Forsaken Dreamscape (Nevermor) Read Online Free

said solidly.  Even though time had
passed, it still felt like a sword in her chest.
    “Fair
enough,” Witherspoon said, making a note in the sideline of her casebook.  Then
he started off on another line of thought.  “Rifter left you here with a
promise that he would return for you in a few days, but he never came back, did
he?  Why do you think that is?”
    “He
has a tendency to forget things,” Wren said swiftly, feeling a bit frustrated
by now.  She thought that he must have noticed.  “It’s the fairy’s fault.  She
takes his memories away; sometimes even the small, insignificant ones.”
    “You’ve
told me before that he has to be willing to let go of the memory first.”
    “Usually,”
she confirmed.
    “Then
how does that explain why he might have forgotten you?”
    Wren
caught her breath, staring.  She’d tried not to think on it, but of course she
had considered that Rifter had wanted to forget her – that he was angry
with her, or had decided he didn’t care about her after all.  Was she so
forgettable?  Wren let her gaze drift down to the floor, wondering how
Witherspoon liked the sight of her heart ripping in half.
    “Let’s
talk about that night,” he interrupted, writing a few more notes across the
page.  “Tell me what happened.”
    Wren
closed her eyes, feeling the warmth of a stray sunbeam cross her eyelids.  Not
even the light could aid her.  In this, she was utterly alone.
    “I
was waiting for Rifter to come back for me.  He said he would come back.  He
promised not to forget.  I waited for a long time at the orphanage.  I was even
put into another job – domestic work – and yet he didn’t return.  Then one
night after nearly two years, it was Whisper who came back instead – the fairy
wisp.  She woke up all the children, and they were very eager to see her.  They
looked to me for guidance and I…”  She paused, shaking her head.  “I don’t know
why I trusted her.  I hardly remember it, as if it happened to someone else.”
    This
was true.  Every moment that she could recall seemed so far away that it was as
though another person had lived it and she was merely watching, just as she had
once seen Rifter’s memories.
    “What
did you tell them?” the doctor asked, leaning forward again to hear her
confession like a priest through the lattice.
    “I
told them to follow her,” Wren said sorrowfully, “that she was going to help us
get to Nevermor.”
    “Then
what happened?”
    Wren
was breathing harder now, reliving the moment – the vertigo of being on the
roof as the wind blew all around her, the weight of the storm that was
gathering overhead–
    “She
led us to the roof.  She pretended to give us a blessing so that we could fly.”
    Wren
knew that she should never have believed this.  One could not merely fly to
Nevermor.  Only Rifter could go to and fro as he wished, and anyone he brought
back with him had to be unconscious or blessed to pass through the veil that
divided this world from that.
    I
knew it.  Why didn’t I see through that lie?  It was my fault.
    “And
they jumped, didn’t they,” Witherspoon said, guessing that she would not say it
herself.  “But you didn’t jump.”
    “No,
I didn’t.”  Wren thought she had regret in her own voice.
    “Why?”
    Even
now, Wren could still recall it.  Each one of those children had jumped off the
roof.  She had been meant to join them.  It was only several moments afterward
that they realized that they were falling instead of flying.  It must have been
the sound of their screams that had snapped her out of her own trance,
teetering on the edge of the roof just before stepping off herself.  By then,
Whisper had been gone – gone like she had never been there.
    She
had tried to save me for last.
    “Rifter
didn’t come,” the doctor said, snapping her back.  “He didn’t come to deliver
you from that, or take you back.”
    No,
he didn’t . 
Wren kept quiet and looked at