Displaced

Chapter 93

Consciousness returned to Pari slowly, her thoughts little more than vague feelings and impressions gently drifting through her mind. All she cared about was this feeling of warmth. Warmth and safety. With each slow breath, her nostrils filled with an indescribable plethora of scents, enough to normally overwhelm her sleep-addled brain. But instead, she found herself focused on one particular scent, the strongest one of all by far. It smelled of strength and power—incredible and overwhelming—and yet she felt no fear. Instead, the scent gave her a feeling of great peace. Everything was good and right.

Her bed shifted slightly beneath her, jolting Pari just enough to cause her to open her eyes. Stretching out her arms, back, and tail, she let out a soft yawn and looked around. She sat on the edge of a tan platform up against an equally tan wall, both of which were slightly soft and incredibly warm and comfortable. Beyond the platform, however, she found a massive cavern lit by the soft light of hundreds of glowing things—bags, perhaps?—stuck to the walls and ceilings. Down below, she saw a row of thin and tall containers with lids on them and a giant table and dozens of strange devices she couldn't even begin to understand.

Crawling towards the other side of the platform to get a closer look, Pari stopped mid-crawl as she felt an unusual tug on her head. Turning around, she found, to her befuddlement, that her hair had somehow grown out to be incredibly long, so long that it had piled up into a large heap and was dragging along the floor behind her for many body-lengths. How strange. Why was her hair so long all of a sudden? It hadn't been like this when... when...

When what?

What had she been doing before waking up here? She could feel something there, as if she knew the answer to this question but, for some reason, the knowledge wouldn't come to her. All she could remember was a feeling of incredible cold, a cold that had filled her to the point of numbness. This situation seemed the case with the vast majority of her memory: vague feelings and bits of general knowledge, but specifics strangely out of reach.

Before she could think too hard about this unusual discovery, Pari found herself off balance as the floor beneath her suddenly moved. Steadying herself with her hand as the platform shifted, she watched in awe as it moved away from the wall. Pari's gaze rose up the wall to find a giant eyeball staring back at her. Wait, that wasn't a wall at all! And the floor she sat on, it wasn't a floor, either!

Pari couldn't believe her eyes. A lizard! The biggest lizard she had ever seen, and it was holding her in the palm of its hand! Try as she might, she couldn't wrap her young brain around the sheer size of the tan beast. It was bigger than a house! No, it was bigger than three houses! No, it was bigger than five-

"CHILD HAS FINALLY AWOKEN."

Pari let out a scream and clutched at her head as something seemed to connect to her mind, an unstoppable torrent of meaning blasting into her head. What she felt wasn't pain in the usual sense, but more of a complete overwhelming of her mind, like being thrown into deep water when you don't know how to swim and drowning in it. The foreign meaning engulfed her and, like deep water pouring down her throat, she found her mind unable to hold it back. Her heart raced uncontrollably. She couldn't think. She couldn't breathe.

Before she could regain herself, she felt the floor beneath her shift again as the hand lifted her up beside the giant eyeball. The huge slit pupil contracted as the lizard focused in on her.

"CHILD HURT?"

Pari screamed again as a second wave battered at her soul. It still threatened to suck her under, but for some reason, it didn't feel as bad as the first time.

"WHAT WRONG WITH CHILD?"

A third surge, this one even easier to tolerate than the last. Pari found herself on her back, her lungs huffing and puffing as she desperately drew air. Her heart was still racing and her body was slick with sweat, but it felt like she had finally made it to the surface of the water and was coming up for air.