On the fourth pass, she squirmed and asked to be let down.
“I won’t run,” she breathed.
He stopped. “Won’t you?”
Aldora grasped her wrist, biting down on her tongue.
“Tell me why.”
She looked at the space around them, looked everywhere but at him and tried not to acknowledge that his hands had grown hot and damp where he touched her. “I won’t run... because I don’t want to die.” She squeezed her wrist, uncomfortable, and afraid but not as afraid as before.
He walked them back to the trees and dropped her to her feet, making quick work of tying her to the warping branches. They twitched and moved at his touch, stretching to engulf the entity that disturbed them. She sat as far away as she could. They oozed over her rope.
He crouched a foot away from her, once again blocking her view of everything but him. His horns lifted up into the mist and an urge to grab them and twist them off overcame her.
“You don’t want to die but there are more reasons to stay by my side. I want to hear them,” he demanded.
Aldora pulled at her rope. “There are no other reasons, why would there be? You’ve taken all my chances away.”
The beast snorted. “You spoke to me across the wall, female, if you can remember that far back. I did not answer you at first. I took none of your chances away.”
“I thought you might’ve been a human trapped.”
“And it was your sense of charity that stopped you? Are you charitable?”
Aldora narrowed her eyes. She’d given her mother’s apples to the poor and the children of Thetras, had covered the work of those in need, had accepted her life as a peasant and a farmer, as a nobody who could not so much as force a flower to grow as make a change in the world. “I’m not charitable,” she said after a minute, thinking of all that she could have done but hadn’t. “I was curious, but I’m not a bad person. I’ve never hurt someone intentionally, and if you had been a trapped human, I would’ve helped.”
“I was curious too,” he said after a moment. “But I’m not charitable either, nor am I kind. I have no delusions of goodness, not here, not in this place. I have hurt beings intentionally and...”
She waited but he just stared at her. “And?” she asked softly.
“And if you run again, I will hunt you down, subdue you, tie you up and drag you naked and sobbing through these dangerous lands and watch whatever hope you have left wither, happily. There’s a high cost for life, and one you will pay for.”
He moved away and circled the clearing again. Her gaze dropped to settle on his inhuman feet.No, not feet. Hooves. She hugged her arms around her stomach, trying not to watch him, but her eyes would not leave his body.
The fear that the morning light had diminished had come roaring back to life. It further clawed at her insides as she realized how futile it would be to run. He was twice her size, if not more, and naked except for a thick loincloth that draped his front and back. It left nothing to her imagination, and every part of him that was human versus animal was fully on display for her.
He. It. Thing.
Aldora knew him for his maleness from the very core of her soul. It wasn’t that he looked like a human male, it was the abysmal, unbreakable aura that threatened to drown her whenever he neared. They were alone, and being a female, she was worried.
He stopped in the middle of the clearing, barely an arm’s length away, and grasped the ties hanging at his sides, removing them.
They landed on the murky ground with asplat.
“I won’t run,” she mustered warily. His head snapped up to peer at her. “I won’t run because I want to live and...” she sucked in air through her nose, “I can’t smell anything but you anymore.” Aldora tore her eyes from him to look at the fog overhead. “I don’t know where we are, and even if I made it back to the barrier, I’m in no state to make the climb.” Her body was on the verge of collapse. “But...”
He made no move to speak and she clutched her arms tighter.
“I’m sad.”
The silence that stretched between them had her curling up on her side on the wet ground. The quiet lingered far after he had risen to his feet and stormed off and out of her sight. It was the best gift he could’ve given her.
Aldora closed her eyes against where his form had long since vanished and wished she could smell the dirt beneath her cheek.
That she could smell anything that wasn’t him, anything at all.
