normally would. “They are catching up!”
My bride’s face fell with the sudden realization that I wasn’t going to protect her. Naima shook her head in denial and took a step back as if she couldn’t tolerate being in my presence. The betrayal on her face and the hurt she broadcast towards me cut me to the core. A pain like I’d never felt before, in this realm or hers, flooded directly into me through my brand connecting us. It felt like acid eating me from the inside out.
“Fuck you,” Naima hissed almost in a whisper filled with pain, tears rolling down her cheeks. The look of hurt and disillusion on her beautiful face struck me like a thousand daggers. “I’m not playing your stupid games anymore.” She angrily wiped the tears glistening on her cheeks with the back of her hand. “You want your monsters to kill me? Then enjoy the show, you sick fuck!”
Turning her back to me, Naima spread her arms wide, tilted her head back, and closed her eyes while waiting for death to come claim her.
Terror, a feeling I had never experienced before, slammed into me at this reckless display. I raced towards my woman, while summoning countless trees before the Beast. It had gone into a hungry frenzy as he carved himself a path to Naima, now that she had surrendered her life to him. With a wave of my hand, I dispelled the zombie fairies that had been less than fifty meters away from her.
I swooped in and snagged my bride before flying away in all haste. Naima yelped in surprise, and fear, thinking I was one of the creatures stalking her, then instinctively wrapped her arms around my neck, shock and confusion visible on her face. The Beast roared in fury, having been denied his prize with less than twenty meters to go. It gave us chase, but I was too fast for it as I flew through the defensive walls that defined the perimeter of my domain in the Mist. The wall would kill the Beast if it attempted to trespass.
Even now that she was in safety, my head spun with the overwhelming lingering fear that still wanted to choke me. At the same time, anger at my female’s recklessness bubbled inside me with the need to erupt. I landed in the empty clearing that surrounded the immediate vicinity of my wall. Putting Naima on her feet, I gripped her shoulders in a bruising hold while glaring at her.
“What the fuck do you think you were doing?” I shouted, furious.
“Refusing to be a puppet in your twisted mind games,” Naima hissed, lifting her chin defiantly in a way that left me speechless. She’d never stood up to me in the past, always cowering in fear instead. “You wanted to see me get eaten by a Beast. I was giving you satisfaction while getting out of this farce. Why are you so upset? Unhappy your prey didn’t want to play by your rules,” she added in a mocking tone.
“What you did,” I hissed back in her face, “was nearly commit suicide! That Cthulhu Beast was not a summoned illusion like the fairies. It was a real Mist Beast I had lured here.”
“So what?” she retorted with an irritated expression. “This is a dream. MY dream. The Beast kills me, I wake up, and I’m out of this bullshit scenario!”
“NO, YOU STUPID FEMALE!” I shouted, giving her a single shake. “This is not a dream. You are not sleeping. You are walking awake in the dream world. When you sleep, a sliver of your consciousness crosses the Veil. On its own, the human mind isn’t powerful enough for a full walk like you are currently doing. That’s why you don’t remember your dreams in the morning. That’s why you can die in your dreams. But when you do, that part of you in the dream dies! Your people usually awaken before it, but the few times you don’t, a part of you is lost forever. There’s a reason humans say that if you die in your dream, you die in the real world.”
Naima froze, a horrified expression descending on her features. “Are you saying I would have died in the real world if that Cthulhu had eaten me?”
I heaved a sigh and let go of her shoulders. “I’m saying that the part of you that is here with me right now would have died. Unlike us, humans cannot do a full transfer of consciousness