Chapter 39 The Making of a Universe #2
Lying beneath them, with only a thin strip of cotton separating her skin from theirs, Sascia feels much too flushed for words.
She nods—then immediately goes still and breathless.
Nugau has lifted her T-shirt and begun their own exploration.
Inch by inch they discover, with their fingertips or nose or lips.
They spend an inordinate amount of time on her belly button and the jut of her hipbones over Shivani’s low-rise pajama pants.
A long time later, Nugau’s head pops up again, eyes glazed and heavy-lidded. “Sascia,” they say, very seriously, “may I bite you? For us aesin, it’s a form of intimacy. I promise I won’t make it hurt—”
“Please,” she rasps.
Nugau gives her no warning. Their teeth close around the soft flesh beneath her rib cage, shooting licks of flame through her chest. Sascia’s eyes flutter closed. She’s thinking indecent things again, coarse with want and rough with desperation.
But Sascia has never been too good with self-restraint—she pushes to her elbows and buries her teeth over the closest thing she can find: the soft curve where Nugau’s neck meets their shoulder.
The sound Nugau makes—a startled sigh of pleasure that could sustain Sascia forever, a godly ambrosia to her hungry mouth.
The princet goes absolutely still, in both resolve and surrender.
Sascia trails her teeth to their ear. Nugau gasps quick breaths against her neck that make her feel aflame with heady joy.
She listens intently; with their every soft exhale, her own body reacts, every inch of her bursting with the need to be touched.
Time becomes endless between them. Their soft sounds stretch an eon. Millennia pass with every exploration of their hands and lips. It is fitting, in a way, for two souls brought together by a knot in time; the meeting of their bodies lasts as long as the making of a universe.
“I have a confession to make,” Nugau whispers later, as they lie on tumbled sheets.
“Mhm?” Sascia is burrowed into their neck, being swept into the lulling waves of sleep.
Their throat vibrates against her skin. “I knew you long before I met you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Since I was a young adolescent, I have seen flashes of an image between one blink and the next. It’s your face, breaking out of the darkness.
Your hand, reaching for mine. When you jumped in the Maw to save us, I recognized you as the face that I’ve been glimpsing for half my life.
That’s why I was so hostile at first—I thought you were something evil, come to haunt me.
My own guilt, perhaps, for leaving my family when they needed me most. But your hand, it had always felt like an invitation.
And your scent…it promised a perfect sunny day. ”
They breathe her in, slow and luxurious, as though she smells intoxicating.
“So in the end, I surrendered,” Nugau whispers. “Even now, I cannot give you up. I am a coward through and through, because I would rather bare my throat at your blade than be your enemy.”
The words fold around her, warm and snug. Sleep drapes at her eyelids and heat swathes her body, snug and cozy as a childhood blanket. She wants to say I love you too, but it is too blunt a statement, too small, too human.
She says instead, “There is no blade. There is only this.”
She kisses them, and in that kiss, she bleeds everything: how she feels, how she wishes, how she hopes.
When she leans away, Nugau’s face is flushed with color. Their eyes take to the ceiling, where the iridescent marks of the moths cast endless spotlights. “I would like to show you Itkalin sometime, after all this is over.”
“Yes, please.” She can think of nothing better. Surely, with Nugau by her side, she’ll find a way past the unbearable cold of that world. “What does it mean, Itkalin?”
“Itka is our word for moth, and lin is the essence of our world. It is in constant flux, a push and pull, like the black sun in our sky, or the shape of our flowers, or the marks on our skin.” Their Darkprint shifts among pulsing colors.
“Our world is one of ever-turning change, of endless beginnings. We named it after the first creature that dwelled in it, and after this power that is vast and unknowable, yet always filled with wonder.”
They shift to look at her, a hint of a smile on their lips.
“I guess the best translation,” they say, “is Moth Dark.”
Mooch wakes her.
Around the bed, the moths snap their wings, a flurry of movement and sound.
Sascia raises a sleepy hand to pet them, but her touch seems to agitate them even more.
Like a swarm, they fly to the window, flapping against the blinds.
Something is wrong. She tugs her T-shirt on and rushes to the window.
Her every step makes the moths grow louder.
Nugau lifts their face from the pillow. “Sascia?”
But Sascia can’t reply. Her eyes are locked on the city below, plainly visible from the cohort’s thirty-first-floor apartment.
She traces the concrete barrier a few blocks away, with its hundreds of nova-light panels and mortars, its death cannon and trio of helicopters circling above.
Beneath all this light, the Maw is a pit of liquid black, vast and bottomless, but… its surface is rippling.
No, Sascia thinks. It’s too soon—
An antlered helmet breaks out of the Dark, then the armor-clad shoulders and three-foot-long broadsword of a warrior queen.
War isn’t coming any longer.
War is here.