Page 5 of Dweller of the Mists

She swallowed thickly as her pulse quickened.

“No problem,” she whispered aloud in an attempt to reassure herself as she turned away from the window and peered at the surrounding sleeping space once more. “I will just wait here a day or two and catch up on some rest. Whatever it is, it will eventually get bored and move on. It’s not like I’m short on food or anything. Being delayed by a few days to recover won’t hurt me. I’m sure everyone else is doing the same thing.”

That was a reasonable course of action as far as she was concerned. The problem was that it didn’t go away. Days passed in which Noelle paced the trailer, at times eating directly out of the packet. There was no power in the trailer so she could not turn any of the monitors on. There were likely voice logs within them documenting whatever had happened that led to the base camp being abandoned, but it was completely inaccessible to her. So she spent hours staring out at the swamp beyond the window instead. She never actually saw the creature during the day, but she heard it singing intermittently during the day from wherever it concealed itself among the trees within the lighter fog, letting her know that it was there, but every night it returned to the water surrounding the camp.

“Jymlina, jymlina,” it sang.

And the more it sang, the more her translator picked up. What was even stranger was that her translator was suddenly updating itself with the new language in large patches as if collecting and supplementing from another translator within range. She doubted that it was from anyone among her team. This was an uncharted world. None of them would have the language within the database of their translators yet.

That left only one possibility. One that sent a cold chill through her to even think about.

Had someone from the original exploratory team survived? That was the only thing that made sense since the translator was powered by the neural activity of its host. A translator attached to a corpse wouldn’t be able to uplink like that. But if someone survived, that implied things that only frightened her further as it didn’t mean that they were functionally whole. The fact that they abandoned the camp testified further to that. But if they were truly still alive… then where were they?

Chapter

Five

Gwum crept toward the dwelling, his slightly webbed ears pricking as he listened to the activity coming from inside. This female—for all her fearlessness, she was a shy one. She concealed herself in her dwelling while she watched him.

At first he worried that she wished to trap him there like so many females of his species, to catch him within her territory so he could never leave her nesting grounds again. Because of that, he made his approach cautiously. It was only after she watched him for several minutes and then disappeared without attempting to lure him inside that he decided to relax his guard. This was not her territory. She was not trying to trap him. And so, he watched, waiting to see what she intended to do.

Whatever she was doing, she seemed to be growing increasingly restless. He spent days watching her and had discovered that she never slowed down. Even though she never emerged from the dwelling—not even to enjoy the semi-seclusion of her pond, which could not possibly be good for her—she moved continuously with quick, jerky motions from one end of the dwelling to the other. And it was only getting worse as the days passed.

Her pacing was growing quicker with a nervous, twitchy energy as she hurried from one end to the other before whirling around and starting over again. She was at the window more frequently too, the shadows on her face growing darker, betraying her lack of sleep even as her pauses, while more numerous, became nothing more than hasty glances before she was nervously moving away again.

It was becoming uncomfortable to watch. It was natural that he felt that way. He was a healer, so of course it would bother him to see the female anxious and suffering. She was fluttering around inside like a brightly feathered wylmyn caught in a cage. Her restless pacing and frequent stops to peer outside were too much like the frantic beat of the wylmyn’s wings against its confines. His chest constricted tightly as he watched her, and that tightness spread quickly up his neck. The skin of his throat sack grew taut and flushed with heat, the skin tightening painfully as it then swelled instinctively.

Not again!He would not permit it. He had self-control. He would contain it. He would?—

“Jymlina,” he sang, his song bursting unbidden from him as his throat sack ballooned larger than ever, the sound deeper and more resonant than ever before.

Eyes widening in horror, he slapped a hand over his throat, flattening the muscle and the vividly pink flexible tissue there. It was one thing to casually sing in order to offer comfort, but those sweet little songs meant nothing. This, however, was a primal quaking designed to lure in a mate. It frightened him even as it vibrated from him.

“No, no, no. Not that,” he hissed to himself.

