This story will involve a few character deaths, a non-graphic act of sexual assault, other acts of violence, and brief (non-graphic) nudity. Thoughts are in italics, trade language in italics, sanzai will be in quotes and italics. Hopefully that is not too confusing.
I was inspired by kiwi's writing prompt on what would happen if Tempo slipped into Alex's dreams while they slept on the shuttle. He turned this into the very good For What Dreams May Come. I wanted to take a different twist on the idea, so I started outlining this story. It took a long time to get it to this point - it has been a very long time since I have written anything. Sorry for the length for the first part.
Chapter One: Nightmare
SpoilerShow
Beryl wakes to wind rushing past her face. There is a vast silence in her mind, instead of the usual chatter or even just the presence of her companions. Opening her eyes, she glimpses stars. She starts to hold her breath instinctively even though she knows it is futile if the shuttle has been destroyed, then reassures herself that there is air and resumes breathing. She tries to hold her hand up and the stars shift violently. Tumbling, she thinks. I’m falling. Why am I falling? Her view is uninformative as she falls – there is a large field of stars, then darkness, then a smaller field of stars, then more darkness, then it loops back to stars.
She pauses to remember what she was doing before this. That’s right, I was on the shuttle with the others. We were going to sleep, but Tempo wanted me to stay awake and sense any change in Alex’s lotai through my touch. She shivers and tells herself it is from the cold wind of the fall. Is this some mental punishment for betraying Alex’s trust? Tempo’s argument that Alex would want to know if his lotai was based on some non-conscious factor seemed logical. Beryl found herself agreeing, wanting to establish a more intimate connection to the strange human.
But that was back in the safety of a shuttle surrounded by her fellow loroi. I must be dreaming. Alone, wherever this is, Beryl remembers all of the rumors she has ever heard about the mental techniques of the mizol. They can cloak their thoughts so you only see your greatest fear. She does not think this place is her greatest fear, but she finds herself unsettled. What happens if I hit anything? What happens if I don’t? She is not sure which would be worse.
I’ll wake up at some point. It should only be six hours until one of the others is up. Tempo and Fireblade were also staying awake to monitor Alex – one of them will surely notice something is amiss! She tries to shake off the rumor that the mizol can distort their victims’ perception of time, so one minute seems like hours. Just stories to scare the other castes, she assures herself.
Suddenly in the darkness, there is a figure. As she tumbles, she recognizes Alex standing in air only a dozen feet away, whipping past her. He looks surprised, she thinks, then her rotation shows him diving parallel to her, head held in a position so he can see her and whatever she is falling towards and his arms outstretched before him. I am falling towards water reflecting the stars above, Beryl realizes.
“Relax and hold your breath in a heartbeat,” a quiet, determined voice says in her mind. “Stay calm. Someone is coming to find you, and you will be ok. I promise.”
Is that Alex? she barely has time to think as she hits the water. Pain blooms through her body, followed by a deep cold. Her skinsuit seems to offer no protection as the water pours in through the openings in it. She is not sure if she was holding her breath or not, but she finds herself choking on the water. She manages to get her mouth closed but spins for long seconds, trying to find the sky above. Everything looks so much darker underwater. Follow the air bubbles, she thinks, remembering one of Stillstorm’s interminable stories of her days on Taben.
Beryl spots the bubbles and starts following them, then feels a large current catch her. She puts her limbs out to slow her tumbling, finds the bubbles and starts to follow when something grabs her foot. She kicks out for a second, then hears the voice in her head again, so soft that she wonders if it is sanzai or merely her subconscious pointing out something she has missed.
“Stop kicking. You are heading deeper.”
“Are you speaking-” she begins but is cut off.
“Prey!” a deep, primal roar sounds through her sanzai. It rejoices/seethes, “it has been too long since there has been prey in my domain!”
She quickly spins and grabs Alex’s arm to pull him up towards the surface with her. He follows her up. As they break the surface, the voice roars in triumph as something huge breaks the surface in the distance. She cannot help but look while he starts pulling her away – she gets the impression of something large, long and slender, with fins and a long tail and topped by a head full of teeth crashing back, with something smaller held in its mouth. She turns away, joining Alex in swimming towards shore. He seems to be scanning the way ahead, and as they get closer, he corrects their direction purposefully.
