There is a pause. I kind of miss the familiar sound of the singing surrounding me. “Are the Ferathorns alright?” I ask, desperately. I need something to come out of this. This day I’m certain I’ll look back on as the worst day of my life. “Is Vyken still alive right now?” I hate myself for running, but I know with one hundred percent certainty that it did nobody any good for me to lie there buried in a dirt tomb. At least from out here maybe I can help.
“This was the plan,” the Oracle finally says, pulsating with light as it speaks to me. I draw my knees up to my chin, a streak of blood on my arm from when I had briefly been able to tend to Vyken. He’d been so warm still. So soft and yet so firm.
I recall the way his body felt pressed against mine and my heart breaks all over again.
“It went as well as it could have gone,” it continues.
“I see,” I manage to reply, my voice cracking. I swallow. “You know, as far as a collection of bioluminescent consciousnesses serving to protect a colony of plantlike aliens goes, you’re kind of a dick.”
I can almost see it absorbing that with changing light patterns. “I have no genitalia,” it protests. “I am the culmination of a thousand generations of ripened souls. There is no greater representation of nature’s willingness to adapt and survive anything than I.”
“Never mind.” I rub my face hard. I don’t want to do or say anything right now. But Vyken’s death can’t be in vain. “What now?”
“Listen to me right now. Sometimes in a piece of music the silence is more important than the notes played. Do you understand?” I don’t answer. I just squeeze my eyes shut hard. “Sometimes in life we forget that taking a moment to rest, to breathe the air, to feel the earth, is just as important as to run around and … achieve.”
I smirk. I think about my life so far, and I know that I could have used someone I trusted reminding me of this when I was a kid, feeling unloved and feeling guilty for taking a moment to close my eyes and just remind myself to breathe sometimes. But I don’t think this advice is necessarily going to help me right now. I don’t know what will. Maybe nothing will.
“Then let’s sit,” I whisper. The lights dim almost completely, as if the Oracle is satisfied. Even though everything is dirt now, and I mean it literally.
Useless damn mushroom.
“I hear all,” it lazily reminds me. I ignore that.
I pull in deep breaths through my nose, and let them out of my mouth, trying to clear my head because I feel like that’s what the Oracle was telling me to try. But with every heartbeat the same thing throbs throughout my consciousness; my being.
I feel as though I had just discovered happiness. Just, you know, figured out life. The secret to it, and all.
To me, it’s Vyken.
And he was ripped away.
I pull in a deep breath and let it go. I wonder when this pain might lessen. It feels like … a rumble through my bones. Like cracking roots and snapping twigs. It feels like…
Um, no, wait a minute.
I stand and look over my shoulder.
“Be ready to help.”
It’s almost as if it’s my own thoughts telling me that, because instantly my legs start to move, and I stand and flex.
From the tunnels that lead to the cavern, there’s a sound. A yawning, crackling sound. Audible dirt spills from something slowly moving.
A seven-foot tree, thick with sharp branches, heavy with dry yellow leaves, a crown of wood above its head, crouches to enter the cavern and lays a bundle at my feet, bowing to the Oracle.
Although it’s unmistakably some kind of a tree thing, it’s also quite humanoid; more so than I was expecting. Its face is recognizable, and the split in the wood that is surely a mouth opens for it to speak, lips moving stiffly. Its eyes narrow, dark but sparkling with life.
“General Vyken of Paxia, Firosa,” it says. “He saved the people of Fera with a truly selfless act.”
“A truly selfless act,” the Oracle echoes. “Thank you, prince Rsharr. Lead the people to the sunlight now.”
The Ferathorn bows, a crackling noise that makes him wince ringing out. He turns and slopes back down the tunnels, grey dirt still spilling from his branches.
I look down to the bundle, wrapped in thick yellow leaves that are clearly half dead but still hanging on to life.
I hope that reflects the alien within. I kneel and peel away the leaves and blink away the tears, angrily -- now isn’t the time for them.
