Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 88010 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 88010 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 440(@200wpm)___ 352(@250wpm)___ 293(@300wpm)
“Why did you make the game?”
He shrugs. “For something to do. I get bored. We are the dominant faction in the realm. My uncle is a strong and capable leader. There is little call for a young warrior like myself. I can do all the training missions in the world, but at a certain point I needed to do something with my mind. People need me in the way nobody in this realm does. Here, Ornix is in control. In my version of the realm? I’m in control. And I have subjects who get to do things they could never do in their own world. I love what I’ve made.”
I smile at his passion for the game. “You should. It’s really incredible. I didn’t get to play it as much once I made friends in college, then I had to go out all the time and stuff, but your game filled in so much of my time when I didn’t have friends, and I even met some really cool people in it.”
Equinox grins. “It’s amazing to have a player here. I wish I could have more people see this place and realize that there’s more here than they could imagine. Could you see it? Hordes of specially handpicked human players running the forest dungeons for themselves, then moving on?”
“That would be crazy,” I say. “And I’d get to see some other people. I don’t think I’m going to get to see anyone like me for a very long time.”
Equinox looks at me solemnly, and for a moment, I wonder if I have said too much.
“Do you want to get back to the human world?” He mumbles the question to me.
“Oh, my god, yes. Can you help me?”
“I have a portal I use for work. I can sneak you into it once we all get back to the Golden Keep. I don’t want you feeling trapped here. I’m not saying Uncle Ornix won’t come for you anyway, but it’s there.”
I feel a bit guilty, plotting to run away while Ornix discusses the seal with his advisors, or whoever they are. But I do want to get back to the human world. I want to get back to sanity. I want to find myself among people. I barely know the creature who has taken me as his mate, and the fact that we have spent almost the entire time we’ve known each other having sex doesn’t change that.
“That’s very nice of you,” I say. “Won’t it get you in trouble?”
“Everything gets me in trouble. I’m trying to bring this realm into the modern age. We can’t keep acting as if the human world is still stuck in medieval times. Taking some human female and ravaging her over and over until she spits out a baby isn’t right.”
“It’s pretty wild.”
“Wild isn’t the half of it. I couldn’t put that in the game. It would get the whole thing taken down. People don’t realize that the hunger of a dragon and the greed of a dragon extends to more than jewels. If too many of our kind were to enter the human realm it would be a disaster. It is better our numbers stay low, even though Ornix and the others insist on trying to make me take a mate.”
“You could find someone who likes you, who wants to be ravaged?”
He snorts. “Who would do that?”
“A lot of people, I think, of all genders.”
He smiles. “You’re sweet. I’d like to help you escape before you get pregnant. Nobody deserves to be stuck in this realm. It’s fun for a game setting, but year after year for eternity? It’s basically hell.”
Escaping is appealing for many reasons. When Ornix fucks me and breeds me, it is hot as hell, but the notion of actually giving birth, of mothering? That feels like a lot right now. I planned to have a family one day, but I always assumed it would be in my late twenties, with a human man.
“Come and find me when you’re back at the keep. My rooms are on the floor below his. Go downstairs and open the door with the three-horned dog on it.”
That’s the symbol his game company uses. I would have recognized it anywhere.
I nod, daring to feel a little excited.
I miss the world I came from. Already. It is a hollowness inside me, a certain amount of being completely unsettled all the time because this is not where I belong. I was not made in this world and to some extent, I think I feel it trying to eject me, like a splinter from skin.
A shadow falls over us, depriving us of moonlight in the shape of Ornix.
“What are you two talking about?”
I feel an instant surge of anxiety. What if he heard us? What if he already knows about the plot we were just hatching?