In a few minutes, they reach a drainage pipe. It has a grate with sturdy bars on it, but the gaps are wide enough for them to fit without much effort. It should be too small for that beast to follow. I hope.
Entering, she is pleased to see that that the pipe is wider than the opening and the sides are raised to be out of the flow of water. Alex climbs up quickly, then turns to help her up. As cold as the water is, the air feels much colder. Hypothermia, she thinks, her mind flashing back to when they were treating Alex on the shuttle after picking him up from space. We both need to get warm, fast.
“Thanks for rescuing me,” she says to Alex. She has so many questions, but the most immediate one would have to come first. I am never going to live this down. I can already hear Tempo’s encouragement, Talon’s snark, and Fireblade’s derision when I tell them about this. “Our clothes are soaked. I’m getting cold; you look even worse. I hope this doesn’t cause a problem, but we need to get our clothes off.” Please don’t be a problem, she thinks.
He blinks. Oh Tempest, he thinks I want to mate to warm up.
He nods, starting to fumble with the buttons on his jacket.
“This is purely for survival,” she warns. “Not a sexual advance.”
Shooting her a wounded look, he continues fumbling and she sees that his arms are starting to shake. She hurries over.
“Let me. Please.” I am never ever going to live this down.
He resists, then a voice speaks in the dim recesses of her mind with a sense of weariness. “Ok, I’ll let you undress me, but only if you sanzai me first so I can trust your intentions.”
Beryl stifles a quick expression of surprise. Of course he can sanzai. I think I’m in his – well, I guess nightmare. Alternately, Fireblade is right that I’ve been thinking about humans too much if this is my dream.
“Only in this place, not in the real world. Now please, state your intentions.”
“I desire to get your clothes off only to keep you from freezing to death. Please let me help.”
He holds his arms out to the side, still shivering. His clothes seem similar to when he was originally found in space. She quickly strips his jacket and shirt. When she moves to his pants, she notices a short blade of some sort strapped to his leg. She reaches for the handle, but he grabs her arm roughly.
“Please leave it in the scabbard,” he warns. “I don’t think I can untie it.” She manages to undo the straps holding the scabbard from his leg and setting it carefully aside, then stripping off his pants to leave him in his shorts, which, being thinner cloth, seem only damp instead of soaked. He is left shivering, arms hugging his bare chest, turning a shade of blue that she reminds herself is concerning, not appealing.
She frowns and starts feeling the side pockets of her skinsuit. Her hands brush the familiar bulge and she smiles as she gets the pocket open. Reaching in, she feels around and pulls out a thin rectangle. Ripping the covering off of it, she shakes out a metallic blanket and hands it to him. “Wrap this around you,” she instructs. She carries the blanket and a simple firestarting kit ever since her diral band days, when she suffered a truly horrible night out in a freak rainstorm on the open plains of Maia. She wishes she had her chemical hand warmers, but Stillstorm insisted they were a fire hazard, even though they could not get hot enough to start a fire. Alex wraps the blanket around him and holds it close. His teeth chatter, so she tells him to walk in place while she prepares to gather some wood for a fire.
“I’d like to get out of my skinsuit now,” she sends, clearly conveying her single-minded focus on getting warm. She flushes a bit at the realization that she is exaggerating her emotions slightly through the link, as one would to a very young loroi, but it is weird speaking telepathically to a non-loroi. A nearly naked male non-loroi.
When he indicates his assent, she removes the firestarting kit, carefully placing it on the ground and putting the flint and steel out to dry off. Stepping away, she unzips her skinsuit, stripping it off and leaving it on the ground as she stands in her underclothes. She notices that Alex turns to look away during this, then remembers his body modesty from the shuttle.
Turning to the matter of gathering wood, it looks like the wood on top is high enough that it should be dry. She starts to pull that off awkwardly. Most of the pieces are locked in like a puzzle among the other branches, and she is not very strong even before her muscles are bruised by landing, tired from the exertion of swimming here, and sapped by cold. Soon enough, she has several good-sized pieces. Deciding this will have to do for now, she carries them over to Alex in a few trips. She piles a few up carefully, then opens the packet of kindling from her kit.
