Chapter 19 #2
The other option was that the chair was a total loss, it would break down at some point. Then Krashe would try to carry me the rest of the way, that didn’t seem like a smart choice. But sending him on ahead to get help? Was that any smarter? If he passed out, I wouldn’t know what had happened.
Glancing back for the hundredth time, my heart lurched in my chest when I realized that Krashe had paused a few feet back. He was upright but no longer moving, staring into the distance with a fierce frown on his face, his jaw tightly set.
“Hey! Need a hand?” a voice called out cheerfully. I spun in my seat to face the front and that’s when the chair gave a final spluttering effort to keep me hovering before it crashed with a thud to the ground. The smell of burned electronics and melting plastics filled the air; not good.
A pale figure came around a tree, a Naga as white as snow.
He was such a jolting, different sight from all the Naga I’d seen so far that I just stared.
He was different in many ways, from the fact that he wore a robe around his shoulders in pale blue, to the sash around his middle.
He wore glimmering jewels around his arms, throat, and in bands around his tail.
His scales might be white but when he slithered out from behind the tree, they caught the sunlight in a shimmering wave of color like an opal.
“Artek! How did you find us?” Krashe rumbled, he was no longer frozen in place.
He’d silently gotten right next to me, and now he pushed his body between me and the stranger.
I thought he’d said Artek would help us, that the Shaman would be the one who knew how to use those chips we’d found.
Clearly, Krashe wasn’t feeling quite so trusting right now.
“I was just out for my morning stroll when I caught the scent of blood. How bad is it, my friend?” The Shaman moved closer without a care for Krashe’s threatening posture.
He kept right on going until he could lean around my mate and peer at the bloody bandage on his back.
It wasn’t until the Shaman had his face right there that he even acknowledged my presence, winking at me with one golden eye.
He straightened after that glance, “Deep one. Why don’t you let me do some quick field dressing before you carry your mate to my home?
I don’t think her hover chair is going to move another inch.
” I could see his face better now, he had refined, almost androgynous features and long pale gold hair.
I could also see that his cheeks were a little sunken, and red veins shot through the whites of his eyes.
He looked exhausted, like he hadn’t slept in days.
“How did you?” Krashe started to say but he was also shrugging off his precious bag of books, readily presenting the worst of his wound to the pale Naga. He was trusting him with his own body, though he still kept himself between me and the male.
“Ah, she’s not the first human I’ve met,” the Shaman responded while he pulled a very strange-looking device from a satchel at his hip, he slipped it over his hand like it was more jewelry but then a piece in the center started to glow as soon as he held it over Krashe’s injury.
My heart was racing from the news and the sight of such a helpful medical device.
Krashe was in good hands and if this male had seen other humans, did that mean Vera and her group had come through here?
“I’m Artek, nice to meet you by the way.
” The Shaman clearly knew that I could understand every word that he said and he also seemed to know exactly how much contact he could make without making Krashe feel like he had to intervene.
This was the strangest Naga I had met so far, and I kind of liked it.
It was refreshing to be met with curiosity and friendliness instead of hostility.
Krashe wordlessly held out his arm to me.
I thought he meant for me to grab his hand, but when Kiwi clambered up his fingers, I understood.
He wanted the Shaman to have a look at our little friend too.
The tiny green dragon looked even tinier in Krashe’s large hand, I couldn’t believe he’d managed to lift that sword and drop it on the unsuspecting Naga like he had, but I was very grateful he’d managed somehow.
“Ah, a Sleara. Are you injured little fellow?” The Shaman said warmly when Krashe sort of just shoved Kiwi in his face.
I was starting to get the feeling that Krashe wasn’t much of a talker when it came to this Shaman, or maybe others too.
Maybe I was just the exception and that thought practically made me glow.
Artek didn’t bat an eye at being asked to treat a creature that Krashe told me was considered a pest by his people; a rodent like a rat.
Something they ate because they were so damn hungry at Bitter Storm, not something they made friends with.
“Did you know that the Sleara was domesticated once? Our ancestors kept these in their homes all the time. Very clever creatures, very loyal too.” Well, that explained why Artek wasn’t bothered.
It explained a lot about Kiwi’s behavior too, actually.
Krashe didn’t seem nearly as surprised about that news as I was, nodding thoughtfully.
