“Should there be more?” I hear Aloryk ask from behind my closed eyes. I open them to glare at him, only to find the faintest of grins on his lips.That fucking smile. He knows he’s teasing me. He has to. He shrugs but then winces at the movement.
“Are you ok?”
Ignoring my question, his hand raises - an offering to take mine again. Except, his hand is shaking now, and I look up to see those violet eyes looking a little glassy. “Come, my Polly,” he says, his voice, a raspy whisper wrapped up in pain. I leap forward as he stumbles, bowing down, trying to keep himself from falling completely.
It’s then that I see it while he’s doubled over with pain; one of his ink-black wings is slick with blood. There must be a very deep wound somewhere beneath those feathers.
“Aloryk, you need to sit down,” I tell him, hovering over his hunched form like a mother hen. He slumps and then collapses forward, his handsome face pressed into the sand, leaving little black specks to stick to his pretty skin. The groan he emits echoes in my chest, making me wince in sympathy. Those monsters really fucked him up. And he was protectingme. This man I’d never met - this stranger…this alien- had put himself between me and the monsters. The onslaught they’d wreaked over this body is unthinkable. “Aloryk?” I ask, kneeling down beside him and brushing off the jet black sand peppering his cheek.
His eyelids flutter before opening weakly. “Beautiful,” he murmurs faintly, his eyes closing again like keeping them open is too great an effort to endure. “Just like my dream.”
“Aloryk, I know you’re tired and hurting but we need to-”
“They are coming,” the other guy comments gruffly as he lands beside Aloryk and I, sand spraying over my leg as he does so. “Quick.”
Looking up, I see some dark figures lurking around the headland. They’re not chasing after us, per se, but they are definitely curious.
“The longer we are out in the open, the more their interest in us will grow,” the alien says, reaching down to grab Aloryk’slimp arm. “Soon, they will not care that we smell like something a grakiphant threw up and will see us for what we are to them.”
“What we are to them?” I echo, taking one last look at the lingering monsters in the semi-distance. If I really have gone insane, why did my mind createthose things? I’m pretty sure I know the answer already, but it doesn’t stop me asking, “and what is that, exactly?”
“Meat,” he grunts, and I feel surprisingly numb to his answer. The winged man hoists Aloyk’s unconscious body up and I quickly go to his other side, pulling his heavy arm across the back of my shoulders. It’s not an even distribution of the huge guy’s weight by any means, and I may be hindering rather than helping, but together, we start to drag Aloryk through the sand, trudging toward a large, slate-purple cliff.
Chapter 7 - Aloryk
When I resurface from the black nothing once more, there is firelight before me, the pop and crackle of the flames accompanied by soft murmurings. Slowly, I sit, gritting my teeth against the tremendous pain slicing through my wings. The quiet talk stops and two pairs of eyes are on me, one set is a rich, amber brown that fill my belly with yearning, the other… is whatever color the Shadow Wing’s are.
“Aloryk? How are you feeling?”
The question is asked by my female -my female. My lungs greedily take in an inhale. I found her. She is here. And she is everything she had been in my dream and more. The light purple colored hair, the gloriously curved figure, complete with an adorably rounded face and cheeks that flush a bright pink as I watch her.
I grin at my Polly, despite the way my shoulders and wings are screaming in agony. The pain has become a constant friend to me in some ways now, and my mind feels like a floating feather - or like that time when I drank far too much fermented fylli fruit juice. Polly is here and that gladdens my heart more than anything. “You may use my face like a seating rock whenever you please, my beautiful female,” I inform her, starting to feel a little light-headed now that I’m in an upright position again.
Chaz-Titi had told us of many a pleasurable thing that males and females can do, and I must admit, the thought of a mate using her male’s mouth for this purpose is one of many that I am fascinated by. I had lay awake in my hut, imagining my mishi-flower female straddling my face for many a night.
“Wha- Did you just…” Polly’s pretty little mouth opens and closes.
“I believe Aloryk just offered for you to sit on his face,” Tyrk drawls, leaning closer to Polly in a way that makes my tail twitch and my teeth clench. Her cheeks are blooming into an even deeper shade of pink now. “Where on these Goddess-given lands did you come up withthatidea, Protector Aloryk?” Tryk asks, bringing my attention back to the Shadow Wing.
I lift my chin. Is he implying I know nothing about females? That I simply made it up? “Chaz-Titi,” I reply, watching his blackened skin-stars burst over his body at the mention of the female.
He blinks, and then fixes me with a glare, the muscles in his jaw jumping before he grinds out, “I thoughtthis onewas your female,” he asks, jerking his chin at Polly.
“Excuse me?!” Polly flusters, “This is ridiculous.”
She stands, and instantly, I try to stand, too, but my body is raging against me, protesting with pain so sharp, it leaves me groaning and gasping for breath.
“Sit down,” she orders me, her hands before her, urging me to stay seated. “You’ve lost a lot of blood.”
I slump back, too lightheaded to stand anyway. Only now do I realize that I am at the base of a night tree, and we apparently made it back to the jungle’s embrace. I have only once seen The Great Waters before in all my life; when I was dropped off, wings freshly clipped for my Protector’s Trial. My back grazes the bark of the tree and I hiss at the contact, jolting forward. I shouldprobably lay down, but that would mean leaving the majority of the responsibility of my Polly’s protection to a Shadow Wing.
A Shadow Wing who saved us when I could not.
Fuck, that stings as much as my injuries do.
I stay seated because she asks it of me, trying not to focus on my own inadequacies now that I have my female.
“Good,” Polly comments, standing in front of me with her arms crossed over her chest and her shapely hip cocked to the side. I feel like a misbehaving youngling about to be reprimanded with the stern way she is looking at me.