Still dry, she notes as she pulls it out and builds a small pile. Better use it all in one attempt, she decides. Reaching over, she grabs the flint and steel, then curses as the steel slips from her fingers. It bounces once, then rolls towards the water. She lunges but comes up short, watching in anguish as it falls into the stream. She fights back tears, glad that Alex cannot see her face. Why is this dream so terrible? she thinks.
Slowly, she crawls back to Alex, who is sitting down looking at the skeleton of a fire.
“Do you have anything else to make a fire with?” he asks, with a disturbingly calm resignation.
“No,” she admits, ashamed at such a simple mistake. “I should have been more careful.”
“Use this,” he pulls the blade carefully out of the scabbard, then reverses it to hand to her hilt first. She eyes it. It is a finely crafted blade, with a fairly strong curve. She thinks she has seen something similar but cannot place it. The handle seems to be made of some kind of bone, nearly seamlessly attached to the blade. “Be careful you do not cut yourself. The blade is very sharp.”
Carefully bracing the weapon with one hand, strikes the flint onto the plate so a shower of sparks hit her tinder. On the third try, one of them catches. She moves the sword to the ground at her side, then leans forward to blow on the flames and start feeding kindling into it. Slowly, the fire grows until she feels comfortable pushing the fire into one of the pieces of wood, starting a proper campfire. She smiles as she starts feeling warmth on her hands.
Confident that they will be able to warm up now, the time has come for some answers. “So, what are you doing here?” she asks.
“Besides rescuing you?”
“I think I’ve done an equal amount of rescuing.”
“Fair enough. Thought it would work out differently in my head, or maybe I didn’t even think at all when I saw you falling.” He looks at the fire for a long heartbeat. “I guess I’m here doing penance. I think that’s the only way to put it. I’ve done something wrong – failed someone who trusted me. Still trusts me, as far as I know. Apparently, that means I deserve to be in this place.”
“Failed someone?”
“That’s why the whispers say I’m here.” She can sense he believes it, that he feels ashamed at whatever it is he did, or failed to do. “Maybe that’s why you’re here. Or maybe not,” he adds quickly, feeling her frustrated denial rise. “You’re the first person I’ve met who is here accidentally, so I’m not an expert on it.”
“You’ve seen others?”
“Yes. There’s a whole bunch of others – they seem to have come here willingly. More fools they, thinking they run this place when this place is running them. I hope to get out of here before they figure that out.” She senses a wry lack of belief that he will succeed.
“Our fires won’t alert these others?” she asks, alarmed. She tries to decide when they would be warm enough to put the fire out.
“No,” he reassures her. “The smoke is minimal and won’t be noticed. The others mainly patrol elsewhere, and look for other things. My name is Alex.” There is an added subtext of a weary man stubbornly walking against a wind made up of his past failures, bowed but not yet broken.
She turns to look at the fire so he does not see her frown. If this is Alex’s dream to deal with the trauma he has suffered, then it makes sense for him not to remember any of the loroi. I’ll need to ask Tempo about this, since the mizol are the most likely to understand the psychology of aliens. I wish our doranzers had any knowledge of non-loroi psychology.
“I am Beryl,” she says, delighting in sending the full meaning of her name, richer than even the spoken loroi trade language can easily convey.
“Pleased to meet you.”
She adds some more wood to the fire. “I think our clothes will be dry enough soon. Once we can dress, we can go to sleep.”
“Good. But first, I’d like my blade back. And if you don’t mind, the only way to properly sheath it is to give it some blood from each of us.”
“You’re joking, right?” He doesn’t seem like he’s joking.
“No. It may sound foolish, but it was a deal I made when I got this blade, to always give it blood when I used it. I figure since you used it, you should do so as well, but I understand if you don’t want to.”
“Why did you make that deal?”
“I heard somewhere that if you believe your weapon wants to murder everything, then it will. Figured it seemed to apply here.”
“Ok, so what do I do?”
“Just draw the blade, very lightly, over the palm of your offhand. Then pass me the blade and I’ll do the same.”
“And nothing bad will happen?”
