by Vivian Venus
“Then we need to get out of here, fast.” He quickly turned to leave, but Crysta grabbed his arm.
“It’s too late, it’s already nearly right on top of us. If you go outside you’ll be killed!”
The system now pinged a shrieking alarm, and the lights in the ship flashed to red. “How much time do we have?” he shouted.
The alarms suddenly went silent as all the systems cut out. They looked around, their eyes wide and waiting. There was a low shudder, a vibration through the ship’s body, and a sudden jolt threw the two of them to the ground. The space outside the viewport flickered with crackling energy from the storm, and Crysta struggled to her feet to get the ship's basic systems back online.
Kyp scrambled up next to her. “Are the shields up?”
“They are now,” she said. The shuddering calmed to a low vibration, and then ceased.
Kyp looked out the viewport to make sure his ship was still all in one piece. “I need to get back to my ship,” he said. “Hopefully there was no damage. How long is this storm due to last?” He turned back to Crysta, who stared grimly at the read outs. “Crysta? How long?”
“It looks like…maybe two days,” she said.
Kyp ran his hand through his hair and took a deep breath. He wasn’t going anywhere.
CHAPTER THREE
Crysta’s cruiser was quite spacious, much more so than Kyp’s which was designed for agility and maneuverability to his specification. Her ship was a family vessel retrofitted with weaponry and other non-standard equipment, and many of the amenities that one would expect from a ship of its class. There were two living quarters, a bathroom, a small kitchen and dining room, a cargo bay, and an observation deck.
When it had been established that there was no way either of them would be leaving the ship or the quadrant while the storm kept the engines disabled, Crysta showed Kyp to the guest quarters.
“You can stay in here,” she said as she pressed the button to open the door, which slid into the wall with a hiss. “There’s no fresh clothes, not any that you’d want to wear anyway, but there’s a cleaning unit in the wall. Bathroom is over that way down the hall.” She pointed. “We have to share it, and the door doesn’t work anymore, just to warn you.”
“Thank you,” he said. They stood awkwardly in the doorway together, both of them trying to think of something else to say. Kyp cleared his throat. “Well, I think I will change out of my armor, at least.”
She nodded. “Okay. I’ll uh… Okay.” She turned and walked off towards the cargo bay.
Kyp shut the door and let out a deep breath, like he had been holding it in from the moment he set eyes on her again. “Interesting day indeed,” he muttered. He unlatched the plates of his armor and removed them, setting them into a storage cabinet built into the wall.
The day they met again. It was a scenario he had played in his mind nearly every day until he had resolved to forget and move on. Now that the moment had unbelievably come, Kyp found himself wanting to keep his distance. He had already overstepped earlier. He didn’t want to reopen old wounds that had taken so long for him to heal. It was for the benefit of both of them that they didn’t get too involved with each other during this time stuck together.
Still, the question that had been with him since the moment she left bit at him now.
Why?
Now it was a question he could finally ask her.
He set his final piece of armor into the case and closed it, then straightened and re-tied his robe top. He picked up his sword and pushed the hilt with his thumb, inching it out from the scabbard. He would have to be as strong as his blade to get through this. He had moved on in life, moved on from her. He clapped the sword back into the sheath and tied it onto his belt, then opened the door. Practicing would help clear his mind.
Up in the cockpit, Crysta checked over information readouts of the radiation storm’s fluctuating energy levels while wearily eying the ship’s diagnostic reports. She made a note to do another check of the ship’s shields, just in case there was any hidden damage done during the battle.
She walked to the ship’s cargo bay and shut the door, and then punched in a password combination into a panel on the wall. There was a chime of confirmation, and a groove appeared in the wall and slid out to reveal a container. Crysta reached inside and opened a small transparent box, and inside that was a blood red gem that glowed softly, and she touched its warm surface. Then she tenderly lifted the stone out from its casing.
It was her father – or at least what remained of him – his soul shard, a stone that rested inside the hearts of all dragons, from lesser born to high born. When he had died, his body had produced this blood red gem, the rarest color a soul shard could take. To Crysta and her family, this was her father’s last remnants, and according to their beliefs his spirit remained inside, the source of its radiant warmth. To thieves however, the stone was treasure, one of the most valuable in the galaxy.
She squeezed her eyes shut as she remembered the day that her father’s shard had been stolen from the shrine at her family house. It was the day she left Raspharion and her beloved Kyp behind.
Tears stung her eyes. That had been such a long time ago…
Crysta knew she had to tell Kyp the reason she left – he deserved to know. What she wasn’t sure about telling him was why she had vanished without even saying goodbye. She didn’t know if he would understand.
She would talk to him about it eventually, but for now she just wanted to look at his face.
