Because it was. “Thank you!” I whispered, genuinely overcome.
That night, I made my first entry….
Hello, my name is Dorie Hamilton-Scotswolf, and I’ve fallen through time.Here’s everything I’ve learned about my new reality so far….
I didn’t get far in my recounting before succumbing to sleep.
And sometime after moonrise, I turned over to find A.D.—or, I guess, Orpheus—sitting statue-still at the edge of my bed. “Go away, Orpheus,” I mumbled sleepily. “Don’t kill me. That’s an order.”
The statue animated, making an ominous growling noise.
But then he stood in one liquid rise to his feet and departed the cavern, leaving me to fall back asleep.
Was it just a dream?I wrote in the journal first thing when I woke up the next morning.
Soon after, Aengus came through with another meal.
Aengus-Diarmuid-Orpheus and A.D.O. felt too unwieldy. So I decided I’d just call him Aengus when he was being nice to me, like when he served me another plate meal of barbecued mega-deer, Pleistocene salad, and berry compote with a cheery, “Good morning, Dorcas. We hope this fare will sustain you well for this day’s training.”
He also brought mega-deer for last meal, and the first meal the following morning was, yep, you guessed it, mega-deer and a Pleistocene salad. This time without the berry compote.
When he set the bronze plate in front of me again, my modern palette overrode my good manners.
I was tired and achy from the drills he’d put me through in Diarmuid mode, no closer to convincing him to let me take a look farther inside the keep, and just could not take another meal of crispy meat.
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but is there any other kind of food I can eat?”
“We will switch to another meat, and we are working on providing the variety you crave. During our free time, we scour the land hoping to find fruit and grains we might give you in offering, but so far our search has been futile.” He bowed his head. “We were not quite prepared to host you. Our apologies.”
Something uncomfortably close to guilt wormed its way into my chest at the thought of him scouring the land while I hammered out possible escape plans in the gorgeous journal he’d given me.
“Don’t go to too much trouble for me,” I said. “This is probably more than I should expect, anyway.”
“There is nothing you cannot expect from us, Dorcas.” He spoke the words like a solemn vow. “We would do anything for you.”
His voice was quiet smoke, but his eyes burned with that hungry-but-not-for-food look that was beginning to become familiar.
I had to duck my head to get away from it.
“Anything except call me Dorie when you’re in nice mode,” I grumbled. “Or let me out of this room for anything other than exercise.”
“Anything except compromise your protection,” he insisted.
“Again, protection from what?” I set the fork down, no longer hungry. “You’re the only one here.”
He gathered up the plate with my half-eaten meal. “We hope to find sustenance beyond meat for you soon.”
Over the next two weeks, a lot of our conversations ended like that. He was a terrible tennis player, lobbing a couple of balls back that barely made it over the net before ending the game altogether.
Still, of all of his personalities, I liked Aengus the best.
Diarmuid barely spoke words to me that weren’t barked orders or corrections like, “Sustain your form,” “Endeavor to extend your time in this running activity,” “Lower, you can go lower,” and “Watch the rise of your anger burn, Dorie. You will never manage to beat us if you keep letting it get the best of you.”
Have I mentioned how not fun it is to have a trainer who literally sees you fuming on the inside?
Sometimes I thought I was only imagining the smoldering looks I occasionally caught him giving me, even when I was a sweaty mess.
He had to hate me. Why else would he keep pushing me so hard?
