The Anima [completed]

20.

20.

The Anima brought us to a quaint cottage further downstream, huddled in the centre of a small clearing, yellow daisies blooming on the moss covered walls.  Once inside, she shoved the men down upon the coaches in the dining room, pushed me into a chair opposing them and threw a large chunk of meat out the front door for Beast to feed upon. She busied herself in the kitchen, pots clanking as she prepared us all tea and honey biscuits. We all exchanged weary glances, the men's eyes glued to the floor to avoid glancing at the lady's naked body, that she still had not covered with anything but her liquid black hair.

I peered around the room, absorbing every detail of the woman's home, attempting to understand just where her power came from. There were landscape paintings hung high on the wooden panel walls, tiny vines growing through the cracks of the floor curling around the golden frames. A fireplace cracked in the corner of the room, licking the air with its blue and red tongues and consuming the logs laid upon the hearth. My fingers sunk into the fur of my chair; all the furniture covered in lavish animal hides with prints unrecognisable to my human eyes. I could not see any of the other rooms, but I imagined them to be as homely as the one I sat comfortably in and undisturbed by the silence that had crept into the throats of the men in the room, sleeping upon their tongues.

"Here. This tea will help you all process the following information and allow me to gather what I need." The woman spoke formally as she entered the room bearing a large teapot and several floral cups.

Again, she passed those golden eyes over our faces, waiting for us to drink the concoction she laid before us on a small coffee table. A smile crept upon my lips as the men continued to stare blindly at the floor, choosing not to look and see the true beauty of the goddess before them. I reached for the cups and poured them all a generous amount of the liquorish smelling tea, saving the strong brew that I knew to be at the bottom of the pot for myself. I sipped it hastily, noting it was not scalding, and then chugged it down quickly. My vision blurred if only for a moment before I could refocus. I could feel it; my mind clearing of its built up congestion, the festering questions which had brewed in the corners for too long.

A wider smile grew upon my face and I looked up to see the woman smiling back. Like everything else about her, her teeth were flawlessly white, blinding even, creating a great contrast to her dark skin. When I truly recognised her good intentions, my mind opened to her just as it had to the Gryphon. With her delicate fingers she quickly plucked through my memories, as if not to alarm me by her presence in my mind, until she found the moments she was looking for. I felt her zooming in, eyes squinting, particularly upon my past few weeks. Each time she shuffled past a memory, it flashed behind my eyes: Lucas' disappearance, my sister's necklace, being dragged from my home, my first night in the forest, confronting the Prince on the balcony, and the night of the storm. None of it bothered me; until she found the one thing I had kept hidden from the entire group, fearing that she would believe the words of the Shadow creature and correlate them to the visions. But like a hawk observing a field full of rabbits, she could see my fear too, the weakness that lay within me, and in turn she had nothing to fear from me. I was the rabbit, a baby rabbit that she could have easily ensnared in her sharp talons, but she did not have her eyes on me.

The Anima pulled herself from my mind and zeroed in on the Fae men, waiting for them to take their first sip. As soon as they did, I sensed she entered their minds just as she had done to mine, rifling through their memories like CD's in a flip case. Occasionally, she'd grunt in disapproval, and even snickered once inside Lucius' mind, sending a flush of embarrassment across his cheeks. But the Prince did not give into the drink as easily as the rest of us had; he stared at the cup as if it were a source of evil.

"Drink it, young Prince. I will not rifle through the moments you do not wish to revisit. I only look for what you need to remember." She was softer with him than she was with the rest of us, which surprised me. He seemed to be the strongest of us all, at least in regard to his psychic and his own representation of himself.