He was a fool. What had he done to himself? How was it even possible? It had meant nothing, no more than the other times that he had soothed and distracted an overexcited female to escape her notice. What was more, he had no intention oftaking a mate! Among the Bia, females settled comfortably into their territories, keeping their brood and mates close to them. Even before mating, they seldom ventured far from the safety of their maternal homes until they came of age to claim their own breeding “pond,” defined only by the greenery and natural structures that would enclose it partially from the rest of the swamp. It was only once they were comfortably settled and ready to mate that they drew males in with their pheromones and the pulse of their vibrations. And that was it for any male good and caught. The chosen male would never leave again except when accompanying his mate somewhere, though if there were young offspring, he usually remained within the nest caring for the young—his carefree days of exploration over.

It had never been a life that appealed to him. Although he had no objection to comfortably resting within a nest, his desire to explore the swamps of their world had him avoiding any scenario where he might possibly be snared. He should leave. He had just recently begun to consider that he might be cursed by the gods with a highly developed conscience that kept him from abandoning her to her own devices, but enough was enough.

Decision made, Gwum grunted quietly and turned away, intending to leap for a tree outside of the pond. He lined himself up for the jump and attempted to leap but his limbs refused to obey him. His breath stuttered out of him in a shocked gasp as he stared down at his traitorous body.

Why was he reacting like a captivated male, drunk on pheromones and stunned by the tiny pulses of bioelectricity? That was not happening. It was not possible. There were no pulses in the air, and the female’s pheromones were fainter and sweeter like the rarest flowers that bloomed after a monsoon than the robust notes of Bia females. She should have had no way to bind her to him.

Was it because he had privately admired her and, in moments of weakness, considered it a pity that he had never encountered such a female among his own species. Was this a joke from the gods for entertaining such forbidden thoughts? No Bia would have dared to even think such of a Gwyr. To think it of a female from the heavens was surely how he brought punishment upon himself.

And yet, within the privacy of his own mind, he could not deny that he was captivated by qualities in her that the Bia females he had met and known did not possess. Perhaps if they had, then he would have felt a desire to mate and put himself out of his misery. At least then he would no longer be plagued by his mother’s complaints about him being alone and that she had no grandchildren to dote on. For a moment he allowed his imagination free rein, and he gasped at the image of the female that rose unbidden within his mind, her body ripe and swollen with life even as she traversed fearlessly through the swamp at his side, a smile on her soft lips.

Such an adventurous female who fearlessly loved the swamps and wished to explore them as he did would be a female he could feelrightwith. With his quiet hiss of desperation, he thrust the image away even as he grasped at the underlying logic. It had to be the reason that he was singing for the female. Perhaps it was all in his head, even his captivation, all because some instinctive part of him was reacting to the fact that he was at ease around her.

He laughed uneasily. It was logical and yet it did not feel right. There were those among the Bia who would call it fate, but he had laughed at those who claimed that mating came down to such a thing. Pheromones and bioelectric vibrational pulses played a large part in ensnaring a male, but that was hardly fate. Still… it felt that way. He could see why those who had experienced it likened it to such phenomena. It was certainlytempting to entertain when it had such a strong influence on a male’s function. If not for the fact that he was a healer and highly aware that she did not send out electric vibrations to tease the receptive tissues in his ears, nor possess anything quite like the pheromones of Bia females, he might have also been susceptible to thinking this way.

Either way, it had suddenly complicated matters. He only intended to guard her on her northern journey because he could not abide the idea of her becoming injured or dying in his absence. Although it was not an inclination he had ever felt before as he customarily fled from females, it seemed natural enough response for a healer.

She needed to leave the dwelling now. He needed to continue making his way home before the saplings died. He could not afford to arrive empty-handed with nothing but a small harvest to show for his efforts. He was also ready for this torture to come to an end. She made him… react to her in uncomfortable ways. Even now he could feel the tightening as his cock grew more rigid. It was a state that plagued him nightly now for which he could not find any truly satisfactory relief. All this waiting was simply prolonging things.

He was getting tired of waiting.

Gwum hissed quietly to himself as he watched her shadow move past the window. She did not stop and pull back the material covering it to look out at him this time. Instead, she paced with an increasing restlessness that he could feel tightening within him. No, this was not the frantic fluttering of a wylmyn, trapped and cut off from the only home she had ever known. He suddenly comprehended with sharp clarity what this was. He understood this restless feeling. He felt it every day when he returned to his mother’s den, as was expected of any and all unmated males. It was being trapped in a place of safety and familiarity and feeling suffocated by it. Knowing it was rightto remain but unable to tolerate the confines. The pacing was an expression of helplessness while the constraints grew harder and harder to ignore.

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