Chapter Text
It feels like it’s been forever. Every time I come home, I keep expecting to hear the sounds of a Native Dragon in the next room, but there’s only silence.
For a while, I would cry myself to sleep every night. I wandered around aimlessly, just going through the motions of running my farm… Frequently I’d go out into the wilds, thinking I’d send some of the wild monsters back to the Forest of Beginnings with messages for her. But she wouldn’t have answered any of them.
How could she?
Eventually, I started feeling things again. Amber, Dylas, Dolce, and Leon all fully shared my pain; most of my time was spent in silent companionship with one or another of them at first, sometimes more than one. But life goes on, no matter what we think we want… And I began to realize that the time I spent with them all didn’t just mean a lot to me.
I came out of my daze a year after she had…disappeared. When I woke up the morning after the anniversary, I felt like I could start to face reality again.
Within a few days, Leon and Dylas had both staked their claims on pieces of my heart, and I was glad to spend time with them as something more than just friends. We had fun, but as often as not after a date with one or the other of them, it would end up that the three of us would run through the old, now familiar places, fighting blindly so as to hide our tears. Sometimes I could feel them sizing each other up as competition when they thought I wasn’t looking. There was a terrible, mean part of me that enjoyed that. It seemed Vishnal had the right of it when I’d jokingly tried to crawl into his bed one slow afternoon, shortly after my arrival in town: I was a bad, bad princess. I’d overheard Blossom telling Volkanon one day that it was a good thing; it showed that I was recovering.
Becoming involved with them made me more open to hanging out with the others in town – and of course, being with Dylas meant a lot of exposure to Doug. If they weren’t hanging out together and arguing, they were griping about each other. Many times I had gone to the store to visit with Blossom and pick up some groceries only to run into Doug, who would ask me what I thought I was doing with “that one trick pony” any time Dylas’ name came up, which was often… And usually his own fault. I started wondering if maybe he was jealous… Though I wasn’t sure which of us he wanted to keep for himself, Dylas or me.
We all knew that he and Dylas liked each other, but Dylas showed no signs of interest in Doug once he and I started dating. It confused the poor dwarf, I could tell. One day I found him looking distracted, and I ended up asking about his type.
Well, he told me.
That evening I took him on a wild whirlwind “training spree” through some of the toughest areas I knew, and he was miles stronger by the end of it. I figured he’d need to be stronger if he wanted to keep up with me… Then I told him I wanted to be with him, and he said he’d answer the following morning.
I wasn’t sure if he had said yes to me for my own sake until the end of our first date. We were at the smithy, and no one else was around. I wanted to be closer to him, so I moved towards him… And damned if he wasn’t the most forthright man I’d met. Oh, Dylas was sweet and honest, but so insecure and uncertain. Leon was quite the opposite, a little standoffish, sometimes too cocksure and fond of teasing, but Doug was right up front about holding me close in return.
How in the world was I ever going to decide between them? My three wonderful men. My snarky, sexy fox; my sweet sullen stallion; and my hotheaded redhead. A more unlikely trio of suitors would be hard to imagine.
And then I thought of something I could do. It was Leon who gave me the idea, though he’d never know if I could help it... I made a promise to myself, I guessed the way he had told me that he promised himself he’d never marry. I swore not to even consider getting married until Venti returned.
And at the time, I had every intention of sticking to my word.