"You would have been young when you bore her," he said. "Too young to have agreed to become a mother."
I took a sharp breath in.
It was the tone of his words that undid me. His voice held layers of warmth that are difficult to fake, and he looked at me with eyes that were softened with understanding. I wasn't expecting it. When I first met him, he was a ravenous beast of a man, falling upon me without hesitation or thought about conversation. Now he was a consummate gentleman in the truest definition of the word, refusing to let the conversation veer from the truth of the matter yet calling me on my habit-worn lie with the kind of compassion that unraveled the knot I'd tied around the truth.
He waited as the silence grew between us, a pressure of a flooded river churning behind the constraints of a dam built in my childhood interrupted.
I opened the floodgates.
"He... he was a lot older than me, and I believed him when he told me I was mature for my age. He said he wanted to marry me, but then he also kept talking shit about my mom, being a single mom, but that wasn't her fault. Then he slapped me when I told him off, and I went on the internet and asked for advice, and strangers told me to run. By the time I told my mom it was too late to do anything but have Anne," I said, feeling the old ache of thoughts I didn't like to think about anymore. "She gave up everything to get me away from him. We moved before I gave birth, changed our names, cut ties with everyone so that the sperm donor wouldn't find us. I have to finish high school somewhere else with a new baby sister."
I took a shuddering breath as a sharp pain rose between what I wanted and what I refused to give up.
"That's why I can't just stay here with you," I said, letting the words come out. "What my mom did for me... that isn't something everyone's parents would do. I've heard so many stories of girls being yelled at and forced to make choices they didn't want, whether to keep or let go. She gave up everything when the police said they wouldn't press charges, and I refused to give the baby up. I didn't want to be with him anymore, but I couldn't bear to think of parting with the life growing in me. So my mom made the choice to abandon her entire life and support me so that I could have my cake and eat it, so to speak. I can't force any more of my choices on her. She's already done so much to give me everything. I can't just run off with the first Forest Lord I meet and become some sort of magical forest goddess. To hell with my family."
Lorthion tilted his head as he regarded me. His fur faded away, replaced by a silk suit embroidered with flowers that matched the blossoms on the trees around us. He held out his arm again. "I understand," he said, holding out his arm. "And I would love to come to dinner. First, would you like to see how your familiar is doing and meet some of my friends?"
"You have friends?" I asked, startled by his statement. Immediately after I said it, I wished I had kept my mouth shut.
He laughed. "I like to think of them as friends. You can ask them what they think of me yourself."
I nodded, feeling emotionally worn out and embarrassed. I had made so many assumptions about him because his behavior was so intense and magnetic. If I hadn't had the ties holding onto my heart, I would have thrown myself into the fire with him right away, letting his predatory aggression sweep me away. That same aggression was what made me see him as a monster. Then he flipped back, showing me his thoughtfulness and his deep attention to me. So I opened myself to him.
I hadn't told anyone my story. I'd finished high school but never made any friends I considered real friends, because I always had to hide that entire part of my life from them. How could I connect with people if all I did was lie to them about who I was? I couldn't tell the truth. There was no way. I couldn't risk someone who thought they had good intentions and just wanted to make sure the statutory donor knew where his offspring was. Those were the kind of good intentions that led straight to hell.
I felt vulnerable, more than I had in a long time.
So instead of saying anything else, I slid my arm through his, feeling the touch of his soft silk garment under my hand, and let him lead me off through the woods. I remained silent as we walked, and he didn't seek to fill the silence in words. Instead, the stroll was carried with the background melody of birds, singing sweeter than I'd ever heard before, interlocking harmonies that didn't sound possible for random animals in a forest. When a high soprano, a sweet wordless singer, joined the backdrop of harmonies, I stopped in my tracks.
"What is that?" I whispered, hoping my quiet voice would disturb the beauty of the singer.
"It is a phoenix," Lorthion said, his voice low, matching mine. "I have many that have chosen to live within my woods recently. They are being drawn to something in the school."
Then I saw her, perched on a branch, her feathers dripping down from her as they rippled with flame. Its feathers were liquid lava that flowed down its body, accenting the long, slender neck reminiscent of a peacock. It had a delicate head with huge eyes that sparkled as it tilted its beak to the sky to sing. Though it looked like a living creature of flame, the branch it sat on seemed unaffected, not burning or charring.
"What could attract something so beautiful to a place so horrible?" I asked, still whispering.
"They are creatures of Chaos, too fragile to survive in the Mundane, and they are drawn to only one being," Lorthion said, his voice holding a tone of awe. "The Chaos God has returned to the Magic Realm."
I'd heard people talking about something like that at the school before I escaped. That one day the Chaos God would return to fight the Order Goddess and there would be a great battle where good would finally triumph over evil. The problem was that what seemed like the people who insisted they were on the side of 'Good' and used that as a reason to demand that other people give up control over their own lives, were the ones who did the most evil.
We stayed there until the song finished and the Phoenix vanished into the forest.
Then we continued our walk until we got to the huge treehouse in the gorgeous clearing. It took all of two seconds to realize that Veveron was fine and didn't want to see me. She didn't want anyone to bother her in her nesting chamber. So we left to go meet Lorthion's friends. It was another long walk through the forest, with a couple of stops to snack on fruit that seemed to be growing everywhere. I didn't recognize most things, but there was a delicious cherry tree that had soft pink cherries. Eventually we got to our destination.
"I don't see anyone," I said as I looked around the small lake. I could see most of the circumference of it, and there was a possibility that his friends were lurking on that rocky outcropping on the other side of the water, but it seemed strange when the spot we were at had a nice sloping dirt beach with several trees in a circle that were grown with a zigzag near the bottom that shaped them into perfect benches. There was a stack of towels on a boulder that sat right on the edge of the water.
"They arrive," Lorthion said, pointing at the water.
There were bubbles on the surface of the water where he was pointing. Suddenly, a woman burst from the water, lunging up into the air up to her hips as she tossed her hair back like a mermaid breaching the surface. She had a mask covering her face, clear and see-through, and was wearing a brightly colored wetsuit. As she settled back down in the water to her shoulders, she smiled and waved at me, and I lifted my hand and waved back. Then another head popped up near her, and another, but they weren't wearing masks. The individuals had intense skin color, with stark white on their faces and chests and black on their backs.
The woman swam towards us with big breast-strokes until she got to a place where she could stand, then she waddled forward. When her feet came free from the water, I could see she was wearing big flippers. She pulled off her mask, revealing dark skin and a big grin as she pulled off her flippers and crossed the distance between us. Behind her, a merman and a mermaid, both bare-chested, beached themselves on the shore with a sudden surge of water. I caught a glimpse of them grabbing a towel off his rock, and then the woman was in my face, grabbing my hand.
"Hi!" she said, her voice breathless as she took in deep, rapid breaths as if she had just been doing an intense workout. She released my hand. "I'm Susan. Welcome to freedom. How did you get out? The Sirens didn't rescue you, that's for sure, or I would have met you already."
"Susan, you must greet the Forest Lord with respect," one of the male mermen said from behind her.
"Oh, she's fine, Lorthion doesn't mind, do you, Lorthion?" the mermaid said as she rubbed the towel on her tail.