“You’ll get cut, but that is all.”
“Like a diral band pledge,” she comments, then frowns as she realizes that he does not know what that is. She quickly explains the normal rite where a diral band cements their bonds by cutting their palm and mingling their blood. Her band had not done so, despite her pushing for it, but most bands did so.
“Sort of. I suppose we can do a blood oath since we seem to be in this together now.” He must have noticed her excitement over their link. She agrees and cuts her right palm. Her skin parts effortlessly, and then pain and blue blood wells up. How sharp is this? she wonders. Then a voice crushes her mind.
“Daughter of the arrogant, you have dared return to the depths that your masters fled? For that, I should have you cut your throat!” In her mind, she sees the vast creature from the lake rise up and grin evilly at her. She feels the blade rise to her throat, then realizes that her own hand is holding it there without any input from her mind. Or, she realizes, most of my mind is out of my control now.
“Beryl?” Alex cries out mentally.
“But I am feeling generous. Your perfidy is minor compared to others, so I will let yours pass, providing you assist me in a minor matter. A trifle. I would handle the issue myself, but then I would be forsworn.”
“What issue?” Beryl asks as her hand lowers.
“The eyes of my servants have grown bigger than their mouths, and they have enacted designs to imprison myself with the aid of the newcomers who are here. One I trusted was able to obtain my oath to imprison me. The details matter not. If you desire for this one… this Beryl, I believe you called her… to survive, you will assist me. In return, I will both spare her life, I will also not alert my captors to your existence, provided you free me in one week.”
Before Beryl can think to agree, Alex counters, “I need assurances that you will not harm us during or after this service, and also that doing this service will not harm Beryl’s people or my own.”
A deep laughter sounds through their sanzai. “The boy has been here for a month, and already he drives a hard bargain. Agreed, unless you seek to cause harm to me. And I assure you that it is in both of your species interests to aid me, as my captors seek the extinction of one species and the enslavement of the other.”
“There is still the loophole you are currently using – recruiting another to do what you cannot.” Beryl points out.
“Clever daughter. I will agree to that stipulation.” After a few more wording changes, Beryl and Alex agree. “Excellent! Your blood shall seal this covenant. If the daughter consents, we can use the blood she has already shed,” Beryl agrees, not wanting to feel the disturbing bite of the blade again, “then we need the blood of the son of man,” Alex winces, cutting his palm on the blade. “Let this covenant be sealed with this blood, and may it bring ruination to our enemies and freedom to ourselves.”
Beryl drops the sword with a gasp as the voice leaves her and she can once again control her limbs. How am I ever going to explain any of this to Tempo? And what will the mizol think? Wordlessly, she passes out.
She pauses to remember what she was doing before this. That’s right, I was on the shuttle with the others. We were going to sleep, but Tempo wanted me to stay awake and sense any change in Alex’s lotai through my touch. She shivers and tells herself it is from the cold wind of the fall. Is this some mental punishment for betraying Alex’s trust? Tempo’s argument that Alex would want to know if his lotai was based on some non-conscious factor seemed logical. Beryl found herself agreeing, wanting to establish a more intimate connection to the strange human.
But that was back in the safety of a shuttle surrounded by her fellow loroi. I must be dreaming. Alone, wherever this is, Beryl remembers all of the rumors she has ever heard about the mental techniques of the mizol. They can cloak their thoughts so you only see your greatest fear. She does not think this place is her greatest fear, but she finds herself unsettled. What happens if I hit anything? What happens if I don’t? She is not sure which would be worse.
I’ll wake up at some point. It should only be six hours until one of the others is up. Tempo and Fireblade were also staying awake to monitor Alex – one of them will surely notice something is amiss! She tries to shake off the rumor that the mizol can distort their victims’ perception of time, so one minute seems like hours. Just stories to scare the other castes, she assures herself.
Suddenly in the darkness, there is a figure. As she tumbles, she recognizes Alex standing in air only a dozen feet away, whipping past her. He looks surprised, she thinks, then her rotation shows him diving parallel to her, head held in a position so he can see her and whatever she is falling towards and his arms outstretched before him. I am falling towards water reflecting the stars above, Beryl realizes.
