Chapter 10
The second Kaba was in my arms, I realized my life was altered forever. I never could have guessed that two months later, I’d be essentially jobless. Although that was changing. Homeless but not really since we now had a house. And so fucking in love that it scared me.
Kaba was fearless. Each new experience he encountered he faced head-on.
He worked his butt off in physiotherapy.
He never once slacked off and I cherished how helping him brought us closer together.
There were still some bumps in our communication.
We’d be totally lost without the translators but sometimes I thought they weren’t exactly accurate and I had to guess at his intent.
But we were working through it and Kaba was mastering Elvish. I could not learn his language.
The language he used with his family was a dialect of another language that only they used and Kaba didn’t possess the skill to teach it to me in his human form.
They spoke telepathically with one another, and while they used words, emotions and ideas were conveyed through words that he couldn’t explain.
Even he struggled to speak it. It didn’t occur to me how much language was affected by our mouths and how sound was pushed through them.
When your only means of communication was telepathic, you didn’t understand how to make your mouth move and work to make the sounds you heard in your head.
A dragonkin who lived on the island was able to talk to Kaba telepathically but Tiki was unfamiliar with Kaba’s language nor did he have the dragon’s gift of automatically speaking in someone’s language regardless of what it was.
Tiki promised to have a friend of his come at some point, since he worked for the dragons, and help Kaba.
I considered if all the therians would need that kind of help and if we should petition the dragons to have someone on hand who could speak to them.
The more I thought about it, the more imperative it seemed. I only lucked out that Kaba knew some Elvish but what if the others didn’t know any? I made a mental note to present the idea to King Bayne in the morning.
I hoped one day, his family could find more of their kind.
So far, none had been found here in the Terran dimension.
It saddened me to think they might be the last of their species.
But I surmised the ones brought in to join their family had to have come from somewhere.
There were two other family units found and all of them would be brought to the island.
They could stay here to rehabilitate or to live permanently if they chose.
I’d been helping to strengthen some shields on the mainland today in preparation for a storm coming in the next day or so. I had already checked on the ones which covered the whole island and added my magic to strengthen them. They had excellent mages, but it never hurt to increase the defenses.
I strolled along the road toward our house after getting dropped off at the turnoff by a shuttle.
The realization that we inhabited a living tree was unreal.
During our time at POOF headquarters, the tree was so immense that you wouldn’t consider it a tree unless you stood at the edge of a branch and glanced down.
The first and last time I did I freaked because I couldn’t see the ground through the thick foliage.
Nevertheless, our house was quite different.
Rather than being made from one huge tree, it was made from three smaller ones merged together.
The elves who grew them said it was preferable so that it wasn’t so obvious from afar that the trees were anything other than trees.
It made sense to me, and frankly, I was unconcerned with how they were made.
I only cared that Kaba and I had a roof over our heads.
The new settlement was situated at the end of the road, with trails meandering between the homes leading to the lake.
Our house sat near the center, with the back overlooking the lake.
Due to the number of therians expected to live here, there wasn’t enough space to construct houses all around the lake.
However, the walk to the lake was not far at all.
Each house also featured a natural tub that would easily fit two hippos in their first or natural form, as Kaba called it.
As the sun began to set, I created a few floating mage lights.
It was eerie to walk past all the empty houses, and while each house had lights in the branches, they were all off to conserve energy.
Ahead, the lights of our new cozy home shone through the foliage.
Kaba had been acting weird even for him in the past few days.
I wasn’t sure if it was because we were getting closer to having his family here or if it was something else.
The main door almost seamlessly blended into the bark of the tree if not for the knot of wood sticking out.
There were windows like those in Mythtalas, made of magic-infused crystal that was merged with the tree as if it was part of it.
The Magnus elves combined magic, nature, and technology in a way that blew my mind.
We worked more with stone than trees back home, so our thought patterns about utilizing magic differed. Well, this was home now, wasn’t it?
I wasn’t crying rivers over it. Family? Nope, I couldn’t miss what I didn’t have.
Job? Not a chance! The Magecore experience didn’t live up to my expectations.
Although I continued doing the same type of work since I specialized in it, the atmosphere was different, and I wasn’t dealing with the same challenging individuals.
I expected that there would be difficult personalities here as well, and that the excitement would eventually fade.
However, I had a sense of purpose in helping Kaba resettle his people.
Knowing it would be a tough task, the prospect of working alongside Kaba, and sharing the workload, made the challenge less daunting.
The aroma of dinner was thick in the air and I wondered what would be in store for me tonight since the combination of smells I was getting were a bit confusing.
Kaba wanted to learn how to cook but he was worried about burning things or starting a fire by accident.
However, part of the rehabilitation was cooking classes that would start after his family was here.
Someone was coming to teach them how to cook and work all the various appliances after they got used to eating cooked food first.
I considered it a brilliant idea and was thrilled at the prospect of acquiring new skills.
Since I wasn’t the most skilled cook to begin with, I believed it would be fun for Kaba and me to learn together.
While our dimensions were similar, they were very different.
The technology here was different enough that I’ve had to relearn many things.
One thing I hadn’t done yet was learn to drive their vehicles, which were larger and went much faster.
However, the rules for owning a vehicle here were very strict.
I’d never be able to have one of my own.
But there was a fleet of vehicles I could borrow from if I needed to.
For now, the free public transportation was more than enough to get me around the island.
I sat on a small stool near the entryway and took off my work boots.
Placing them on the rack by the door, I went in search of my mate.
In the kitchen, we had a cozy dining table positioned next to a large window that faced the lake.
Although the trees were too dense to view the sunset, the last remnants of light filtering through were gradually diminishing.
Kaba strolled out of our bedroom on the main floor.
There was another floor that had two other rooms, which we weren’t sure yet what we were going to do with, and there was a cozy bathing room with only a shower and then a separate toilet room.
The larger bathing room with a very spacious tub was off our bedroom.
The first floor toilet room was by the front door.
It was fascinating how the trees processed our waste.
They took what they needed and then expelled the rest into the soil for other plants to use.
My concern was that the process might lead to unpleasant odors emanating from the trees or the surrounding area over time.
However, they assured me that the method effectively broke down the waste to its fundamental elements, eliminating its toxicity.
It was both fascinating and kinda gross.
I decided it was one of those things I wasn’t going to examine too closely and chalked it up to magic.
Some days, the best explanation was that the magic took care of it and just left it to that.
Magic flowed through all living things. While the ley lines varied across dimensions, drawing from them revealed a consistent essence of magic.
In the midst of all the chaos, it brought me the greatest comfort, second only to Kaba.
“Hello, my mate.” Kaba greeted me with a kiss.
The chasteness of it did not diminish the zing that lit through me with the contact.
“Hello to you too, my mate.” While I never denied he was my mate, I had been holding back on making us official in the eyes of nature and the magic. We were legally married on paper. It was the best way to give Kaba an actual identity and safeguard him from disappearing again.