Page 45 of Rok's Captive
He tilts his head, that now-familiar gesture that seems to say he’s trying to understand me but isn’t quite there yet.
“So,” I say, looking around at the vast desert stretching in all directions. “Where to now?”
Chapter13
A NAME IS A MARK. SHE HAS MARKED ME
ROK
Icannot look away from her.
The realization comes slowly, settling into me like the dust settles after a storm. She stands before me, small and fragile against the vastness of the desert, and something in me has…changed. Shifted. As if the very foundation of my being has cracked, allowing something new to take root.
The wind tugs at the strange coverings she insists on wearing, and beneath them, I can sense the heat of her skin, the rhythm of herdra-kir—strong and steady now, no longer fighting against the heat that had threatened to consume her. She moves in a circle and I follow her movement with my eyes, tracking each gesture, each expression that crosses her face. The way her brow furrows as she studies the horizon. The way her lips press together in what looks like concentration. The way the sun catches in her hair, turning it to fire.
I want to move closer. I want to breathe in her scent again, that strange, sweet smell that is unlike anything on Xiraxis. I want to press my face to the curve of her neck, where her pulse beats visibly beneath her delicate skin.
I want to taste her.
The thought crashes into me with such force that my claws dig into my palms. This is not…I am not… These urges are foreign, and yet they burn through me with an intensity that I cannot ignore.
Female.
The word echoes in my mind, ancient and powerful. A myth. A legend. A gift from Ain herself.
And yet, here she stands. Flesh and blood and warm, strange scent. Not Drakav, not of Xiraxis, but undeniably, impossibly, female.
“Okay, so we’re down from the cliff,” she says, her voice quick and light. “That’s good. Progress. But which way do we go now? I need to find my people.”
I watch her turn in circles, scanning the horizon with those strange, fragile eyes. No secondary lid, as far as I can tell. How will she protect against the storms when they come?
No need.Iwill protect her.
I will not leave her side.
“I think it was that way,” she says, pointing toward a distant ridge of stone. “Or maybe that way? I don’t know. Everything looks different now.”
The dust stretches endlessly in all directions, the same shifting sea it has always been. But she sees it differently. To her, it is a maze, a puzzle to be solved. She is lost.
Lost, and very far from home.
Perhaps Ain truly did send her. Perhaps there is purpose in her arrival, in our meeting.
Or perhaps the dust simply gives what it will, and takes what it will, and there is no greater meaning.
I try to mindspeak, focusing my thoughts into a clear image:“Where did you come from?”
But it is useless. She continues her restless movement, unaware of my question, her mind sealed away from mine.
She cannot perceive my thoughts. I have tried, again and again, to reach her mind, to share the images that would make her understand. Each time, I am met with silence—or rather, with the chaotic flurry of her own thoughts, sealed away behind a wall I cannot breach.
Yet somehow, she has given me her name.
“Jus-teen.”
The sound still feels strange on my tongue, unfamiliar and awkward. But when she spoke it, pointed to herself and shaped those sounds, an image formed in my mind—a bloom in the dust, delicate and impossible, yet somehow existing. Bright. Beautiful.
Names are sacred. We do not own them. A name is something given, not in sound, but in thought—a mark left in the minds of others.