“Oracle,” I beg. “Can you help?”
“General Vyken of Paxia,” the glowing mass says thoughtfully. “You committed a truly selfless act. That requires a strength of mind so rare and so valuable that it is almost magical. It was the only way to save my people. That means his finding you was the only way to save my people. This was the plan.” A pause. “There is blood on the spacecraft, correct?”
I have no idea what to say, if it’s talking to me. How could I know? “There’s a medbay,” I say, but I only half know if that’s true. There were signs to one, if I recall right.
“General, you can get up and walk to the ship?” the Oracle asks. I don’t know what it thinks will happen, but I manage to ignore everything else going on and bend down and cup my alien’s paled purple cheek. His face is so handsome still, so smooth and still warm. The leaves he’s wrapped in feel warm to the touch, and I feel like they are contributing. He’s alive, for sure, but if he were a human and this was Earth I would know in my heart that he had only seconds left to live.
Something inside me holds me back from mourning him just yet, though.
His eyelids crack open. “Mm,” he says, unable to make words, and manages to move his hand to press over mine. It’s such a firm but gentle touch and it reminds me of everything I have come to respect, admire, adore about him. I smile, but his eyes shut before he can see it.
“Ferathorns, he requires the light of the suns as well,” the Oracle says gently. There’s a beat and then two burly tree-men crouch to enter the cavern on their way up to the surface, bow to the Oracle, and grab Vyken from under my fingertips to carry him.
“To the ship,” I call out, scrambling to my feet and tripping after them. “Take him to his ship!”
Wordlessly they change course once we get to the surface, and I squint at the sudden bright sunlight. Around me, Ferathorns bask in the sunlight with what I can only call smiles on their wooden faces. Prince Rsharr, the Oracle called him, is directing some younger, slighter ones up from the tunnels, brushing dirt from them, and dipping back under the ground to collect more of his people.
They’re alive, and they’re going to be OK. That means that Vyken’s sacrifice was enough…
No, I’m not as selfless as him, clearly, because I don’t think that’s enough. “Faster, please,” I yell to the trees carrying him to the ship, and jog up to them. They break into a faster walk than I could dream of keeping up with.
When we get to the medbay in the ship I expect to have to figure it out but the Ferathorns just lay him out on the metal slab and puncture his skin with tubes. One flicks on a switch and powers on a computer.
“Welcome,” the ship says. “General Vyken appears to be in critical condition. Should I enact the protocol to--”
“Yes,” I interrupt. “Obviously, yes! Every protocol!”
“Initiating.”
The tubes connected to his arm turn red as blood passes through them, and I turn to the tree aliens to thank them. But how can I? I’m flustered and sore and exhausted and thirsty and starving. I barely remember how to speak English.
They simply get to work fiddling with things in the medbay, working around each other as if they have been doing this all their lives. One of them programs the replicator and brings me some tea. Honest to goodness tea.
“How?” I croak, but I blow on it and sip it. How do they know all this?
They give each other a look. “The Ferathorns have a collective consciousness,” one says, his voice rich and deep like i
f varnished oak had a sound. “We have therefore lived a hundred thousand lifetimes.”
I nod, encouraging them to go on. “While we don’t have the memories of others,” the other one says, and I realize this one seems female -- if they are gendered like humans are -- because her voice is light and breezy like wind through canopies, “we have notions. It can alarm other beings.” She glances at her friend, who gives her what looks like an impression of a grin. It’s not unsettling, weirdly, though it should be. It’s a tree, after all. “It’s like a faraway whisper; an instinct. We tend to just understand things faster.” She gestures around. “Like how to use a standard Mahdfel craft’s medbay. A thousand of our ancestors or more will have walked around in one, and it feels therefore … familiar to us.”
I’d be fascinated normally but I’m barely listening. I have pulled up a stool and I am squeezing Vyken’s hand.
“Vitals?” the male one asks, moving around and checking the tech. Eyeing syringes and opening drawers. He has to check one or two before finding the right one, but that’s a dozen fewer than I’d need to look through.
