“Your eyes have faded.” Her translator was silent. She understood it and she blinked back the sheen of tears that had formed. When her vision cleared and the strange man—hallucination?—reappeared, comprehension dawned.
One of his fingers lifted to swipe across her upper cheek, breaking her heart, as he lifted an escaped tear away and studied it. He looked at it as if he had never seen a tear before. Her heart thudded painfully as his features went hooded...
This is too much. Too intimate.
“You created a wet jewel,” he said, cupping his other hand around her tear like he was trying to save it, to keep it.
“It’s a tear,” she responded softly.This isn’t be real. It’s not.
He slowly lifted his gaze back to hers. “The sky makes these... Yahiro, what are you?”
“Human.” Her eyes lowered back to the pulsating stone in her hand. “Just a human.”
He placed his hands against his chest, pressing her tear into his skin. She looked away, unable to take anymore, wishing her mind didn’t feel so muddled. It’d never been the same since that day... but when his arms wrapped around her and pulled her into his glorious body, the smell of sugar filling her nose, she sighed and gave in.
She liked Quist, somehow she felt safe with him, safe in a way that she had never been since she was last with her parents.Maybe it’s the light.Maybe it was the way the light of her stone trailed around his frame, like a lover’s caress.
He was also warm. And she adored warmth.
Exhaustion hit her all at once as she succumbed to the safety of his embrace. Waking dreams skittered across her mind. The giant feathered wings that created her and Quist’s bubble from the rest of the universe folded in closer until it wrapped around her like a second skin, a silken one that she wished her entire body was privy to.
“Am I safe with you?” she breathed, already half asleep.
“Yes, Yahiro of Quist. You are safe.”
***
QUIST
He rose to his feet slowly, his focus entirely on the female sleeping in his arms. She had yielded to him willingly, and until she went pliant against his chest, he hadn’t realized her submission was what he wanted. The fact that she had spoken his language, as if a Creator’s power fueled her, so quickly astonished him. Each valos race had their own words and it had taken him years to learn and understand all the spoken languages on Sonhadra.
She was powerful. At least against him. Quist didn’t know why. He didn’t know where she came from.
He knew what to do with his sexual organ, knew that it was meant to thrust into a little hole that was between her thighs. The other valos who had female counterparts had shown and shared this information with him over the many dawns, noons, and dusks of his life. It was another reason why he hated his Creator. Why give him the tools to mate but not give him a mate?
It burned him.
Lusheenn was his to kill.
From the day he was brought forth, he knew he was different from his older brothers. They never feltwronged.At least had never voiced it. But ever since the day he first opened his eyes, there was a twinge of hatred seeded within him, but he hadn’t understood it at that moment in time. It had made him feel incomplete, unwhole, and different than the rest of Lusheenn’s creations. Galan remarked to him once that their Creator was angry the day he sculpted Quist.
That anger smoldered within him now and feeling the Divine's presence only made the embers burst forth with new strength.
He shifted his human, trying to find relief from the pressure on his hard member. She had distracted him from his revenge but now that the sun had vanished behind rain clouds and the rays of light were gone, his mood plummeted.
Quist peeled his eyes from her pale, dirt-smudged yet invitingly soft features and looked around him. The heartstone kept his eyes from seeing the starlight beyond their barrier but as he focused, the light from the stone moved and danced. It lit up a path to safety and he followed it to a shallow cave broken in from the plateau he had chased... Yahiro... off of earlier.
His grip tightened and she moaned in her sleep.I didn’t lose her.It was only hours ago when he had come upon her thinking she was Lusheenn back from the abyss, and as he lowered to the ground, cuddling her against him, his anger at the Divine returned.
If you think to take her from me, Lusheenn...
If this was all a horrible trick, a punishment to crumble his heart...
The ground trembled below him.
