The words had been spoken in a feminine voice, and at first, it took me a while to find its source. But there, bobbing in mid-air next to one of the Carers is the floating, spinning, glowing orb that ‘the Goddesses’ use to communicate to us. It must have detached from the Temple when we weren’t paying attention.
Instantly, the elders drop to a kneel, urging the younglings to do the same. I’m too caught off-guard to follow suit, and Zyn doesn’t even attempt to bow down to the floating ball. Instead, he steps in front of me, shielding me from the deity with his massive body.
Peeking around him, I watch as the orb floats closer. “I wonder, what would you best me at?” it muses. From the tone of its question, I don’t think it’s actually challenging Zyntarr. In fact, the voice sounds… playful? “Do you play duos on this bore of a planet?…. or maybe goxxi-stones?… I’ll even settle for eye-spy!”
The orb floats higher to be directly in front of Zyn’s face. It spins and whirs like this ball-thing is really looking at him. “Oh, shit!” the orb exclaims, but this time, Zyn jerks a little in surprise at how the voice is now that of a male and decidedly less ethereal sounding. “I guess I’d have the advantage over you on that one,” the male voice laughs.
Heat spikes at the base of my skull and I step out from behind Zyntarr. “Are you making a joke about his eye?! Because that isnot ok!” I demand, pointing an accusatory finger at the spinning ball.
It’s not until a deathly silence falls after my words that I remember that I just reprimanded a ‘Goddess’… or is it, ‘God’ now? I think the elders with us are all about to have a conniption.
Beside me, Zyntarr subtly angles his big body like he’s readying to pounce on that little spinning God-ball. “Leave her be,” he growls so low and menacingly, it sends tingles down my spine and raises the downy hairs at the back of my neck.
The God-ball….laughs. “Relax!” it chuckles. “Your cute little human is safe.”
“Why do you sound like a male?”
The question came from a small child -Tyll- who was no longer bowing, and had shot back up to his feet amongst his peers, his little face confused, curious, and completely oblivious to his Carers angrily gesticulating for him to get back down into a kneeling position.
“Ah,fuck!” the orb-God swears. “I mean, sorry, uh… it must be broken again… uhhhh…” the sphere spins and bobs nonsensically like it can’t decide what it wants to do. “You know what? Uh… us Goddesses sometimes sound like this, you know? It’s-it’sperfectly normal.”
I’m not so sure about that.
“Please forgive the youngling’s ignorance, my Goddess,” one of the elders steps forward to say, his graying head bowed low, with his graying wings tucked in tight on his back. “He meant no offence.”
The orb whizzes around and starts circling Tyll. “Oh, yeah, none taken, none taken,” it says, spiraling and loop-de-loopingaround the little boy. Tyll giggles. “Oh, hey, kid. You wanna try n’ catch me?”
With that, the hovering ball zooms away, twirling and zig-zagging all over the place, egging on little Tyll to follow - which he does, excitedly pursued by all the other boys, too. The Carers nervously look to one another before deciding they had better run along after their charges.
Zyn and I watch from our place here at the foot of the mountain, the strange Temple looming over our shoulders. “That Goddess is… very odd,” Zyntarr comments as our gazes follow the glowing ball and little crowd of Trixikka children laughing uncontrollably as they frolic from one side of the white-grass-covered clearing to the other, chasing it. The elders shout for them to all calm down. It doesn’t work.
“Yeah, it’s a shame. I was thinking of asking the Temple for some advice,” I say, feeling Zyn’s heavy gaze settle on me without having to turn to see it. I stay facing forward, watching the little kids laugh and jump and sprint after that twirling orb. “I was going to ask the Goddesses if I saw what I thought I saw.” It’s then that I turn to face him, my eyes falling to his chest. In the light of the bright afternoon, all I can see is his scars - no evidence of heart-stars at all. I sigh to myself. “Do you think we could coax them to appear somehow? So that we know for sure?”
Zyntarr stares at me with that one blue eye of his for a long while. It takes him so long to answer me, I almost start to think I’ve made him mad somehow. But then he says; “I do not think one day spent together is enough to make heart-stars appear, little Bea.” His voice is somehow velvety and rough at the same time. He pauses, his chest expanding with a breath before firmly adding; “you should stay with me in my nest this night.”
And with that, he turns back to the chaos of the younglings whooping and giggling as they chase the God-ball. Zyntarr doesn’t wait for my answer, he simply starts to walk in theirdirection, as calm and nonchalant as if he hadn’t just invited me to bed with him. His tail twitches and he stretches out and resettles his huge, inky black wings on his back. When he calls out in one booming word for everyone to stop - they do.
Even the Goddess orb stays bobbing up and down in one place. “You really are a buzzkill, you know that?” the ‘God’ voice calls back to my man.
My man.
God, it’s gonna hurt if this is the wrong choice.
Chapter 9 - Bea
For the rest of the day it was like I was even more hyper-aware of Zyntarr being beside me than I had been before. Every slight brush of his feathers on my arm or the tufted tip of his tail on my calf sent shooting stars up my body. It makes me wonder if that’s what skin-stars feel like for the Trixikka? By the time evening rolled around, and he’d taken my plate of food in his huge hand, telling me to ‘come,’ with a jerk of his head toward his hut, my stomach was doing somersaults.
“If we retire from the others early, and eat together in here, it will be less noticeable than you having to choose to come with me when you bid the other females goodnight.” He says the words so logically, and level as he sets my plate in front of his on the ground before seating himself there too, the arches of his big wings rising high above his head.
Zyntarr then takes the little soft leather pouch he likes to have on a low-slung cord around his hips. He keeps a blend of spices in that pouch. Sometimes the blend is different, and I can feel him watching for my reactions when I try it on my food. It hasn’t tasted different in a while, though. It’s tasted so incredibly good, and part of me wonders if he designed that particular recipe of herbs and spices specifically to my taste, and now he just carries around a little pouch of it to season my food with?
He does so now, looking up at me with that gorgeous blue eye of his before he tucks the pouch away at his hip.
My heart feels like a jumping bean. Are we really going to start sneaking around?
Well - sort of sneaking around. It’s not very sneaky of us because everyone will eventually know where I’ve been sleeping if I’m not at the girl’s hut.
And, is it just going to be sleeping we’re going to be doing? Or are we…? My eyes fall to Zyntarr’s loincloth of their own volition. He’s sat cross-legged and not even the soft leather can hide that there’s something large and heavy hiding under there.