“Far from perfect.”
I squeeze Vyken’s hand again. I just want to feel him squeeze back. Something; anything.
“He needs sleep.”
I look up at the Ferathorn and see the concern on the wooden face.
“So does she,” the other one adds. “You are no use to him half-dead from hunger and stress.
“That is a fact,” the first says. “Replicate a meal and sleep for an hour. Return then. He will not wake without you.”
The female shifts her arm-branches with interest. “Schorr,” she says. “They are mates. She does not want to leave him.”
“Mates?” I say again with a quirk of my lips.
“Fated,” she adds. “Throughout time we have seen enough to know a pair that are fated for each other.”
“The hell does that mean?” I narrow my eyes. “Like, I’m his DNA bride?” That’s the Earth term for a woman who’s matched with a Mahdfel and can have his children without risking death for her and the baby. It stands to reason that something scientific might have spiritual superstitions in other cultures. Not for me, though. I was never interested.
They exchange a look. “Get some sleep,” the male one says. “Like I say -- he will not awake without you, if that was a worry.”
It really was. “It’s not,” I say. OK -- I’m not big into people assuming they’ve got me figured out. I knew it was just a part of their ability to tap into whatever the Oracle had going on for them, but it was my instinct to stay aloof.
Vyken’s hand twitches, and then squeezes mine, and my heart aches with pure joy. I lift his hand and kiss it, leaving it pressed against my lips. Screw being aloof -- my man was OK!
After several minutes when we all confirmed he still wasn’t going to open his eyes, I took their advice. I made a piece of simple buttered toast with the food replicator, and took it into my room to eat it in bed. I set the plate on the side and then closed my eyes, the events of the day whirring through my mind.
I fell asleep within one minute.
Chapter Nineteen
Vyken
When my eyes open a pain sears through my entire body, a heat and an ache deep within my muscles. The medical serum we use to inject into soldiers mere seconds from death. It has a combination of epinephrine, heavy-duty tranquilizers, and something so very technical and Firosan that I would never be able to wrap my comparatively primal brain around it.
Essentially, it wraps itself around your very cells and prods each and every one to work at maximum capacity. Or, I have no idea -- but that’s definitely what it feels like. It feels a lot like a tough internal web of electrical wiring.
I grunt and every movement it takes to sit up is a crunching, straining ordeal. I work up the effort to stretch as hard and as long as I can, knowing full well that makes it feel a lot better. Finally the pains give way to a more dull ache and I can work through it. I get up, rock on the balls of my feet to the heels, testing my weight. The last time I was under that kind of treatment I was knocked out for four days. I have no way of knowing how long it was this time, or how much muscle definition I might have lost.
“Morning, sunshine!”
I wheel around to see Roxie sitting in a chair in the medbay, right near to where I was lying, and yet I didn’t see her right away. Her feet are up on a sterile white counter and she is flipping through a manual for transforming rubber gloves -- medical gloves that will transform fit any known species in the universe. I smile and she grins back.
“You made it, General,” she adds, getting to her feet and strolling towards me.
“How long?”
She shrugs, looking around and squinting. “Two days? Just under?”
“Could be worse,” I grunt.
Her smile doesn’t falter, and she gently reaches up to caress the back of my neck. Her touch electrifies. “I dreamed about you,” I murmur, wrapping my arms around her waist. She nuzzles into my chest and it feels right.
“It was boring travelling through space without you,” she says, and then pulls back to search my eyes for a reaction.
“We’re travelling?” I repeat, moving from her grasp to open the shutters and gaze upon the blackness of space.
“Turns out the ship has an autopilot function -- we’re going straight to your home planet. How cool is that?” She looks so proud of herself for figuring that all out without my help, but I struggle to see it like that.
