Page 233 of A Soul to Embrace

Jabez threw his head back with a boisterous laugh. “I’d consider it foreplay.”

The growl that burst from Merikh was feral, but it quickly died. His orbs flashed bright yellow in humour, and he hid his chuckle well behind a grunt.

They both glanced at their females one last time before dematerialising.

A quiet chitter tickled Zylah’s chest. She scratched the side of her neck awkwardly as she stared down at the little plump human who barely came to her chest height.

Delora looked up at her so expectantly, her brown eyes wide and glinting with emotion, and she had no idea what she was supposed to do or say.

Zylah took in the wavy dark hair that reached just below her shoulders, her tanned flawless features, and her full pink lips. The gown she wore over her busty figure was white and came to just below her knees, with frills around her neck and sleeveless shoulders. It didn’t particularly look like an outfit for going outside, especially as she lacked shoes Zylah knew humans preferred to wear.

Although she’d met her before, and knew what she was to Zylah, it was still hard to digest that such a small thing was her mother. The fox-skulled Mavka she could understand, since they both wore a skull, antlers, and even a collar of a creature – hers being fur and his being feathers.

Zylah thought she may be a little under a foot and a half tallerthan her, which just made her wonderhowshe’d been birthed from this human.

“H-hi,” Delora greeted, her croaked voice thick with emotion and trembling with nervousness. “How have you been?”

Why did the question feel so stiff? It didn’t help that the female’s cheeks turned bright red, reminding Zylah of how her orbs would shift to embarrassment – something Jabez teased her about and called a Mavka blush.

“I’ve been okay,” Zylah grumbled in return, scratching at her neck harder with the desire to leave this conversation already. Even her teal orbs shifted to reddish pink as she felt completely out of her depth.

Loneliness almost had her orbs flickering with blue, but she managed to stop them.I wish he didn’t have to leave.She didn’t want to do this by herself.

“W-we, um...” Delora licked at her lips and glanced to the side at Magnar. “We’ve returned to your cave a few times over the last few months, but you were never there. Magnar said your scents had faded, like you hadn’t returned in a long time.”

“We left to go to Nyl’theria,” Zylah admitted.

Delora’s high-arching brows narrowed as her head jerked to the side. “Nyl’theria?”

Zylah lowered her hand, surprised she didn’t know. “Oh. It’s the Elven realm.”

Her complexion paled, her eyes twitched wider, and she fisted the skirt of her white dress. “T-the Elven realm?” she mumbled in a shaky voice. “Why?”

Zylah’s first thought was to state the whole truth as to why they originally left, but she decided that may not be taken well. He’d wanted to enact his war, only for him to fail because she’d gotten hurt. Jabez didn’t tell her this. Zylah figured it out on her own and thought it was sweet he’d done that for her because helovedher so much.

“Because we live there now,” she answered instead, lifting her sight to Raewyn so she could find an out from the conversation.

She watched as Magnar waved his hand barely an inch from Raewyn’s nose, as if checking she was truly sightless. She wondered if it was rude to do that, since it looked odd watching it from the outside, but she’d remembered doing exactly that the first time she met her. Perhaps it was a Mavka thing to be curious in such a way.

The tall Elven woman merely laughed, as if expecting it from him.

“Then how is it you walk around by yourself?” he asked her.

Placing Lehnenia on the ground to free up her hands, Raewyn unclipped an unassuming cylinder from the side of the satchel she’d taken from Merikh. The white cylinder had a brown loop on the end, and a tiny orange mana stone on its side. She placed her thumb over the stone for a few seconds, and a rod suitable for her height shot out from it. On the end, a small ball freely rotated for ease of movement across uneven surfaces.

The entire thing was made from the same nearly indestructible material the Elysians used as armour, which came from the silk thread of the central palace’s leaves.

A strip of silver in the very middle stated the level of Raewyn’s visual impairment, but the colour of it varied depending on the person.

Zylah had seen the female pull out her mobility cane quite a number of times, so she wasn’t surprised. Magnar, on the other hand, gave a laugh of mild excitement as he touched it to explore what it was. Raewyn then showed him how she used it to see.

For some reason, seeing herparentreact in the same ways she had was oddly soothing. Her heart swelled with tenderness at Raewyn’s kindness in the face of it all; it was a quality she really adored about her. She looked so natural meeting new people, soopen and welcoming despite that Magnar was something other to her.

I want to be like that.

Realising she’d looked away from Delora, and that she wasn’t offering the same kindness she liked in Raewyn, Zylah brought her skull back to her. She flinched inwardly at the female’s frowning and obviously disheartened expression.

“Why do you look so saddened?” Zylah asked, subtly tilting her head.

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