“I don’t know!” he roared, his wings thrusting out and crackling. The clouds thickened overhead, allowing only scattered sun rays to shine behind him. “He left,” Quist spat. “Without a word and vanished like the sun does at dusk! He gave us his loneliness and subjected us to bear its burden until his power fades from our veins and we return to the abyss from whence we came. Only cruelty would do that. And I have vowed to hunt him down and destroy him.”
Yahiro threaded her fingers in her lap and forced herself to ignore the growing pain of hunger and lightheadedness. “That’s why you want to kill him?”
“Yes!”
“A god?”
He shook his head. The band at his nape fell to the ground. His hair spilled over his shoulders and caressed his skin. Yahiro pressed her fists into her belly and tried to stop the knot of arousal that formed. The knot only tightened as his wet pants plastered to his legs and groin, leaving little to the imagination. Her eyes dropped to his apex, trying to see what she had felt but he was no longer erect.
“God. No, one of the Creators. I won’t stop until either I or he is dead. I want to feel his pulse melt like wax under my fingertips until he feels what he had excreted so long ago from his ass. What I am now!”
She lifted her feet out of the water and tucked them beneath her legs. “Do you know why he left?”
Quist caught a fallen feather in his hand and crumpled it. “No.”
“Maybe it wasn’t by choice then?”
“Human. Whoever made you did poorly in giving you Sonhadra’s history. The Creators did nothing that wasn’t by choice, and Lusheenn, beloved of the sun, was never told no. His men never uttered the word in his presence, knowing what it would cost them.”
“You spoke his name last night when you found me? Why? I thought you were going to kill me so I ran, but the tone of your voice was raw.” She continued to rub the ache in her belly. “I’m not even from Sonhadra,” she added, wanting to remind him again.
He stopped and looked at her sharply, his eyes roving over her huddled form, smoldering yet questioning. He plucked a feather that still floated in the air and stalked toward her until he kneeled at her side. “Last night, the dead inside me returned to life, and I was pulled to you. You held that stone, our fabled heart, one that Lusheenn often goaded us with but never showed us. I felt it and him again. When I came upon you in the dark,” he bit out the last word, “all I saw was my vengeance coming to completion. If you are on Sonhadra, you are from Sonhadra, human Yahiro. We’ll find who made you and get the answers.”
She shook her head, but Quist ignored her as he retook her aching foot and placed his feather over the wound like a bandage, plastering it with water. She immediately felt better, however, the knot of arousal now had a fish hook through it and pulled. Each tug begged her to open her legs to touch herself... and touch him.
“What stopped you from killing me?”
“I don’t know.”
Yahiro deadpanned.
“You weren’t him.”
“No... I’m not a man or a god.”
“Divinity,” he amended, saying it in her language, but it came out coarse. “You had my heart.”
“It’s gone now...” she whispered, uncertain. “I couldn’t find it. It’s gone.”
“I still feel it.” Quist reached forward and pushed back a lock of her hair, freeing her face for his perusal. The simmering emotion within his gaze was too much. Too much and too fast. She tried to see herself in the glassiness of his eyes but couldn’t, and didn’t know if she reflected the emotion. The ropes of her knot pulled. “We’ll see it again. But first, you need nourishment.” His hand left her and she missed it.
Yahiro watched as the alien looked around them as if the food she needed would magically appear. She followed his gaze, disheartened not because a cheeseburger didn’t sprout from the ground, but because he’d only protected her because of the stone.
He stormed around the glen, tugging and pulling any and all berries, roots, and flowers into a pile under his arm. A damning thought presented itself: there are other humans. They could be nearby. They could’ve also found stones that called to him. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that but quipped up, “I’m not the only one.”
Quist dumped his gatherings by her side and she moved to pick through them although keeping her eye on the alien.
“You weren’t created alone?”
“Ehh. We weren’t created. We fell. And no, I didn’t come here alone.” She eyed a purple globule that looked rotten but smelled sweet, deciding whether or not to risk more stomach pains. “Before you found me, I was with the others but we were scattered, chased down by these monsters that screamed—”
“Ak’rena?”
“Sure. We got split up but there are others. Men and women, some old, some not, that survived. We fell together.”
“From what?” The curiosity was back.
Yahiro looked up at the sky, seeing only clouds but pointed up anyway. “The sky.”
