Free Forsaken Dreamscape (Nevermor) by Lani Lenore

known
it.
    “When
I got back, everything was in chaos.  It happened so quickly!  As we were
trying to figure out how it had happened, what had caused it and how we might
beat it back, I lost track of time.  Time meant so little to me back then.  But
I didn’t forget you, Wren.  I want you to know that.  I never forgot you.”
    He
reached for her hand.  The way he looked at her now, even with his fierce eyes,
made her want to take away his pain.
    “I
believe you,” she promised, holding his hand between hers.
    Does
he have fever?  Why is his skin so hot?   She wanted to ask, but he was speaking
again and the moment passed.
    “When
I started talking about bringing you back, Wisp became angry.  I had thought we
were past all that,” he said, shaking his head.
    “Me
too,” Wren agreed quietly.
    “She
felt that she was the only thing protecting me, and she wanted it to stay that
way.  I didn’t know what she was planning – didn’t know to stop it.  It was my
fault.  She had been corrupted long before; I just turned a blind eye to it.”
    Rifter
had always turned a blind eye to the actions of his fairy companion.  The truth
of it was that Whisper had never needed the darkness.  That night at the
orphanage was not the first time she had tried to kill Wren.  Wren hated the
thought of this, but perhaps it was that simple.  Those children had died just
because of her, and yet she had lived.
    “Whisper
came back to me and told me what she had done – that you were dead .  I
didn’t want to believe it, but when I went to see for myself, it was true.  You
weren’t where I’d left you.  A while later, that entire group of children
showed up on the beach here.”
    They
appeared as wanderers – ghosts .  Wren’s heart ached for them.
    “They
were still looking for this place after death, but you weren’t among them.  I
had to believe that you were alive, but I couldn’t find you.  Without Whisper,
and without your own dreams to bring you back here, I couldn’t see you in the
other world.  I had to give up.  Only recently it occurred to me that I might
use my own shadow to find you, but that was a bad idea from the start.  Mimics
have always been corrupted.  They are of the darkness.  Seems that it did work,
however.  It eventually found you – even if it tried to kill you.”
    “What
happened to your mimic?” she asked then, recalling that it had simply disappeared
inside her cell.
    “It
must have sensed I was close when I was looking for you at that prison.  It
attacked me in one of the hallways, but I was able to subdue it.”
    “So
you were behind the riot after all.”
    He
nodded.  “I needed a way to get you out.  Chaos is a good distraction.  At
least you weren’t hurt.”
    Hurt?   Wren had been
ignoring the dull pain in her arm but allowed herself to look at it now.  The
long line where the shadow had cut her had stopped bleeding, but her skin was
smeared with old blood.  She covered it with her hand, hiding it with her hair,
and Rifter did not seem to notice it at all.  Instead, he became agitated,
rising up to pace as he continued his story.
     “To
see the land as it was…  I couldn’t stop thinking about him .  Still, I
didn’t bring him back.  Even so, he knew that this would happen.  He planned
it.”
    The
Scourge…
    “Before
I killed him, as the two of us were tumbling down into that lava pit, he told
me that I wouldn’t be able to keep him away.  He told me it wasn’t over.  The
Scourge set something into motion that day, and he knew that it would come back
around.  None of us were aware enough to see it.”
    Wren
thought back to those last days.  Unlike the rest of them, she’d spent time
with the Scourge – talked with him privately in a way that the others never
had.  He hadn’t told her all of his plans against Rifter, but he had given her
the impression that there was something more to what he had intended than what
he’d presented