I shudder, his voice almost like a physical touch. I look to my right, and he’s several feet away, watching me just like everyone else.
“What do I do?”
“Nothing. Let them observe.”
I hold my breath and wait, and one by one, they begin to turn away from me. Conversation picks up, but nothing in English. It’s all that melodic song they share with throats and tongues, so unlike humans, we’ll never learn to speak it.
I breathe a little easier when Rathyn steps up close to me and lays a hand on my shoulder.
So, touch isn’t forbidden. It’s just the sweet and sexy stuff they shy away from.
“Can I…speak?” I murmur.
He eyes me. “Do you think you would be silenced here?”
“No, but…I have no idea how I’m supposed to act or what I’m supposed to do. How many of your people can understand me?”
“Nearly all of them. We absorb language the way the ground absorbs water. It is…simple. Even if we cannot speak it.”
He means Cielo, of course. And probably other monsters like him who can’t seem to get their long tongues to work around our blunt language.
“Are there reasons Vyastil can’t speak English?”
“Yes.”
That’s all he says, and I don’t feel like I can ask anything else. Not here. Not with this company.
“Come,” Rathyn says. He squeezes my shoulder, then walks ahead of me, and I can’t help but follow. I can feel Vyastil eyeson me, and for a moment, I wait for the humiliation to hit me, being almost completely naked in a room full of strangers.
But it doesn’t.
Not really.
When there’s hunger in their stares, I feel a tug in my mind from Rathyn, reminding me I’m his, and that is the strangest comfort. It’s one that wraps around me and follows me out of the room.
We enter a long hallway, the walls very white and very polished. I can’t tell where the light is coming from. At least, not at first. But a few feet into the corridor, I realize it’s the walls.
“They’re glowing.” I want to reach out and touch, but I’m a little afraid.
Rathyn looks over his shoulder, ears twitching. “Gl…owing?” he says slowly.
“The walls.” I lift my hand and hover it near the white stone. There’s slight heat coming from whatever they’re made of.
“Ah. Yes. We have no need for the electricity that humans use.” He threads his fingers through mine and pulls my hand back. “Come, my Everest.”
We start walking again, down a maze of hallways. If I tried to escape, I’d probably die before being able to find my way out again. I probably should panic. I don’t like feeling trapped, and I really don’t enjoy feeling lost.
But my heart’s beating steadily, and it’s not long before the hallway opens up to a massive atrium. There’s a tree in the center, but it looks nothing like the trees on Earth. The leaves are a myriad of colors, the trunk a rich pink, and it’s growing right from the stone floors.
My breath heaves in my chest at the strangeness of it all, but Rathyn doesn’t seem to notice. He tugs me further along until we pass through a set of doors, and it’s then that I realize we’re outside.
Their sun—is it even a sun if it’s in a different universe?—isn’t as powerful as the one on Earth. The light is softer, cooler, kinder. I can’t see where it’s coming from, but I’m way too afraid to look.
The last thing I need is radiation from another universe burning holes in my retinas. Instead, I fix my gaze on the sky ahead of me. It stretches into waves of pink and orange like a desert sunset, and there are clouds, so that probably means it also rains here on Erethar.
I want to ask. I have a thousand questions, but I can’t seem to form words.
Rathyn notices that my steps have slowed, and he turns, his face softening and his ears flicking back as he approaches. There’s a street ahead of us and plenty of Vyastil walking around in either sheer robes or nothing at all, but none of them pay us any mind.
