So it’s us that came into their path.
I don’t know what that means, if it means anything at all.
The air tightens, threads pulling taut between two groups that were never meant to meet out here.
For one stupid, fragile moment, hope sparks in my chest.
Bee.
My heart slingshots through my body.
Beneath me, my boots stagger, and I straighten up, chin lifted, to see the faces coming closer and closer and closer.
Samick tenses beside me.
His grip tightens on the rope—but he does exactly what I do.
Scans the faces of the other unit as we start to pass, like ships in the night.
No one stops to talk. Just some head tilts here and there. But we all look, stare, scan, searching for familiar faces.
The faces I see are too sharp and too strong and too bright with unnaturally coloured eyes, and the bodies are too muscular and too tall, and all of them are toowrong—
Fae.
Just fae after fae after fae.
They walk in pairs, more ordered than this unit, more structured.
Stricter.
That much I can tell just by passing them.
But then, Samick’s grip flexes on the rope.
I consider him, the feathering muscle slashed along his cheek, the sudden flickering in his eyes.
I trace his stare to the other unit—
To the face looking back at him.
Across the shifting torchlight, I find a set of blue eyes. They’re startling, even in the dim light. How lovely those eyes are, like pieces of ocean trapped in a place that has never known the sun.
But an ugliness is slashed across the fae’s neck. Ridged and pale, a scar that is undeniably a throat-slashing. One so deep and brutal that he should be dead.
The dark-haired fae isn’t looking at me.
He’s looking at Samick.
There’s something tangled in that stare. Something soft behind the clenched jaw and determined bootsteps.
Something dangerous.
Yearning.
I read it on him, that his instinct wants him to step forward. Cross the invisible boundary keeping them apart. Like he might reach out, pull Samick into an embrace.
Friends, I think.
