Page 59 of Aria's Ascension

“That’s… incredible!”

Sauran and Tirox both looked appalled at her excitement so she quickly corrected, “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean the fighting. That’s horrible. I meant that the octoflies call doesn’t work on you. For us, and everyone else I’ve come across, it enhances our aggression, makes usneedto fight anyone near us. But it sounds like it broke the suppression on your mind, which barely took to begin with.”

Aria paused, thinking through what that might mean. If nothing else, it meant he’d just become the most reliable person there. It also meant he probably knew more about this place than anyone else she was going to find, possibly even the dragon.

She had the impression he came from a primitive society, so the chances he’d recognize or be able to describe the technology he’d seen was probably slim, but she had Tirox. He and Sauran seemed to understand each other. He might be able to help translate.

Focusing back on Sauran, she leaned forward and propped her elbows on her knees. “This is going to be a tough question, and I’m sorry to ask, but do you remember being taken? Back on your homeworld?”

Anger, sadness, and regret flashed across his face in rapid succession, and his bright green eyes darkened, but he nodded.

Aria waited, but when he didn’t elaborate she bit back a sigh. She hated pushing him to answer obviously painful questions, but she had to know.

“Will you tell me what you remember?”

“This will aid you in our mission?”

“It might, yes.”

“Very well,” he murmured, solemnly. “It was the end of the Drowning Season… ”

Four people went missing from his tribe without a trace. He and two other males had been tasked with finding them. In the course of that search, they came across another small party from a different tribe with the same story.

From what she understood, their people usually only intermingled if they found mates from a different tribe during some kind of quest, but Sauran made the decision to bring those males back to his leader.

That decision was the beginning of something huge.

After a lot of back and forth with his leader, it was finally decided that they would send messengers to all the tribes they knew of and see if they, too, had lost people.

They found that many had. Some only lost one, but others were missing as many as half a dozen. And no one saw them disappear or knew where they went.

Upon learning that, for the first time in memory, a gathering of all nearby tribes was called.

Aria was more than a little taken aback at his entire species’ apparent disinclination to explore the world outside of their individual territories unless it was to find someone to breed with. Even then, it didn’t sound like they ventured very far. Hell, for centuries, humans had sought out new, unexplored places just for the sake of saying they were the first ones to find it. But, what did she know? It seemed weird to her, but maybe it wasn’t at all strange for people still early in their development to stay close to the area they knew. It didn’t sound like they really lacked for resources, so maybe they just didn’t have a reason to wander until people started disappearing.

At the gathering, after finding out how widespread the problem was, Sauran said most of the leaders’ first instincts were to return to their territories and hide, but one disagreed.

That woman, leader of one of the wetland tribes, argued that they needed to band together and find somewhere in which they could all live, safe from theRreshek. Ghosts.

Sauran said it took a hell of a lot of convincing, but she finally got all the leaders to agree. Messengers and scouts were sent in every direction, some to spread the word to the various tribes and lead them back to where they were gathered, some searching for a safe place to live, and many more to look for their lost people.

Sauran was one of the people sent to find a new place to live. And then he, too, was taken.

He talked about waking up in a box with see through walls, surrounded by other boxes, some holding his people but most full of beings and animals the likes of which he’d never seen. After being trapped there for a while, he woke again in what she thought was some kind of black market slave auction, from his description.

He remembered seeing a ‘hideous, green being with four eyes and a hard mouth.’

“Zhrovni,” she muttered.

The next thing he recalled was waking up in the arena.

“I was in two such battles, but only fought in the first. I chose to withdraw from the second and headed for the mountains. They were the wrong color, so I knew they were not ofShakti, but they were familiar enough. I thought I might find my people there, the ones that had been taken.” His jaw clenched and his gaze went hard. “The hideous one put me down here before I could finish my search.”

“Wow,” Aria breathed, at a loss for words. “That’s… damn.”

She felt like she’d just seen a glimpse of an entirely new world and had a moment of truly understanding how big the universe was.

The realization that it was full of planets, populated with people with lives as vivid and complex as her own, made her own life feel shockingly inconsequential, but it also left her with the intense desire to see those places for herself, to visit those people, to speak with them, to understand their world, if only a little. Because, as strange as she found some of Sauran’s customs, she understood his motivations and those of his people, identified with them.

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