“Relax and hold your breath in a heartbeat,” a quiet, determined voice says in her mind. “Stay calm. Someone is coming to find you, and you will be ok. I promise.”
Is that Alex? she barely has time to think as she hits the water. Pain blooms through her body, followed by a deep cold. Her skinsuit seems to offer no protection as the water pours in through the openings in it. She is not sure if she was holding her breath or not, but she finds herself choking on the water. She manages to get her mouth closed but spins for long seconds, trying to find the sky above. Everything looks so much darker underwater. Follow the air bubbles, she thinks, remembering one of Stillstorm’s interminable stories of her days on Taben.
Beryl spots the bubbles and starts following them, then feels a large current catch her. She puts her limbs out to slow her tumbling, finds the bubbles and starts to follow when something grabs her foot. She kicks out for a second, then hears the voice in her head again, so soft that she wonders if it is sanzai or merely her subconscious pointing out something she has missed.
“Stop kicking. You are heading deeper.”
“Are you speaking-” she begins but is cut off.
“Prey!” a deep, primal roar sounds through her sanzai. It rejoices/seethes, “it has been too long since there has been prey in my domain!”
She quickly spins and grabs Alex’s arm to pull him up towards the surface with her. He follows her up. As they break the surface, the voice roars in triumph as something huge breaks the surface in the distance. She cannot help but look while he starts pulling her away – she gets the impression of something large, long and slender, with fins and a long tail and topped by a head full of teeth crashing back, with something smaller held in its mouth. She turns away, joining Alex in swimming towards shore. He seems to be scanning the way ahead, and as they get closer, he corrects their direction purposefully.
In a few minutes, they reach a drainage pipe. It has a grate with sturdy bars on it, but the gaps are wide enough for them to fit without much effort. It should be too small for that beast to follow. I hope.
Entering, she is pleased to see that that the pipe is wider than the opening and the sides are raised to be out of the flow of water. Alex climbs up quickly, then turns to help her up. As cold as the water is, the air feels much colder. Hypothermia, she thinks, her mind flashing back to when they were treating Alex on the shuttle after picking him up from space. We both need to get warm, fast.
“Thanks for rescuing me,” she says to Alex. She has so many questions, but the most immediate one would have to come first. I am never going to live this down. I can already hear Tempo’s encouragement, Talon’s snark, and Fireblade’s derision when I tell them about this. “Our clothes are soaked. I’m getting cold; you look even worse. I hope this doesn’t cause a problem, but we need to get our clothes off.” Please don’t be a problem, she thinks.
He blinks. Oh Tempest, he thinks I want to mate to warm up.
He nods, starting to fumble with the buttons on his jacket.
“This is purely for survival,” she warns. “Not a sexual advance.”
Shooting her a wounded look, he continues fumbling and she sees that his arms are starting to shake. She hurries over.
“Let me. Please.” I am never ever going to live this down.
He resists, then a voice speaks in the dim recesses of her mind with a sense of weariness. “Ok, I’ll let you undress me, but only if you sanzai me first so I can trust your intentions.”
Beryl stifles a quick expression of surprise. Of course he can sanzai. I think I’m in his – well, I guess nightmare. Alternately, Fireblade is right that I’ve been thinking about humans too much if this is my dream.
“Only in this place, not in the real world. Now please, state your intentions.”
“I desire to get your clothes off only to keep you from freezing to death. Please let me help.”
He holds his arms out to the side, still shivering. His clothes seem similar to when he was originally found in space. She quickly strips his jacket and shirt. When she moves to his pants, she notices a short blade of some sort strapped to his leg. She reaches for the handle, but he grabs her arm roughly.
“Please leave it in the scabbard,” he warns. “I don’t think I can untie it.” She manages to undo the straps holding the scabbard from his leg and setting it carefully aside, then stripping off his pants to leave him in his shorts, which, being thinner cloth, seem only damp instead of soaked. He is left shivering, arms hugging his bare chest, turning a shade of blue that she reminds herself is concerning, not appealing.
