Page 28 of Sun Elves of Ardani

Not an exit from the ruins. But not a dead end. They weren’t going to drown after all. Neiryn closed his eyes, silently sending a prayer of thanks to Aevyr.

When he opened them, Kadaki was looking up at him, her wet, dark hair plastered to her head. She held a hand to his chest, a spot of warmth against him in the cold water, and it began to glow with the white light of a healing spell.

“You said you didn’t have enough power,” Neiryn said suspiciously. “You said you might make it worse.” That was the last thing he needed.

“I’m recovering my magic faster than usual here. I think being in the center of an axis does that, even for someone like me.”

Things on the inside of his body shifted and tingled and pulled oddly. Healing magic always felt strange. But by the time she pulled away, he was in significantly less pain.

“Thank you,” he said.

She didn’t reply as she climbed up over the lip of the pool and set herself on the edge. That was when he realized that the water had made the thin, pale fabric of her clothes transparent. He took in the curving outline of her small breasts and their hardened, dark tips before he thought to avert his gaze. She wrung water from her hair, still facing toward him, oblivious.

He cleared his throat. “Kadaki, I can see through your shirt.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her giving him a half-lidded stare. She looked like she was questioning his intelligence. “I know. I can see you staring at my breasts, believe it or not.”

He jerked to look up at her, and had to quickly look away again. He scoffed, offended. “That wasn’t staring. It was a mere brief glance, if anything.”

She gave him a look that he couldn’t quite interpret, but she didn’t seem pleased with him.

“I have no need to steal looks at women,” he said. “It’s not as if I have a shortage of breasts to look at.”

“Yes, you can get any woman you want, of course,” she drawled. “Consider me very impressed.”

“I’m not talking about people I’m romantically involved with.”

She gave him another look. “You spend a lot of time leering at strangers’ breasts, do you?”

“Yes—no.” He climbed out of the pool. Water from his sodden clothes splashed on the stone floor. “Not leering. But they’re… there, sometimes, obviously. I’m around women frequently, you know. There are plenty of women in the Ysuran military. It’s not like the Ardanian army. And there are times when we’re bathing, or changing, or what have you.”

“So this is a story about how you stare at your subordinates’ tits while they’re changing?”

He glared. “No. I’m saying that tits aren’t as big a deal in Ysura. It’s like saying you’d like to stare at a woman’s shoulder blades, or her foot. Women aren’t all wrapped up in layers and hidden away in Ysura the way they are in Ardani.” All of this was true, except for the fact that none of it applied to Kadaki, because he had never seen her breasts before, which in fact made him want to see them quite badly. He was also, of course, painfully attracted to her regardless of what she was wearing.

“If it’s not a big deal then why stare?”

“It’s not. And I wasn’t.”

“Good for you.” She finally crossed her arms over her chest, though it seemed to be more for the sake of conserving heat than for modesty. She only seemed to get more annoyed with him the more he explained.

“What was that thing that was chasing us?” he asked, eager to change the subject. “Do you have any idea what it could be? Or where it came from?”

“I know exactly what it is. I’ve never seen one, but I’ve read about them. Ysurans call it an elf-eater.”

“Awhat?”

“In Ardani, we call it a magic-eater,” she went on. “That’s why it glows. It’s held together with magic. You can see why it chose to take up residence in the middle of an axis. It consumes magic energy as sustenance.”

“And elves?”

“Elves have magic in their blood. It eats them for their magic, presumably.”

“So do mages.”

She nodded. “I’d imagine it would happily eat me, as well. And probably anything else that got in its way, judging by what it did to that building. According to everything that I’ve read, magic-eaters are unthinking, unfeeling things. They know only hunger and consume endlessly.”

He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it behind his ears. He guessed that the thing would keep looking for them as long as they were down here.

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