Page 150 of A Soul to Embrace

“But that’s horrible.”

Jabez shrugged. “I can’t change the past – not what has happened to me or what I’ve done. All those who harmed us died that day, and I managed to learn how to transplant body parts to myself, so I’ve always considered it beneficial.”

“Trans... plant?” Zylah asked, tilting her head. She’d never heard that word before.

“When you’re in pain and scared, you do stupid things. Once everyone calmed down and finished eating the humans, I wasfound trying to stick my own ear back to my head.” Despite the horribleness of what he just said, a boisterous chuckle came from him. “There is magic that is considered taboo, and I just wanted my own damn ear back so much that I managed to figure out how to heal it back onto myself.”

“That’s not funny,” Zylah grumbled.

“Maybe not, but I do find it rather pathetic of me.” Humour still lingered in his expression as he looked down at her. “If I wasn’t so distressed, I wouldn’t have figured out I can also useotherpeople’s body parts to heal myself. Without that knowledge, I would be nothing but an earless, limbless torso rolling around on the ground. I would have perished a long time ago.”

“That sounds disgusting.” Zylah stuck her tongue out with a bleh.

She also couldn’t imagine doing such a thing, or the pain of having one’s ear removed – especially as she didn’t have fleshy lobes. But... she did know what it felt like to have her limbs missing, and she would never tell him that she had partially gone through that when she’d healed him.

The urge to caress his ear pestered her, and she wished she could soothe it now to make up for what happened back then.

“It really is. But you do what you can to survive. It takes a while for the attached limb to grow to my body size and match my skin colour, and about the same amount of time for me to fully use it. It also takes a lot of magic, so it left me ill from the ookmanik until I grew my mana capacity.”

Wanting to get away from this particular part of the conversation, Zylah asked, “What did you mean that you confused what the humans did to you with the treatment from the Elysians?”

Once more, he lifted his gaze to the ceiling. His tone was detached, as if he was talking about nothing important or ofconsequence. Zylah found it rather courageous that he could speak on these matters with such emptiness, whereas she likely would have grown teary.

She also found it really saddening. She wondered if cutting himself away from his past like this was the only way he could cope with it.

“My childhood still isn’t clear to me. I think the humans fractured my skull and impaired my memory when they hit me. I kind of remember my mother because she was always there whenever I was receiving treatment, and my stepfather assisted since he was a doctor. They often took blood from me, but I think... they also gave me much because I was unwell as a child. They fed a carnivore a vegetarian diet without realising it, and it was killing me. Those blood transfusions are likely the only thing that saved me, but seeing blood in a tube and then once again with the humans who were greedily taking it from me, I think I combined it all to be the Elysians. They locked me in a prison, and my damaged mind saw them also placing me in cages. I always remembered humans cutting off my ear and the fight that ensued afterwards, but I thought that was simply the result of a battle. Like I said, after visiting Merikh, only recently have those memories split apart and become clearer.”

“If that’s true, does that mean your hatred of the Elysians lessened?” If he misinterpreted what happened through injury...

“No,” he stated with a dark growl. “They may not have been the ones to torture me, but if they hadn’t locked me away like I was nothing but a beast, I wouldn’t have fled to Earth. Had they treated me better, done more to understand me, I wouldn’t have been subjected to everything I have suffered here. I never would have left my home, and I may have been able to live peacefully. All of that was stolen from me as a child.”

Unsure of how to respond, Zylah fidgeted through her unease by scratching her foreclaw over his chest.

“I will admit... my prison wasn’t as terrible as it could have been. They didtryto make it comfortable, but it was a cage all the same. They gave me books to study, as if they thought one day I would be able to leave it. They gave me toys, puzzles, and anything a child could need to distract themselves. That didn’t stop me from going insane, bashing my head against the wall in my tiny world, but it did help. It’s just unfortunate I was so starved of the nutrients I needed that anytime someone attempted to speak to me for too long, the smell of their blood, their meat, the sound of their heart beating in their chest, would send me into a hunger-filled rage. I was starving, and with the transfusions I needed, it always ended in me being bound to a bed as I fought to get free to eat whoever was trying to help me. It prolonged my stay, despite them trying to rehabilitate me for the outside world.”

“Couldn’t you just tell them you needed to eat meat?” Zylah asked, unsure as to why he hadn’t shared that answer. He’d made sure she was aware of his need for meat, and she’d barely been coherent enough to understand him.

“I didn’t know,” he answered. “The Elysians are entirely vegetarian for physical and spiritual reasons. Me being part Elf meant it just never registered to them because it’s not their way of life. They did the same thing to the fully evolved Demons who asked for salvation, who all tried to live their way of life and ended up turning on them without meaning to. The hunger doesn’tfeellike hunger. My stomach didn’t grumble, it just felt nauseous. I ate the fruit and vegetables they gave me, and those foods filled my stomach up without providing the nutrients I truly needed. I couldn’t ask for something I didn’t understand. I just wanted the stomach pain to end, but no one knew the answer, and they didn’t wish to cut me open to see if there was something wrong with my organs.”

“What did they do to those Demons?” Her orbs darkened in their blue hue, worried for the answer.

“They were imprisoned with me. It was foolish of the Elves, and the books they gave me to study were what eventually led to our escape. The ability to use earth magic through stone is not common, but I think my hybrid blend has gifted me with additional mana strength. I managed to learn how to do it with nothing else to keep me distracted; all I had was time to practise. Someone offered me their blood as a component to help strengthen it, rather than weakening myself, and I managed to destroy part of our underground prison. The bars of our cells were strong enough against us, but not from part of the ceiling collapsing. I used that same magic to create the canyon of the Veil.”

With a gasp ripping from her, Zylah sat up. “Youmade the canyon?”

“When will you accept that I am a very powerful being?” he asked, a laugh at her expense bursting from him. “The humans think we arrived only three hundred years ago, because that’s when the canyon was formed. I was here years before that. More Demons were crossing over from the portal stone I’d stolen to escape Nyl’theria, and we needed a place that was shaded and dark. It helped that the centre of Austrális was nothing but brittle desert, and there were already many canyons. I just expanded them with what I’d learned from escaping my prison, and used the mana stones I obtained from Nyl’theria to aid the spell. It helped that I managed to teach that magic to the Demons who came here with me. I didn’t do it on my own, although I did grow most of the forest. I was a man who had a lot of anger and needed an outlet, so I found one.”

“When did you grow Spiral Haven then?”

“About a hundred years after that.”

With Zylah still sitting up in disbelief, she watched as his gaze drifted down to her bare chest, and then it darkened. His pupils expanded, and his jaw muscles flared as if he clenched his teeth. He sat up so he could curl an arm around her shoulders and drag her back down.

“Lie down.”

With a harrumph, Zylah conceded. It wasn’t hard to, since she was thrilled to be able to soak up more of his warmth, scent, and deep voice.

“What else can you tell me?” Zylah asked, her tail swaying. She didn’t care if it was all horrible and saddened, she just liked discovering more about him.

---