She frowns and starts feeling the side pockets of her skinsuit. Her hands brush the familiar bulge and she smiles as she gets the pocket open. Reaching in, she feels around and pulls out a thin rectangle. Ripping the covering off of it, she shakes out a metallic blanket and hands it to him. “Wrap this around you,” she instructs. She carries the blanket and a simple firestarting kit ever since her diral band days, when she suffered a truly horrible night out in a freak rainstorm on the open plains of Maia. She wishes she had her chemical hand warmers, but Stillstorm insisted they were a fire hazard, even though they could not get hot enough to start a fire. Alex wraps the blanket around him and holds it close. His teeth chatter, so she tells him to walk in place while she prepares to gather some wood for a fire.
“I’d like to get out of my skinsuit now,” she sends, clearly conveying her single-minded focus on getting warm. She flushes a bit at the realization that she is exaggerating her emotions slightly through the link, as one would to a very young loroi, but it is weird speaking telepathically to a non-loroi. A nearly naked male non-loroi.
When he indicates his assent, she removes the firestarting kit, carefully placing it on the ground and putting the flint and steel out to dry off. Stepping away, she unzips her skinsuit, stripping it off and leaving it on the ground as she stands in her underclothes. She notices that Alex turns to look away during this, then remembers his body modesty from the shuttle.
Turning to the matter of gathering wood, it looks like the wood on top is high enough that it should be dry. She starts to pull that off awkwardly. Most of the pieces are locked in like a puzzle among the other branches, and she is not very strong even before her muscles are bruised by landing, tired from the exertion of swimming here, and sapped by cold. Soon enough, she has several good-sized pieces. Deciding this will have to do for now, she carries them over to Alex in a few trips. She piles a few up carefully, then opens the packet of kindling from her kit.
Still dry, she notes as she pulls it out and builds a small pile. Better use it all in one attempt, she decides. Reaching over, she grabs the flint and steel, then curses as the steel slips from her fingers. It bounces once, then rolls towards the water. She lunges but comes up short, watching in anguish as it falls into the stream. She fights back tears, glad that Alex cannot see her face. Why is this dream so terrible? she thinks.
Slowly, she crawls back to Alex, who is sitting down looking at the skeleton of a fire.
“Do you have anything else to make a fire with?” he asks, with a disturbingly calm resignation.
“No,” she admits, ashamed at such a simple mistake. “I should have been more careful.”
“Use this,” he pulls the blade carefully out of the scabbard, then reverses it to hand to her hilt first. She eyes it. It is a finely crafted blade, with a fairly strong curve. She thinks she has seen something similar but cannot place it. The handle seems to be made of some kind of bone, nearly seamlessly attached to the blade. “Be careful you do not cut yourself. The blade is very sharp.”
Carefully bracing the weapon with one hand, strikes the flint onto the plate so a shower of sparks hit her tinder. On the third try, one of them catches. She moves the sword to the ground at her side, then leans forward to blow on the flames and start feeding kindling into it. Slowly, the fire grows until she feels comfortable pushing the fire into one of the pieces of wood, starting a proper campfire. She smiles as she starts feeling warmth on her hands.
Confident that they will be able to warm up now, the time has come for some answers. “So, what are you doing here?” she asks.
“Besides rescuing you?”
“I think I’ve done an equal amount of rescuing.”
“Fair enough. Thought it would work out differently in my head, or maybe I didn’t even think at all when I saw you falling.” He looks at the fire for a long heartbeat. “I guess I’m here doing penance. I think that’s the only way to put it. I’ve done something wrong – failed someone who trusted me. Still trusts me, as far as I know. Apparently, that means I deserve to be in this place.”
“Failed someone?”
“That’s why the whispers say I’m here.” She can sense he believes it, that he feels ashamed at whatever it is he did, or failed to do. “Maybe that’s why you’re here. Or maybe not,” he adds quickly, feeling her frustrated denial rise. “You’re the first person I’ve met who is here accidentally, so I’m not an expert on it.”
“You’ve seen others?”
“Yes. There’s a whole bunch of others – they seem to have come here willingly. More fools they, thinking they run this place when this place is running them. I hope to get out of here before they figure that out.” She senses a wry lack of belief that he will succeed.
“Our fires won’t alert these others?” she asks, alarmed. She tries to decide when they would be warm enough to put the fire out.
