Tethered

Chapter 3: Choices✔️

Home.

I am home now, but is this my safe haven? It used to be.

Torin is here, my brother, but is he still a protector to me? He certainly can't protect me from this.

Pleading eyes meet steel resolve. "Forgive me, Gilly."

"You threw me to the beast." I can speak this way now. He is gone until tomorrow.

Tomorrow.

The day of the blood-bonding. The day my wonderful life ends and my new life awaits to kill any traces of joy that might be left.

"He bound us away from you. He used his power to keep us in place! We all tried to break free! You have to believe me Gil."

He used his magyk, a precious gift from the goddess, to isolate them from me? Questions ring through my head.

"Why would he do that? You're my family."

"To show you that we are not a part of your life any longer." His head hangs low, his hair ruffled. He's stressing over this as much as I am, maybe even more.

Hands cover my face, trying and failing to hold myself together. Tears leak. I rip the beautiful butterfly piece from my hair, smash it to the ground of our foyer.

"Why does he want me? He has an entire harem of women to choose from, so why me?" Pointless questions that receive no answers, just arms that wrap around me in a cocoon of false assurance.

"There doesn't always have to be a reason. Sometimes life just veers off track."

I don't let him comfort me for long. I have to hold my own in this world now, just as I have begged for my whole life. I must now use my own strength to survive, so I head to bed shortly after our hug. I need some time to think. I need to figure out a game plan.

I need a loophole.

I change quickly into a nightgown and lay back, letting my thoughts consume my mind.

What if I run? What would happen to my family? Could I risk their deaths for my own selfish desires?

My father had said he was bound by his word, his word, not my word. Would he be held accountable if I suddenly disappear?

Thoughts circle and clash and my mind feels like a vortex.

Spinning and spinning.

I can't tell a soul if I leave,
not Torin,
not Lorys.

Im on my own in this and either way I will have the same result. Only the circumstances will differ.

Option 1: Bond with Cyran, live my life in agony, in hatred, let the very person I have become slip away without a remnant of my former self left and without my family.

Option 2: Leave. Run into the Everforest, hope to live through each night until I find safety...
If I find safety.

Either way I won't have a family. I won't see my brothers' smiles. I won't have my mother to pamper me. I won't hear my father's stories from the war.