“Back to my planet,” I repeat. “We…”
“...saved an entire species,” she finishes for me, closing the gap between us again to lace her fingers through mine. I inhale deeply, getting a lungful of her scent, and instinctively I pull her closer. “They have to forgive you. Us. Whatever. We were working under the Oracle’s orders and we saved them; we gained your people one of their strongest allies.”
She’s not wrong, but there still exists a pang in my gut and it isn’t from the serum that saved my life.
Noting my reaction, Roxie smiles. “It’s OK. I brought along a passenger. He’s going to set the record straight. Alright?”
I don’t know what she’s talking about, and for a moment I am afraid that she has done something astonishingly stupid and somehow tried to bring the Oracle along on this journey back to Paxia with us. Of course, it would lose all of its powers -- and the Ferathorns would be rendered almost useless without access to them through its pseudopsychic root system…
But no, of course she hasn’t done that. My girl is headstrong and impulsive, but she isn’t stupid.
The Ferathorn who ducks to get into the medbay bows briefly and I mimic it, deepening it further when I realize which one is on board my stolen vessel.
“Prince Rsharr,” I say, stunned momentarily. “What an incredible honor.”
“We considered sending a lesser Ferathorn,” Rsharr says, slowly raising himself up and stretching after his bow, “but given the gravity of the situation, I felt no one but me could accompany you.”
“Yes?” I say, crossing my arms over my thick bare chest.
“When we tell your superiors of what happened on Fera,” Rsharr says. “Your fated one filled us in on everything that happened, from start to finish, and it is a tale indeed.” I chuckle. He’s right. “I look forward to the look on your king’s face when we tell it over honeymead.”
I had forgotten how obsessed the Ferathorns are of Firosan honeymead -- it’s a funny quirk. They lack the ability to distill it themselves, so all of our tactical meetings would involve gallons of the stuff.
“Of course,” I say, wondering how bizarre it would be if I sent an advance message for my people along the lines of, ‘I know I am a fugitive, but I am arriving shortly to explain away my crimes. Ready the honeymead.’ I probably won’t do that, but I do want to make sure Rsharr has my unending thanks for coming with me to back up our story.
He bows again, and I spot the beginnings of a bud
or two on the ends of his branches. I smile as he leaves, pleased more than words can say that I was able to save them.
When he is gone, I take Roxie into my arms and press my lips against the hollow of her neck, drawing in her heat, her scent. She presses against me, interlocking with me like the world’s most arousing jigsaw… And I’m still not great with words.
“We saved them,” I say, correcting my inner thoughts aloud.
“You were unbelievable,” she whispers. “But you know the whole thing was the Oracle’s plan.”
I run my fingers through her hair. “Of course it was.”
“Finding me. Everything. The Oracle knew I would be pulled under by the roots down there. It knew that the only reason you’d drain your blood until you were seconds from death was … well, for me. That’s what was implied, anyway.” She clears her throat, averting her eyes. “Is that ridiculous or what?”
I don’t laugh. It isn’t ridiculous at all. “I have been a warrior all my life, and I thought fighting for my people was the most honorable life I could lead,” I tell her, and I gesture to my upper body. It is crisscrossed in fine scars. “If I told you the story behind these cuts you might very well faint. And I always accepted I would die someday, but it never occurred to me for what. What would be worth my life.” I pause, swallow, wishing I was better at speaking. “The answer is you.”
She opens her mouth, but I shake my head, pressing my lips against hers -- hard. They are so soft, so delicate, but so firm and sure of what they want. Our tongues seek each other out and the taste of her makes me hard in an instant. My cock presses against her stomach and I feel her moan ever so slightly into my mouth.
I love her. I know this for sure, but I still don’t know how to say it. I have never said it to anyone else. Instead, I try to quell the roar of lust in my ears by nipping at her lower lip and lifting her by the waist. I have been passed out, healing, regenerating, for two straight days. My cock hurts, I need my woman so bad. Rsharr called her my ‘fated’ -- is that just their word for the one I have chosen, or is it something more?
Vyken: (Warriors of Firosa Book 3) Page 8
