"Delarn, there's nothing to worry about. I'm here, and I can remove the enchantments quite easily," Talem told him, not quite understanding the way that he backed away from the door. Talem then began working on it, and it wasn't long before it was rendered inert, the magic removed from the door, but when she looked back, he seemed to have only gotten worse. He was crouched down with his hands over his head, trembling. Talem walked over to him and got to her knees so she would be level with him. "Dear?"

Delarn struggled desperately to get free, but she couldn't breathe or speak. The syringe went in, and she tried to scream, but her throat was raw.

"Don't you understand by now how futile it is to fight against this?" The gnome asked as he studied her face for a moment before the incision he had made. "It doesn't seem to be healing as fast as it was a moment before. It's so hard to tell with your kind. If there were more specimens, we could say for sure, but you'll have to do."

Delarn whimpered weakly, mouth gaping against like a fish.

"I suppose you're bound to fight it anyway. You're a wild animal by nature. Even with all this logic and knowledge handed to you, you really can't reason out of it. You're a child as well so I can't expect you to have the kind of logic that an adult would possess. If you were an adult? Perhaps you would have accepted that this was happening by now and laid still. Do you think your father would have if I had been clever enough to hold him down? Of course, there's always the factor that you wouldn't simply lay still if you thought you could get away from it."

"Of course," the gnome concluded, "Your people are creatures of habit. They don't quite have the free will a proper human would possess. You have no other option but to learn further and to breed and to needlessly put yourselves in danger. It's just in your nature. I've heard that the ones that aren't so driven would have never made it here, to begin with. How unfortunate for you. If you were born anywhere else, then perhaps you wouldn't have had the chance to be treated like this. Where were you born? I suppose you can't answer if you can't cry out, can you? That's fine. Just lay still, and this will be so much easier on you."

The tiny child couldn't help but follow behind her. She was so tall and elegant and particularly unwilling to have her follow. It just made the game all the more fun. She couldn't disappear forever. Did she not want to play?

When she was gone,, she would settle under the king's feet instead. She would always come back to him so there were no worries that the woman would disappear forever. This man was so freezing, but she was feverish, so it was fine as far as she was concerned. She would babble stories at him eagerly, but she didn't know any words yet so these would have to do. She grinned at him, reaching up for him. She always felt so tall when he lifted her up.

Whenever her father would come back, she would race to meet him, eager to see him again. He always seemed a bit unnerved to see her, and so she would stand on her back legs and stare at him. After a moment he would thaw out, and he would pick her up. He would tell her all sorts of things about where he had been. He would smell worn out every time and sometimes he would bring something back for her, usually meat. When he brought meat, he would have to chew it for her at first.

By the time she could chew it herself he was saying things like, "I can't take being here anymore. I'm tired of living where I must think of my love every day. I want to go away. Would you watch her for me?"

"You won't watch her yourself? You're the one who made her, aren't you? Why not take some responsibility for that?" The person said. She couldn't place the person.

"She reminds me too much of her mother," he replied weakly, but he was staring at the floor. He knew this person was right. He had to take a bit of responsibility for what was done.

She was on the floor at the time, playing with something, but the next moment she was on her feet and trying to follow who he was talking to. She was proud because she didn't have to be a wolf to follow them anymore.

Before she could reach them, her father's arms wrapped around her. She squirmed a bit, wanting to get to them, but it was also so rare for her father to hold her like this. She stopped resisting and cuddled into him. She looked up at him, and she could see his face so clearly. Why was he crying? She didn't understand, but she thought she would ask the lady what it meant when someone cried like her father was crying.

She hadn't seen her since.

Delarn leaned far forward as she sat on the bed, her arms over her head. She really didn't feel particularly panicked, but it felt as if all her senses had been drowned out as well. It felt like there was absolutely no room inside her but raw nerves. The floor seemed to shift and change beneath her rapidly, and she felt nauseous. Her eyes were open, but if she moved an inch everything around her seemed to spin and swirl.

There had been a storm for the last few days that the Seven Sea Bears desperately tried to navigate. It was an effort for all the crew, and when she had first heard that they were heading for a storm, she had asked to help.

"No, I don't want to risk losing you," she was told before being told more bluntly, "and you don't have any real experience on a ship. You'll get in our way."

"I would have experience if you would let me," she had countered.

The strike that Beraliska delivered nearly sent her staggering off her feet and her face stung as she was dragged off to the captain's quarters. "Does it hurt?" Beraliska asked, brushing her cheek with her thumb before shoving her to sit on the bed and bending down. Delarn flinched at the sudden movement, flinching worse than when she expected her to strike her and she really had. Beraliska didn't touch her at all. She merely clamped the iron cuffs around her ankles, meticulously checking to make sure they weren't too loose or tight. She would have them on for a while, after all. "You'll be safer here," she told her gruffly before leaving her there.