“No,” he reassures her. “The smoke is minimal and won’t be noticed. The others mainly patrol elsewhere, and look for other things. My name is Alex.” There is an added subtext of a weary man stubbornly walking against a wind made up of his past failures, bowed but not yet broken.
She turns to look at the fire so he does not see her frown. If this is Alex’s dream to deal with the trauma he has suffered, then it makes sense for him not to remember any of the loroi. I’ll need to ask Tempo about this, since the mizol are the most likely to understand the psychology of aliens. I wish our doranzers had any knowledge of non-loroi psychology.
“I am Beryl,” she says, delighting in sending the full meaning of her name, richer than even the spoken loroi trade language can easily convey.
“Pleased to meet you.”
She adds some more wood to the fire. “I think our clothes will be dry enough soon. Once we can dress, we can go to sleep.”
“Good. But first, I’d like my blade back. And if you don’t mind, the only way to properly sheath it is to give it some blood from each of us.”
“You’re joking, right?” He doesn’t seem like he’s joking.
“No. It may sound foolish, but it was a deal I made when I got this blade, to always give it blood when I used it. I figure since you used it, you should do so as well, but I understand if you don’t want to.”
“Why did you make that deal?”
“I heard somewhere that if you believe your weapon wants to murder everything, then it will. Figured it seemed to apply here.”
“Ok, so what do I do?”
“Just draw the blade, very lightly, over the palm of your offhand. Then pass me the blade and I’ll do the same.”
“And nothing bad will happen?”
“You’ll get cut, but that is all.”
“Like a diral band pledge,” she comments, then frowns as she realizes that he does not know what that is. She quickly explains the normal rite where a diral band cements their bonds by cutting their palm and mingling their blood. Her band had not done so, despite her pushing for it, but most bands did so.
“Sort of. I suppose we can do a blood oath since we seem to be in this together now.” He must have noticed her excitement over their link. She agrees and cuts her right palm. Her skin parts effortlessly, and then pain and blue blood wells up. How sharp is this? she wonders. Then a voice crushes her mind.
“Daughter of the arrogant, you have dared return to the depths that your masters fled? For that, I should have you cut your throat!” In her mind, she sees the vast creature from the lake rise up and grin evilly at her. She feels the blade rise to her throat, then realizes that her own hand is holding it there without any input from her mind. Or, she realizes, most of my mind is out of my control now.
“Beryl?” Alex cries out mentally.
“But I am feeling generous. Your perfidy is minor compared to others, so I will let yours pass, providing you assist me in a minor matter. A trifle. I would handle the issue myself, but then I would be forsworn.”
“What issue?” Beryl asks as her hand lowers.
“The eyes of my servants have grown bigger than their mouths, and they have enacted designs to imprison myself with the aid of the newcomers who are here. One I trusted was able to obtain my oath to imprison me. The details matter not. If you desire for this one… this Beryl, I believe you called her… to survive, you will assist me. In return, I will both spare her life, I will also not alert my captors to your existence, provided you free me in one week.”
Before Beryl can think to agree, Alex counters, “I need assurances that you will not harm us during or after this service, and also that doing this service will not harm Beryl’s people or my own.”
A deep laughter sounds through their sanzai. “The boy has been here for a month, and already he drives a hard bargain. Agreed, unless you seek to cause harm to me. And I assure you that it is in both of your species interests to aid me, as my captors seek the extinction of one species and the enslavement of the other.”
“There is still the loophole you are currently using – recruiting another to do what you cannot.” Beryl points out.
“Clever daughter. I will agree to that stipulation.” After a few more wording changes, Beryl and Alex agree. “Excellent! Your blood shall seal this covenant. If the daughter consents, we can use the blood she has already shed,” Beryl agrees, not wanting to feel the disturbing bite of the blade again, “then we need the blood of the son of man,” Alex winces, cutting his palm on the blade. “Let this covenant be sealed with this blood, and may it bring ruination to our enemies and freedom to ourselves.”
Beryl drops the sword with a gasp as the voice leaves her and she can once again control her limbs. How am I ever going to explain any of this to Tempo? And what will the mizol think? Wordlessly, she passes out.