Page 19 of Bite Sized Bride
One afternoon, while I am weaving a crude basket from flexible vines, he begins to scratch in the dirt with a clawed finger. The movement is not random. It is deliberate. He draws a series of sharp, angular lines, his brow furrowed.
I stop my work and crawl closer. The symbols are orcish runes. My heart gives a painful lurch. I recognize them. A jagged mountain peak, a snarling tusk, and a broken spear. It is a clan sigil.
“Stonefang,” I whisper, the name a ghost on my lips. I read of them once, in a history of the Northern Wars. A clan wiped out by Malakor’s grandfather.
Kael’s head snaps up, his eyes locking on mine. The name has meaning to him. I can see it in the sudden, sharp pain that flashes in their depths.
“Stone. Fang,” he grunts, his voice a rough, grinding sound. He points a massive, clawed finger at his own chest. “Kael. Stonefang.”
He is not just Kael. He is Kael from the Stonefang Clan. He is the last remnant of a dead people. The tragedy of it is a physical weight, pressing down on me.
After that day, the words come more frequently. They are broken, disjointed things, sentences of two or three words, but they are a bridge across the silence.
“Sky… blue,” he will rumble, looking up through a break in the canopy.
“Mikana… cold?” he will ask, nudging a log onto the fire with his foot when he sees me shiver.
He is like a child, discovering the world for the first time. His curiosity is a raw, innocent thing that sits so strangely in his monstrous form. He will spend an hour watching a yillese spider spin its web, his massive head tilted in silent fascination. He once spent an entire afternoon trying to catch a single, iridescent papilion butterfly, his gargantuan, clawed hands moving with a comical, clumsy gentleness. He never caught it, and the look of profound, childish disappointment on his face when it flew away was so heartbreaking I had to turn away.
This is the new torture. Seeing the man, the orc, thepersontrapped inside the Urog’s shell. I see his frustration when his clumsy, cursed body cannot perform a simple task. I see the flash of agony in his eyes when a memory breaks through the fog. I see the quiet, constant care he takes for my safety.
And I am beginning to wonder. Who was Kael? What did he look like, before the curse, before the scars, before the monster? Did he have a mate? Children? Did he laugh?
The thought is a dangerous one. It makes him real. And a real person is much harder to keep at a distance than a monster.
We are forced to move again when we find the tracks of a Miou patrol less than half a mile from our camp. We travel for a full day, pushing deeper into the woods until Kael finds a new shelter, a narrow fissure in a rock face, barely wide enough for his shoulders.
I am exhausted, my body aching, my feet raw. I stumble on a loose rock as I enter the fissure, my ankle twisting beneath me. I cry out, a sharp gasp of pain, as I fall.
Before I hit the ground, he is there. He moves with that impossible, terrifying speed, his massive arm shooting out to catch me. He pulls me up against his chest, his hand splayed across my back, holding me steady.
“Mikana… hurt?” he rumbles, his voice a growling vibration against my ear, his face inches from mine.
“No, I’m… I’m all right,” I stammer, my hands pressed against the hard, scarred landscape of his chest. I can feel the powerful beat of his heart beneath my palm. My own heart is a frantic, fluttering thing.
I look up at him. His amber eyes are filled with a raw, naked concern. The red storm is nowhere to be seen. There is only Kael. I can see the individual flecks of gold in the amber, the way his thick, black lashes cast shadows on his scarred skin. His face is a roadmap of old battles and ancient grief. A face that should be terrifying.
He lowers his head, his gaze dropping to my mouth. He is curious. The simple, innocent curiosity of a child who has discovered something new and wants to understand it.
He leans in.
My mind screams at me to pull away, to shove him back, to run. This is a monster. A beast. A creature of nightmare.
But my body is frozen. I am trapped in the intensity of his gaze, in the raw, honest emotion I see there.
His lips touch mine.
It is not a kiss. Not really. It is a soft, hesitant pressure. A question. His skin is rough, chapped, and the edge of his broken tusk scrapes gently against my chin. It is awkward. It is strange. It is the most terrifying and gentle thing that has ever happened to me.
And then, a jolt. A spark of warmth that has absolutely nothing to do with fear or survival. It travels from my lips, down my spine, and settles deep in my belly, a slow, blooming heat. It is a feeling I have never known, a feeling I have no name for.
I pull back, my breath catching in my throat. The moment is shattered. I stumble away from him, my back hitting the cold stone wall of the fissure. I cannot look at him.
My face is on fire. Shame, hot and sharp, washes over me. What is wrong with me? How could I feel that? That… spark? For him? For a monster with the innocent eyes of a child, a creature whose hands are stained with the blood of countless beings?
He makes a low, wounded sound in his chest, a loud sound of pure confusion and rejection. He thinks he has hurt me.
“I’m fine,” I say quickly, my voice tight and unnatural. I turn away from him, busying myself with my small pouch of supplies, my hands shaking. “I’m just… tired. We need to start a fire.”