Locking her father’s shard safely in its container, she left the cargo bay and walked to his quarters. The door was shut, and she tapped on the notification chime.
“Kyp?” she called. “Are you hungry? There’s food.”
There was no answer.
“You surely can’t be asleep, can you?” She hit the chime again, before she heard a dull sound come from down the corridor. She followed the sound and heard it again from the observation deck.
What was he doing in there?
She hit the activation button and the door slid open. She was going to call out to him, but stopped herself as she saw him there, his back to her as he held his sword in his hand. He was shirtless, sweat streaming down the contours of his shoulder blades and muscles, his body moving rhythmically with the inhale and exhale of each heavy breath. He spun on one foot and swung his sword in a clean arc through the air, whipping down sharply as he stepped forward and slammed his foot onto the ground with a loud thud. With lightning fast speed, Kyp pivoted and swung the sword up and down in multiple directions, each strike with laser precision and hardened power. He let out a loud bellow for each attack, and if an enemy had been standing before him, he would’ve been surgically picked apart before he even had a moment to react.
Crysta watched him silently, admiring his skill. She had always loved to watch him practice. His expertise with his weapon had always managed to take her breath away, and it did now. His eyes were intense and focused and she remembered when he used to gaze at her with that look. It made her shiver with excitement, and she tried to suppress the feeling.
He whipped his sword back to its scabbard and released a hiss of air between his lips like he was decompressing, and slowly lowered his arms to his sides and stood up straight, relaxed.
“Hey,” Crysta said.
Kyp turned and saw her standing in the doorway watching him. “How long were you there?”
“Only a minute.” She walked into the observation deck, which was lined with large viewport windows looking out into the vastness beyond. The blue-green energy of the radiation storm crackled past, casting the room in a pale light. Kyp picked up a towel and wiped his face and body off. “Mind if I join you?” she asked.
“Sure,” he said. “Grappling?”
“You got it.” She untied her robe top and pulled it off and tossed onto the floor. Underneath she had a black, tight fitting top that hugged her breasts and kept her agile and mobile during battle. She joined Ky
p in the center of the room and they lowered into their combat stances and touched their forearms together.
“I’ll go easy on you,” he said. “After all it’s been a while since—”
Crysta jerked her arm and with extraordinary quickness and power, flipped him right onto his back.
“—we’ve sparred.” She pulled him up to his feet and they got back into position.
They went at each other again. Crysta grabbed for his arm but Kyp evaded, stepping around her. He reached out to grab her but she slipped away from him. Sticking to him like a shadow, she twirled around him and locked her legs into his, then wrenched her body and sent him tumbling onto the ground with her on top of him, pinning him down with her legs.
She leaned in close to him, her face inches away from his. Kyp strained to get out of her hold, but she had him rock solid. “Don’t worry about me, I’ve had time to practice,” she said to him with a slight smile.
He slapped the ground and she released him. “Yeah,” he said as he straightened himself out and got back into stance. “I never realized you were the type to go chasing treasure.”
Crysta felt a pang of anger at his comment. He rushed at her and managed to grab ahold of her arm and tried to flip her over, but she leveraged her weight and used the momentum to swing up and break out of his grasp. In one swift movement she acrobatically swung her body around his front, gripping his face with her thighs, and then threw her weight down and flipped him over. She was on her knees over him, his face gripped tightly between her thighs so that he could barely even breathe. He slapped the ground again.
“You’re not still going easy on me are you, Kyp?” she said, goading him on.
He coughed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he stood. “No,” he admitted, “I never was.”
Crysta had always been a stronger hand to hand fighter than he was. Her graceful yet powerful technique drew him in since the beginning, and in the times when they were together, sparring with her had always excited him. She was the only woman, no, only person that could overpower him this way. That feeling came back now with her strong thighs gripping him and locking him to the ground.
They came into their stances again, touched arms and then exchanged blows. “I wasn’t chasing treasure,” she said between attacks. “Trust me, Kyp, I wouldn’t have left if it weren’t for something important.”
She got a hold of him again, but this time he was able to dip out and break her grasp. He locked her leg with his and moved to take her down, but she flipped sideways and out of his grip. He cursed to himself. She had become so much stronger.
They struggled to maintain control, each time one got ahold of the other they would manage to break free or evade, a tense interchange of strikes and grabs that were constantly countered.
He managed to get behind her and threw his arms around her in a bear hug, and any restraint of emotion began to slip away. “It must’ve been pretty damn important, considering what you had said to me. Or did you forget about that too?”
She threw a hammer-fist strike down and hit a pressure point that made him loosen his grip, and she broke free from him and swung with a spinning back elbow. He quickly blocked it with his forearm and returned an attack, which she evaded. It had become more than just a friendly sparring match now.