For the next few days, Delarn found herself mostly alone in the twisting, tossing storm. Sometimes Beraliska would be there for a moment, sitting there beside her and eating and feeding her quickly before going away again. Delarn struggled to keep it down in the storm, but she managed it because she knew that once this was over and Beraliska had time to return to the room, she would punish her viciously if she threw up any of it up in her bed.

It was nice when she came back and sat beside her. It was terrifying and lonely, and she was glad she wasn't up above now if it was so terrible down below. Everything was nailed down, so nothing moved, though the room itself moved constantly and violently.

She closed her eyes tightly. The storm was settling down, but her nerves weren't after being here for so long. She gave a few nervous sobs, almost wishing that she was on deck now, doing something. Anything to stop the violent feeling in her stomach and head, though she couldn't deny that there was a part of her that felt that if she were on deck, she probably would want to toss herself over the rails to stop it.

She hadn't noticed Beraliska entering the room this time, though her figure towered over her and the door seemed to slam like thunder as she wasn't so interested in being quiet. The storm was nearly past, and she was no longer needed to keep order on deck. The giant woman shed her boots, coat, and captain's hat. Even then, she was soaked through, but that didn't seem to bother her so much as she pulled herself onto the bed.

She didn't say much of anything, merely settled in the middle and reaching to carefully tug Delarn back. Beraliska did few things gingerly or carefully, and so it was a bit startling to be dragged back like this, but at the same time she was powerful, and it was easy to pull Delarn back and into her lap without disrupting her too much. She laid stiffly in her arms like a stunned bird that had fallen from the sky before slowly easing to lay back against her. Beraliska wrapped her arms around her waist and pulled her as close as comfortably possible, resting her chin on Delarn's shoulder and closing her eyes.

"You're freezing," Delarn managed to say, taking a few long, slow breaths.

"You're warm," Beraliska answered in return. She snuggled against her, rumbling. Delarn had been startled by this when she had first done it because she thought she had been growling, but after a while, it was clear that it was a content sound. It was a relaxing sound and meant that she wasn't in a bad mood, so Delarn particularly liked it. Delarn began to hum as well, finding that being close to her like this had chased much of the anxiety she had felt away.

"I really love you like this," Delarn told her softly.

"Cold and tired?" Beraliska growled back, but Delarn knew that she wasn't in one of her dangerous moods, so it didn't faze her.

"Holding me like this," she answered. "I love when you hold me like this. I love when we have our quiet moments together. I love how powerful and in control you are."

"You won't believe me, but I love you too, Wolfwood. More than anything else, but I'm a captain of a pirate ship, and you should know by now that I take what I want however I want it. You understand that, don't you?" She answered.

"Imagine how much more I could be to you if you would simply let me go and trust me to return," Delarn answered.

"You would never return," Beraliska hissed, "because you and I both know that you're my property. I don't merely love you; I own you. You're mine alone. Not even you can have you."

"I know," she answered softly.

"And besides that," she murmured quietly in her ear, "you know that there's a part of you that loves the struggle more than any freedom I might give you."

"I know," she said again, softer than before.

Delarn sat with her mother under a tall, shady tree. Her mother's golden eyes gleamed as she leaned over her daughter and went about braiding her hair. She told her softly, "When I held you in my arms as a crying babe, I never really knew what you would become. I had so many plans for you, but I knew I wouldn't see them through. I thought I would see you learn how to shoot a bow like the man that first welcomed us to the homeland, or I thought you might learn to wield a spear like the fierce women in the colony your uncle housed us alongside. I never would have guessed that my daughter was a fire keeper. My father always said my mother was something unworldly, but I never would have dreamt it."

"A fire keeper?" Delarn asked, trying to move her head to look back at her, but her mother shoved her had forward roughly, teasingly.

"No matter what you are, you're something special as far as I'm concerned, and that's all that matters. Don't be afraid to do what you need to do, my dear girl, my lovely boy," Loro, her mother, told her.

Ray looked up at Talem with tears in his eyes when he came back into himself and replied softly, "Sorry, I don't know what happened. How long did I keep us?"

"Delarn, I would sit here for the rest of my life and longer if it's what you need. Are you sure you're fine?" She replied.

Ray nodded and stood, going slowly towards the door. He started to reach for it but paused. His forehead creased in concentration and finally, he opened his mouth. Talem watched curiously for a moment before a cone of flames shot from his jaw and engulfed the door completely, erasing it from his path.