this spell that is keeping you here."

"Safira didn't care about me. She only ever wanted Adelyn." What was she saying? Avery leaned forward and clutched her head in her hands. She needed to stop engaging, stop playing along with her fantasies. Rena is dead. No, she wasn't. She couldn't be dead because she was never alive. Avery groaned and dug her fingers into her scalp.

"Was Adelyn ever real?" Avery asked.

"A generous, open-minded, powerful alpha prime?" Rena suggested. "Probably, somewhere, someday. To you she was real. That's all that matters."

"It's not. I don't want to live in a fantasy. I want a real world."

"No you don't." Rena pointed to the Cabin, the only real world Avery had ever known. "You've been trying to escape reality forever. You even invented Ferrik to give yourself an enemy, a reason to hate."