“My mother had a… picture cube?” He paused to turn his head and look at me and I realized he was asking me silently if he was using the right words.
I mouthed the answer he was looking for and he resumed, “Holographic picture frame. Naomi discovered many pictures on it from the past. I saw Sleara in some.”
I did not recall that at all, but clearly Krashe had been paying much better attention to the images than I had. I was suddenly very eager to dig that thing out of our remaining pile of things so we could have another look at it.
“I see that you’ve come to a better understanding of the past and the present.
Have you, my friend?” Artek said. His glowing hand device winked out, and Kiwi gave a happy little twitch and shrug before he threw himself off Krashe’s hand and with a few flaps of his wings up into the air for a victory lap.
I held my breath as I waited to see what Krashe had to say to that.
He rolled his shoulder, just narrowing his ruby red eyes at the Shaman as the male pointed his hand healing device to the smaller spear wound on his chest. “Nah-omi has had a way of shifting my perspective. We were on our way to you actually. I hoped that you could use one of these to help her walk again?”
From the brief impression the Shaman had given me so far, he didn’t seem like much ruffled his feathers.
He was very calm and practically immune to the protective posturing my mate or my pet did when he so much as breathed my way.
When his golden eyes fell on the boxes Krashe carefully revealed, they went huge in his face.
If his scales hadn’t already been white, I was sure he would have grown pale.
“Blasting suns, Krashe! Where did you find these?” His fingers flew toward the boxes but Krashe coiled back, out of his reach with a hiss.
A rush of affection washed through me, always so protective, but a strange sense of dread overpowered everything.
I’d told Krashe I wouldn’t care if it worked or not but standing in front of what passed for the medical expert…
I felt like it might hurt so bad if he told me it was impossible after all.
“Come, let’s go to my home so that I can study them.
Naomi, you said, yes?” Artek was already ducking down to grab Krashe’s heavy bag of books, his back turned to start going down the mountain.
Krashe grunted an affirmative, placed the precious boxes with my possible cure in my lap, and picked me up.
“Naomi, can you tell me where your break is located? Is it a complete or incomplete injury? Tell me everything.” Artek’s voice carried melodically up the mountain behind him, the excitement in his voice palpable.
I found that soothing, and promising. With Krashe translating my words as best as he could, I tried to explain my incomplete L2 injury and the vehicle crash that had caused it when I was fifteen.
I told him about the treatments I remembered receiving, and the ones I’d missed out on back on Earth because of finances.
If my parents had been rich or at least middle class, I’d have been walking within weeks of the accident.
I only paused in answering the many questions the Shaman had when we reached his home not even ten minutes later.
A domed greenhouse that rose lush and verdant like a gem against the side of the low mountain flank, a clearing surrounded it that was filled with flowers.
This greenhouse had functioning climate control when we entered a door that slid open silently when Artek approached it.
Humid and warm, the inside of the greenhouse was filled with purple foliage and even more exotic-looking plants and flowers.
Meandering paths going through the space, but we only went along the main thoroughfare, to a door right across.
Then we were in smooth tunnels lit up with crystals in the ceiling that brightened everything to daylight.
When we were led directly to a room that was clearly a medical bay, all my worries faded away.
“Put them over here, and her on the bed so I can get my own scans, please? Is that okay with you, Naomi?” Artek had no problem at all pronouncing my name, his voice cultured and his accent almost posh.
This was a very, very different kind of Naga and if my quick look at the tunnels we passed was any indication, he lived alone.
It didn’t take Artek very long to look at his scans and the data he’d pulled up from the boxes we’d brought.
The little chips were probably incompatible with my physiology, or my injury, I didn’t dare to hope that they might actually work.
I reached for Krashe’s hand and hung on tightly, focusing on the soft glow of his sigils along his shoulders, that was real and comforting.
I needed to remind myself that my bond with him was more integral to being happy than being able to walk again.
I’d had so many good moments mixed in with all the scary adventure.
And honestly, the scary adventurous parts?
Surviving those and doing the things I’d done to get through them, that made me happy too.
Then Artek’s golden eyes lifted from the data he’d been perusing, piercing first me, and then Krashe with a look. A slow grin spread over his face, revealing a set of dainty fangs in his mouth. “Oh yes, I think I can get this to work for you, Naomi.”