Page 92 of Stars in Aura

He didn’t know what else to say for the first time since he met her.

Ki’Remi stared at her, his whole body tense with the savagery of what she shared.

Disbelief warred against logic and everything upon which he built his intellect.

Souls in a jar? A celestial city in the skies? Higher Gods who punished their own? Her life in a vice?

His absolute life was grounded in science, irrefutable fact, and rationality.

Yet, Issa Elaris sat before him, living proof of the impossible.

His jaw clenched.

There was no denying what he witnessed: her glowing hands, the sheer power radiating from her, and how she obliterated their enemies and pounded them into oblivion.

He searched for a rational bulwark in the chaos she shared, intellect and cold reasoning to anchor himself.

All he found was her.

She was watching him now, waiting, not with hope but with resignation.

She didn’t expect him to believe her or support her.

For some reason, that infuriated him.

‘Seventy-three hours,’ he rasped, voice quiet and measured. ‘And then you implode?’

She nodded.

He exhaled through his nose, rolling his shoulders, trying to shake off the edginess her account roused in him.

He had seen suffering before.

In war zones, in famine-ridden planets, in the depths of space where death was a whisper away.

This was engineered torment.

Cold. Calculated. A punishment woven into every hour of her existence.

A part of him wanted to dismiss it, to throw up the barriers of logic and reason. To call this what it sounded like delusion, myth, a fever dream wrapped in superstition.

However, he couldn’t bring himself to cast her off because, despite all the impossibilities, her pain was real.

He perceived it in the tightness of her shoulders.

The way her fingers trembled before she curled them into fists.

She held herself together as if she had carried this burden for so long that even living with it became second nature.

With a sudden lurch, he hated her enemies.

He loathed the thought of this woman walking through life with no one to bear this misfortune alongside her.

The realization struck him harder than it should have.

This wasn’t his battle. Nor his problem to fix.

Yet here he was, wanting to pull her into his orbit and protection without knowing what it meant for him.

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