Lapsus Memoriae [Rávamë's Bane: Book 1]

Part I : Chapter 4 ~ An Unwilling Suspension of Disbelief

Part I : Chapter 4

An Unwilling Suspension of Disbelief

 ~ ❖ ~

I didn't sleep for two days after that.

Well, not really. Sleep had just refused to come to me for any sustainable length of time, no matter how much I tossed and turned. I'd stayed awake for hours every night, whenever Aragorn decided we would stop our marching and rest until dawn. Given my situation, I had had little choice but to go along with him, especially since he had made it clear that his moral code would not permit him to leave a defenceless woman on her own in the wilds.

No arguments from me.

Even a whole day after the initial shock (which had involved a lot of cursing, swigging from the friendly booze flask, and Aragorn serenely telling me to calm down), I still couldn't fully believe what was happening. The rational part go my brain kept trying to beat my other senses into submission, repeating endlessly that none of this could be real. Even when I reached up and feel the warm and sensitive tips of my pointed ears, I still couldn't quite convince myself that any of this was really happening. It was as if I'd been thrown into one of the fan-character stories I'd written as a teenager.

My memory treated me to a flashback of something with painfully bad grammar and excessive use of the term 'violet orbs', and quickly shoved the thought away with a cringe. This was ridiculous. I was not a she-elf. That I was not somehow in Middle Earth. And I was definitely not being led through a forest by one of my childhood heroes…

'Aragorn.'

I didn't really know quite what to make of him. He was very different from how I had imagined from the book I'd read as a child. He was taller, and older looking. I hadn't imagined his demeanour to be quite so severe and intimidating, nor his speech to be quite so abrupt.

Never the less, he was kind to me. Sort of. He didn't talk much, and whenever he did it was usually only to answer one of my frequent questions, and I'd had more than enough of those to make up for the one-sided conversation.

I asked about the forest, the rivers, the animals, the mountains I could see way off in the distance to pass the time, but I steered clear of anything too personal. I didn't want to risk him getting suspicious as to how much I already knew about him. That was a conversation I really didn't want to get into. But anything and everything else I could think of, he answered.

My arm and hand also seemed to be improving surprisingly quickly. The pain and tingling was almost completely gone by the second day, but Aragorn still insisted that I keep the bandages on to keep it clean. He checked the state of my burns occasionally, but it quickly became apparent that that was as far as his skills as a medic stretched. Still, he never complained when I begged to stop and remove them for a while because the itching was driving me mad. But despite my endless stream of questions, I found it strange that he never once asked me about anything more than my immediate condition.

He never asked after my home, family, or where it was that I claimed to have come from. But I didn't mind. In fact I was glad he didn't ask. Every time I so much as thought of home my eyes would swim and a painful knot would appear in my throat. I caught him looking at me out of the corner of his eye a couple of time when I'd been like that, but he'd chivalrously turned away and pretended not to have noticed. I was grateful to him for that, even if he only did it because he thought I was insane.

We had travelled south for a day and a half before finally coming to a trail that took us through the outer edge of the forest. Whenever we stopped, Aragorn would set up a small camp fire and the tent, and we would eat a simple meal in near silence before one of us would take the first watch. Aragorn had told me during our traveling together about the dangers of the forests, and of the things that only came out after the sun dipped below the horizon.