Ring of Mushrooms

21

You reached up to Lilia's face, pulling him down to kiss him. You grabbed fistfuls of his hair pulling him into the bed with you and Maleficent. She laughed, gently pulling Silver out of your arms. Lilia tumbled on top of you slipping off his shoes as you forced him to climb in.

"You're awake!" He climbed on top of you gently crushing you underneath him. "Oh I was worried sick!"

You laughed a gasp. One filled with love, a mixture of joy and sorrow. You gently pushed him back and pushed yourself up sitting in front of him. Your hands were shaking again and Maleficent's mulberry stained lips pressed against your collarbone as she waved her hand to make a cradle appear. She placed Silver down before she slipped under the sheets and pressed herself against your side.

She gently intertwined her fingers with yours. "We should explain what happened."

You breathed in sharply, sucking down your anxieties brewing them in your stomach, you squeezed her hand. You were scared to know what happened, the longer you were awake the more you knew that you needed to have it explained. So you nodded, maybe it was better if you stayed quiet, you wouldn't risk breaking down when halfway through a sentence.

You rolled to your side facing Maleficent's chest. She kissed you again, and Lilia wrapped his arms around you from behind.

"When I found you," Lilia started, he punctuated his sentences with soft caresses and kisses to your neck, "You'd lost a lot of blood. You were so cold I almost thought you were dead."

You stiffened up. You wanted to cry again, you wanted to curl up and pretend that this was another story you had been writing. That you were writing a continuation to your novel where it was all something that didn't happen to you, a fake made up story, meant to entertain people.

"You and Silver were both getting worse by the second."

"There wasn't much we could do in general," Maleficent interrupted, "Silver's illness wasn't something we could just magically cure away, and you were bleeding out. Truly we could only pause it and see what happened and just hope for the best."

"Pause it?" You echoed her turn of phrase, you already knew that you weren't going to enjoy what they were explaining, your eyes started to water slightly but you pushed it back, and didn't cry.

"Yes." She ran her thumb across your cheek, not making you look up at her. "I placed you both under a sleeping curse to keep you stable."

"Most people can use magic at least to some minor extent, you had no type of formal training or much use of it." Lilia started talking to you, but it already seemed like the world had stopped. "We think that when you were attacked you subconsciously used a bit of magic to keep you and Silver tied together, for lack of better words."

"We couldn't separate the two of you until your wound healed, the sleeping curse made it so we could interfere and help care for it without harming your connection to Silver," She explained. "You cured Silver's illness, but we separated the two of you so we didn't have to risk working around the connection again."

It made sense, that warmth that you can't clearly remember. The desperate need to find it again, to keep it safe. Losing it is what made you start trying to wake up. "How long was I asleep?" You asked, realizing you had no idea.

"Malleus is a few hundred years old."

It was like cold water being poured down your back. Having Lilia yank your blanket from you in the middle of the night, waking up shaking and confused. Biting into a lemon thinking it was an apple, being confused at the zest and recoiling at the sourness.

You had spent hundreds of years asleep? What about your home? Did Lilia move? Were your things slowly decaying? Your family was absolutely dead at this point, and now you couldn't even attempt to find them again. You had no idea what to process, in all fairness at least you didn't have any human people that you spent every waking moment thinking about, but you could never look for your family, your friend who may have left that little village. What has changed in these few hundred years? Language changes quickly, on occasion you'd hear Lilia say something that you only ever heard your grandfather say.

"What about Silver?" How long until he woke up? Would you die before that? Would you never get to see him grow up? You trusted Lilia to raise him, he was Lilia's son first after all, but you had gotten so attached to the both of them that it hurt to think about possibly never seeing him...

"He'll wake up, we just don't know when." Maleficent spoke softly, she had to have been practicing how to say this for years.

Lilia was quiet, he pressed himself against you, kissing your cheek but part of you could tell it was to help comfort himself as well as you.

"You woke up first because the spell you casted was to keep him healthy and safe, you were almost killed trying to protect him, you had a reason to fight off the spell." She explained it so softly. Perhaps you might be mad that she was being so careful but you still could hear her whispering to you when you had tried to wake up, comforting you to stay calm. "You never wore the curse off the way it's supposed to be. Sleeping curses always affect you after being broken, you'll always dream of the same thing you saw under the curse. Every time you sleep you'll stay exactly the way you did when you went to sleep. Sleep for an hour or another century; you'll never age in that time."

She really did explain it well, but you still shook, you desperately wanted to cry and go back to reading books to Silver whenever Lilia was away with work. Now you just felt so confused. How were you supposed to feel? Every time you'd sleep you'd dream of that damn ocean, would you be looking for that warmth still too?

"And Silver?" You asked again, you could tell she didn't have the heart to explain it to you when you could easily guess she had explained it to Lilia.

"When Silver wakes up he will have worn down the curse correctly," he told you, speaking softly into your neck, still wrapped around you under the sheets. "He will be as sleepy as an infant but he'll be fine. He'll age about the same as an average human if not just a little slower."

How does someone react to that news? Is there a right way to react? You were so happy to see him sleeping peacefully, he wasn't warm to the touch. He was healthy and sweet. You almost felt as if no time had passed other than the stab wound healing. Yet you had just passed that off as magic. But you were wrong, so horribly wrong.

Your hands found both of theirs. Each embraced you with a gentle candied coated touch. You let your hands grasp out and caress whatever they let you. No matter the amount of heartbreak you had these two to comfort you, and you desperately needed it. Being suspended in that deep loneliness, surrounded by nothing and starving for someone to be with you'd take crumbs off the floor if you needed. Yet they gave you more than you could have asked for.

Their hands traveled over you. They dragged their palms across your side, pressing their lips against your skin. Brushing their noses against your cheeks, your neck. Together they drew lines across your skin, painting kisses and sweet nips into your skin. So with a final shaky breath you let yourself relax into the bed, and into their arms.