Page 13 of Bound to the Marak

There had been something wild in her gaze. Defiant, even in fear. A spark unburned. It called to something in him he didn’t yet understand.

“She must learn our tongue,” he said.

“I will summon the linguists,” Temian offered.

“No.”

Karian stood.

The movement was liquid. His cloak, stitched from the living fibres of sea-thread harvested in the midnight trenches of Luxar, flowed behind him like a trailing current. He rose to his full height, towering above even the tallest of Yerak. The light dimmed reflexively, shadows bowing before his ascent.

“I will teach her myself.”

Temian’s breath caught—but he schooled it quickly.

“As you command, my Lord.”

Karian stepped down from the throne. The platform shifted beneath him, adjusting to his weight and flow as his tentacles propelled him forward in a low, sweeping glide. Faster than any humanoid stride. More fluid than any engineered motion. TheVelthraresponded, walls flexing open before him like breathless lungs.

At the threshold, he paused.

“See that she is treated with care,” he said. “No harm is to come to her.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

And then he was gone—slipping into the living corridors of his vessel, the heartbeat of the ship echoing through his bones. The ache in his chest remained—a hunger unfulfilled, deep and ancient.

Others of his kind drowned such hunger in conquest, or ritual, or political games.

But Karian had always been different.

And now, in the silence of his command, he felt it stirring again. Not just interest.

Possibility.

A single flame in the dark.

And he would see where it led—no matter what it changed.

Eight

The chamber was silent, as it always was, but Karian could feel the ship breathing around him.

TheVelthrawas alive in its own way. Grown, not built. It pulsed with energy drawn from the depths of Luxar's oceans—luminescent lines in the coralsteel walls tracing the ship’s pulse, the flow of neural data, the beat of motion and thought. And in this most sacred room,Karian’s private sanctum, theVelthraresponded only to him. No Yerak entered here. Not even Temian.

This was the chamber of observation. The chamber of control.

Karian stood unmoving before a curved holowall—his tall frame cloaked in layers of sea-thread and shadow, his arms clasped behind his back. His mask glinted in the dim light, smooth and impassive, carved from Luxar obsidian and traced with sigils of his line. His tentacles lay still beneath him, coiled in perfect symmetry.

To others, this stillness would seem lifeless. But to those who understood the Marak, it was anything but.

It was discipline.

It was dominance contained.

The image before him flickered softly—a translucent pane suspended in midair, drawn from the ship’s sensory matrix. It was not surveillance, not quite. It was communion. Observation on a level beyond cameras or screens. He couldfeelthe temperature in her room. Could taste the rhythm of sound. Could follow the curvature of her breath.

And she was there.

---