What would he look like after spending fourteen centuries just living? Probably broken beyond repair. He would have probably run into moving vehicles and trains since their invention, or stabbed himself over and over again until the pain became meaningless.
No, never. He shouldn’t be alive. I shook my head, realising that punishment was worse than death itself. I closed the book quietly, shut my laptop and dragged my fingers through my hair.
Damn, I needed air.
I shook my head again and stood up, going upstairs to change into something else. It was past noon when I walked out of the house in loose jeans and a clingy long-sleeved orange top.
A sigh escaped me as I let my mind wander, until the reminder that I was yet to put my head together for my thesis slipped into my mind and knocked. I still wasn’t ready to hit backspace on that topic, and I needed to find a new one very soon. Somehow, I was searching for many answers except the ones I came to Nimorran for.
After a long walk, I strode into the most populated street, or could be called a market street, given that everyone was selling one or two things not just indoor, but also outdoor, on each side of the sidewalk. The market street was alive, voices calling over one another in a weave of sound. People sold fruits and vegetables in wooden crates. There were bolts of fabric dyed in deep blues and golds,handmade soap stacked in fragrant piles, candied nuts wrapped in paper cones. I stopped here and there, letting myself be pulled along by colours and scents.
The next cart caught my breath. Jewellery—silver chains, copper rings, strings of beads like droplets of frozen rain. There were beads of glass, polished stone, carved bone, some threaded into bracelets, others loose in little boxes: deep green malachite, soft pink rose quartz, cloudy blue chalcedony, and other colours I couldn’t recognise.
“Need anything, ma’am?” The woman’s voice was warm, drawing me closer.
I smiled, pointing to a box of green beads. “I’d like to mix this one with…” My finger moved to a different shade, darker, almost black in certain light. “…this one.”
“Lovely choice.” She began threading them together. “You must not be from here.”
“That obvious?”
“You’re so beautiful. And young. Most here are old, or tired, or both. People your age want to be free as birds. They spend their youth in the city, but at the end of the day, home calls one.” She kept talking as she worked. “Most of us have lived in the big cities. But where one was born…” She shrugged. “It calls you home, whether you want it or not. It’s normal. It happens to everyone here.”
“Has it happened to you before?” I asked.
Her eyes flicked past me briefly, then back. “Gods, no. No. I’ve never left. Can’t afford to. Too much at stake.”
I nodded, watching her hands move—loop, knot, tighten. “It’s nice to hear you’ve lived in Nimorran all your life.”
“It’s nice to hear,” she replied. “Not always nice to experience. If you see a bigger opportunity somewhere else, don’t stand here and let it pass.”
She tied the last knot, sliding the beads towards me. Then her gaze shifted past my shoulder again, and she smiled. “Does he want a matching set too?”
“What?”
Confused, I looked behind me and my heart—the biggest betrayal to ever exist—picked race at the sight of the man standing on the other side of the road, leaning against a building with crossed arms and crossed legs, all dressed in black with a relaxed gaze piercing through my skin.
Thrax.
Heat curled low in my stomach, clenching and unclenching from joy. Life seemed to wrap its vines around me because I was suddenly full of it as I returned my gaze to the woman, trying and failing to conceal my smile.
Okay, I thought, fingers curling around the bracelet.I’m beginning to think his act of finding me anywhere is attractive.
And that was not a good thing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
THRAX
Thrax stared at his palm as blood stitched itself back together beneath his skin, strands of flesh pulling tight like invisible threads, knitting the torn flesh, blood darkening to clot before the wound faded, leaving only a thin red line, one that would vanish before midnight.
Once, it would have been gone in seconds. Once, even a blade to the bone would have closed before the steel cooled.
Now, he had been kneeling on the cave floor for nearly five minutes, watching the slow crawl of his own healing. Century by century, the ability that had kept him partially alive was thinning. But had it gotten worse recently?
He rose to his feet, the movement tipping the ground beneath him. Fingers swept his hair back as he steadied his breath, tilting his head up. The cave opened above him, framing a sky that looked exactly as it had a thousand years ago—ageless and unchanging. Much like him.
His eyes closed, searching for the rhythm of his own blood, trying to regain a sense of balance, trying to hold the weight of his own strength. But it slipped through him like water.
