Page 49 of Ragoru

“Perhaps it was traveling solo like our Evie?” Sabol remarked as he joined them again, his head tipping curiously as he scrutinized the dead creature at Vrishna’s feet. “It certainly seemed to be heading somewhere fast the way it came out of that cave..”

“Probably just hunting us,” Vrishna muttered but Sabol gave him a curious look.

“Do you think so? Most predators stay far from us. It’s unlikely that it would purposely hunt us. My guess is that we were merely in its path, and it attacked out of reflex to kill you before you could kill it.”

Vrishna grunted in agreement. That was a fair assessment and one he might have thought of himself if he weren’t still reeling from what had happened. He peered at the angle of the crevice in consideration. The tunnel did seem to meet up at an angle so that it would have been moving in the same direction that they were traveling if it had not come across Vrishna immediately in its path.

“Where do you think it was headed?” he rumbled. He didn’t like that it was traveling in the same direction, heading directly for their mate.

Thral shook his head as he drew back, a deep growl vibrating through him as if that thought occurred to him as well and didn’t sit well with him. “Better that we just continue and quickly before any others attempt to join this one.

Sabol nodded in agreement, and they each took no more than a few steps forward until a loud blast burst through the tunnel. The force of it ripped them off their feet, casting them some distance as the tunnel shook violently and rocks began to fall. Vrishna hit the ground with a terrible force that knocked the breath from his lungs as the world suddenly went silent and the darkness threatened to close around him due to the light flickering at his side.

He lay there for a long moment, struggling to breathe amid the falling dust drowning him in the air. When at last he could breathe clearly, he brought the light up and struck it against his opposite palm, knocking something that felt loose back into place. It steadied and brightened once more, and he rolled to his feet with a pained groan.

“Thral? Sabol?” he rasped as he lifted his light and looked around.

It took him a moment to locate their gray bodies lying amid the rubble, but he never heard anything so sweet as he did when he heard Sabol growl and curse loudly, only to be met by Thral’s snarl. The males picked themselves up slowly from the ruin of broken stone and gathered their lights. All three of them peered around the ruins of the tunnel as a heavy silence descended among them.

Broken rock lay everywhere from the walls collapsed inward, and stone dropped from above them. Despite the damage, the tunnel somehow hadn’t collapsed completely, which in itself was a miracle. In the ruin of broken, fallen stone, narrow gaps were visible when they shone their light on them. It would take work, but they would be able to dig themselves out and continue their hunt.

Exchanging weary looks, they set to work, carefully dislodging and moving stones one by one so not to bring the rest of the ceiling down upon their heads. The work was slow, but with every stone they pulled and widened the gap by even a minutia, the more his heart hammered, sweeping a sense of urgency through him. Soon, soon, it demanded. Soon he would be free. Soon they would be reunited with their rya.

CHAPTER39

Evie coughed hard, her chest spasming with the effort to dislodge the dust that seemed to be coating her throat and lungs. She curled onto her side as she hacked until the coughs finally subsided, and her eyes blinked as they cracked open to the glow of the emergency lights. Every muscle in her body ached as she slowly pushed herself to a sitting position. There was a feeble whimper and a drawn-out groan of pain and she glowered in the direction of the huntsman.

“Alive still, are you?” she grumbled.

“I need help,” he replied in a weak voice. “A doctor.”

“Oh, shut up. I haven’t decided if you’re going to walk away from this yet, so it’s a little soon to be asking for a doctor. Considering what you did to my mates, I’m not feeling particularly sympathetic or generous,” she spat as she winced and pushed herself slowly to her feet despite the weakness in her legs that made them tremble like a newborn calf.

She mentally applauded herself when she didn’t immediately drop to the floor and peered around her. Sure enough, the targeted hall was completely collapsed. That entire wall in fact was gone. And, as expected, SAM was gone too.

“Fuck,” she whispered as she surveyed the damage. At least the entrance seemed to be untouched and clear just as the AI had predicted. She stiffened and a soft, scuffling sound came from it and raised her blaster that was still somehow clamped tightly in her hand. She wasn’t sure if it would even work now after all that, but bravado counted and she wasn’t going down without a fight. “Who’s there?”

“Don’t be afraid,” a serene, masculine voice answered from the darkness. “I will not hurt you.”

Evie’s hand tightened on her blaster. “Not exactly inspiring confidence here. Identify yourself!”

“Avareth Tetheri Norsulu Kavor, First Khival of Beshinara.”

“I have no idea what that means,” she admitted shakily.

There was a soft chuckle. “Yes, of course. You would not have heard yet of the Feriknikal out here. We have come in peace.”

Her brow furrowed. “Is that some sort of Old Earth joke?”

A sigh met her words. “Not very good, was it? My knowledge of your species is limited, but I do enjoy some of the media from Old Earth when it came to intergalactic species,” the voice admitted.

The Feriknikal stepped out from the dark hall, his hands extended in front of him, palms up in a gesture of peace. Evie eyed him cautiously. So this is a Shining One?

The term fit. The male had a translucent appearance to his outer layer of skin through which a golden bioluminescent dermal layer glowed. It wasn’t terribly bright, but the muted glow was noticeable and created a faint halo around him as he stood in front of her. For all that he possessed a vaguely human shape, his features bore a sharpness in their angles that no one possessed. Inhumanly large eyes, the entire expanse of which were black as a void, were tilted at a steep angle and his mouth a hair on the small side with perfectly sculpted lips.

He would have almost looked something out of an Old Earth fairytale if not for the fact that large roughly serrated horns curled back over the top of his head, or how the numerous very long threads of his hair, that appeared entirely like those of a human, whipped around his head, occasionally forming into locks and at other times fanning out around him as if windswept despite the lack of breeze. These also glowed with a slightly stronger bioluminescence, but for all their beauty there was something deceptive about it, as if it could suddenly turn upon a perceived threat. The shifting hair was long enough to graze the back of his calves as it moved, and she could only imagine what a coil of it could easily do, especially since it seemed to grow at various times as it moved, as if it could stretch its length beyond the one it assumed at rest.

She swallowed apprehensively. Unlike the Ragoru, there was nothing straightforward about what sort of potential threat this alien presented, and despite his serene expression, she didn’t altogether trust it.

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