He could not keep himself from adding, “Though you have thrown them into disarray and made them forget their duty to their prime.”
“Sorry to have inconvenienced you by disrupting your tyranny over your minions,” Dorie said.
By now, he knew this apology to be a product of the thing Dorie called sarcasm. So he did not answer.
“And y’know, as long as I’ve got you here, let’s just jump to the big question.” She came to stand right in front of him, her hands balling into fists. “How many eggplanting times have I been here?”
He didn’t answer.
She’d always been so careful with her Reverence power. Maybe she wouldn’t?—
“Tell me. That’s an order.”
“1000 times!” The words squeezed up from his throat with the force of the Reverence. “This is your 1000th cycle. You have been here 999 times before.”
Dorie physically jerked. As if he’d hit her.
Fenrir Prime wondered how she would react this time.
She had only found out about the loop six times in a thousand. Most versions of her never made it past the closet door.
He braced himself for the eyewater, the denials, the catatonia—some combination of the three. He had learned to endure all of them. For Dorie 999, it had been all three after she grew suspicious and had wheedled the information out of Omicron.
But Dorie 1000 simply stared at him.
Then held up a finger.
“Okay… Okay…” she said.
Dorie strode forward then, weaving between him and the silenced Omicron, and walked out.
Simply walked out!
Four pauses. That was all the time she had left over him. They were all rooted to the spot until she released them or the Reverence expired—whichever came first. They could not even turn around to watch her go.
The door to his sleeping quarters was still programmed to let her in and out, which would mean hunting her down on the night of the full moons and having to?—
“Okay, I’m back.”
She reappeared in Fenrir Prime’s eyeline, carrying the wooden chair Aengus had made for her in both hands.
She set it down right in front of her arc of frozen drakkon before grabbing one of the journals from the shelf.
Omicron made them different each time, always trying to add something new. This was one of the more intricate ones, leather-bound, with feathers from an extinct bird Dorie 481—a zookeeper—had told him about.
“So, this sounds like a story.” She flipped through it until she found a blank page of vellum.
Then took a seat in the chair she’d set down. “Okay, Fenny Prime. Tell me everything.”
Once Upon a Pause
[From the Journalof Dorie 481, as transcribed by Dorie 1000]
Key:
Me = Dorie 1000
O = Orpheus, Fenrir Prime
