Page 24 of A Soul to Embrace

Whether he ignored what she’d done or hadn’t noticed it, Jabez continued his explanation and circled all the seasons with a stick.

“A year.” He did so again, repeating the action. “One year.” He put up a single finger before doing it one last time.

He explained that these seasons happened repeatedly, which she, of course, knew. Zylah just didn’t know why. She figured ‘a year’ was what it was called.

She looked forward to the day they could have a proper conversation and she would understand him better.

She’d like to learn who he really was, where he’d come from, and why she’d found him beneath a bunch of stone. Who was Jabez, and why had she never met another creature like him?

Zylah studied the sharp clip of his smooth jaw, his high cheeks, his stern brow, and deep-brown skin. Her gaze followed the strong line of his nose, and then his full lips that hid sharp razors behind them. Her focus flicked up to his long, pointed ears – a feature she’d only seen on animals and not humans – before looking over his black horns.

She liked his horns a lot, as well as hisnailsthat appeared like small claws. These were features they shared, and it somehow made her feel closer to him.

What she adored most was that he seemed to...understandher, like he’d met another of her kind before. Had he befriended them? If he’d been this attentive in the past, she wondered why they’d left his side at all.

He’d been rather patient in her learning, and so informative that she had hope they would soon be true companions. She wanted to voice how she felt, what she needed, and see if perhaps he knew what her true purpose was.

Why was she here? Why had she only ever met one otherMavka, as he called her? The humans called her Duskwalker. She wanted to know why she had so many names, and what their meanings were.

Her orbs shifted to bright yellow when he lifted his eyes, tipped with white lashes, to her skull. He didn’t grin, didn’t smile, but he had a dark intensity to his gaze that always made her feel uncomfortable in the strangest, but oddly remarkable, way.

Zylah liked having his eyes on her, like he was capable of seeing past the borders of her flesh and her inability to communicate, and trulyseeher. They pierced so deep.

She chittered happily at him, and a white brow raised back. She came a little closer, wanting to feel his heat she’d only ever felt briefly or get a stronger draw of his scent. To just be near his presence even more.

He looked away too soon, sighing as he did.

“You’ll figure it out eventually,” he stated, disappointing her when he stood and moved away. He looked towards the forest. “I’ll take us to the lake again. I also want to teach you how to transform into your more humanoid form like other Mavka.”

He continued their lesson along the way, showing her different plants while giving her their proper names. He even managed to have them sneak up on a small creature and capture it.

He called it a rabbit.

He directed her to block her nose with earth to hide its scent before he grossly pulled it apart. Although she didn’t like the needless death, and instantly grew sour at him for it, she accepted it. Zylah grumbled the entire time, as he showed her its bones, its blood, and its different insides while explaining it all to her.

She learned in that lesson what an animal was, what kind it was, and...

That her skull matched this creature’s.

It felt wrong to kill it.

With his eyes closed, his body relaxed, and his mind dozy, Jabez wrinkled and wiggled his nose against the musk surrounding him.

For quite a number of days, the mixture of Zylah’s surprisingly pleasant scent – a rather gentle tangle of jasmine and violets – had tamped down the wet dirt, clay, tree roots, and mould.

Once he identified what her particular scent was made up of, his mind put it to the side, leaving the rest strong in his senses.

His sense of smell wasn’t as good as a Mavka, and he thought it may even be weaker than most Demons, but it was still heightened in comparison to humans.

And he was covered in the grime of her home. It clung to his cloak he constantly wrapped around his body protectively. He felt like a burrowing animal, cowering in some pathetic hole in the ground like a mouse.

But it was more than that. Deeper, even.

Once more, his nose wrinkled, and he cringed at the choking memories that rose up from the depths of his mind. Memories of a time he’d much rather forget and always struggled to do so.

A time and place that had greatly shaped who he had become, and it had been hundreds of Earth years since he’d experienced it.

Yet, in the span of an Elf’s life, it was only twenty-one years ago, almost twenty-two. Then again, to an eleven-year-old, who had been trapped for almost six Elvish years, the passage of time had felt both vast and constricting.

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