“I told you I would always be with you. And I meant it.”
She threw out a series of rapid strikes that Kyp blocked and returned. Each successive strike and return was getting closer and closer to connecting. “And yet…you left…without saying anything!” Kyp locked her wrist and pulled her in, then spun her around over his hip and pinned her to the ground. He held her there firmly, glaring into her eyes, their bodies heaving as they panted from exertion.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
Kyp released her and helped her back up. He walked away and picked up his towel and dried himself off as he gazed out of the viewport window into space. “Twelve years. Twelve years later and I meet you by chance, and you tell me you’ve been chasing down pirates. Where have you been, Crysta? Where did you go?”
She took let out a deep breath and picked up her robe from the ground and wiped tears away from her face.
She needed to tell him, but she was unable to bring herself to just say the words. She struggled to come up with the right words to say, to make him understand why she didn’t tell him why she left. It was to protect him, but she didn’t know if he would accept that.
Just a little more time was what she needed. She hardly had any time to reconcile with herself – everything had happened to quickly. She recovered her father’s shard, and just like that Kyp was back in her life. She just needed a bit more time.
She shook her head, unable to face him.
Kyp sighed, as he found his calm. “Well I suppose you can’t disappear on me this time. We’ll talk when you’re ready.”
He watched her leave the observation deck, and then turned to look out the view port. His thoughts stayed with her. Something had happened to him during the sparring match. Being closer to her again, touching her, feeling her against his body. Experiencing that physical energy that had been so powerful between them when they were together… He felt that longing burning deep in his heart for her, a feeling that he had thought he had successfully quelled years ago, and yet there it was again – tugging at him stronger than the gravity of a black hole.
The way that Kyp wanted her now was in a way that he had long forgotten, that he didn’t even know still existed within him.
It was love.
True love for her, the girl who he had proclaimed to the heavens after they first made love that he would never let go, who he would make his mate forever. He was remembering now all the things he had stored away in his mind to be forgotten, how he had kept her in his mind when undergoing his rite of passage, and that he would succeed only for her. When he had succeeded and inherited his dragon-shift, Kyp had told her how he would make her his mate and how they would raise a family together regardless of what his parents the king and queen said. He would leave the planet for her if he had to.
A smile crossed his face. They had been thoughts of a young fool blinded by love. That much he realized after she had gone. But now that he had met her again, he remembered the reason he had said and believed those things.
He wanted her now as badly as he did then. He was still in love with her. The love he had for Crysta was one that he could banish to the recesses of his mind but never truly be free of. He knew that now, and it pained him. Eventually they would have to go their separate ways, because how could they ever go back to what they were?
Walking back to his quarters, he saw a haze of steam rising from the open bathroom door, and could smell the intoxicatingly familiar fragrance of her wash. He went inside his room leaving the door open, and stored his sword on a special hook that was protruding from the wall. He then stripped out of his pants and underwear and put them in the wall receptacle to be cleaned, and sat quietly on the floor to clear his mind and meditate until Crysta was done in the bath. He found it especially difficult to focus, his mind constantly wandering back to thoughts of her.
He remembered the first time he had secretly taken her to the woods for training. It was the first they had ever spent time together, the day after he had caught her spying on the men training in the barracks, and he recalled how she had surprised him with her skill, knocking him flat on his back after he let his guard down. He knew then that she was someone special that he wanted to be around, and their meetings only grew more frequent, and more intimate. When his mind started wandering to the more private moments they shared, he opened his eyes and tried to shake the thoughts from his head in an effort to stop his growing excitement.
He decided to see if Crysta was out of the bath, so he picked up his towel and wrapped it around his waist and then stepped outside of his room.
His heart leapt when he saw her, and he lowered his eyes. She was standing in the door of the bath
room with only a towel covering her. Kyp felt embarrassed that he was reacting this way to seeing her – it wasn’t a normal reaction he would have to something like this, but with Crysta it was different.
“Bath is ready for you,” she said coolly and she walked into her quarters and shut the door.
He let out a huff of a laugh to himself and walked into the bathroom. After removing his towel and draping it onto a metal hook he tapped a sensor on the side of the tub and water immediately began to appear in the basin, rapidly filling it up to the very top. He stepped into the steaming water which overflowed over the sides and drained away into the porous floor. The water was scalding hot, just right for a dragon shifter, and its heat brought him comfort.
As he lay there soaking his sore muscles, he wished that the storm would never pass and that they would be here together forever. It was an odd and ridiculous thought to have at that moment, he realized. There was still so much pain to see her, and she probably felt the same way about him. It felt strange that they were suddenly in each other's lives again. Despite all that, Kyp thought to himself that he wouldn’t have it any other way.
