Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Days turned into weeks, and while the open stares of those tasked with tending her in Draikis’s absence grew fewer, she was still acutely aware of her status as a novelty of sorts within these walls.
She put them on edge. Out of sorts. A woman living within their cloister, though temporarily and not of her own choice.
It seemed to drive a few to distraction. Others had more aggressive reactions.
Priests and their vows, she mused. And me stuck right in the middle of them.
It was enough to draw a slight chuckle from her when she thought about it, and to her great delight, the moment of mirth no longer sent jolts of agony through her mending ribs. In fact, outright laughter was only mildly uncomfortable these days.
Draikis had commented on the miraculous speed of her recovery. He had also been the cause of her amusement on more than one occasion. Most of them, in fact.
Not only gorgeous, but clever and damn funny? Just my luck he’s one of them.
It was that knowledge that he was off-limits that made him both an item of mysterious interest as well as a safe target for her chaotic emotions as she processed and healed.
She’d endured a physical ordeal, no doubt.
But the psychological trauma had been just as rough, if not more, and Draikis spent many long hours deep into the night at her side talking it through.
Speaking and advising when appropriate, but mostly just sitting quietly and supporting her as she got what she needed to off her chest.
Saying it out loud helped. Saying it to a person even more so.
She didn’t know if it was because of his vows or just how he was as a man, but Draikis was a marvelous listener, seeming to intuit when an interjection would be welcomed and when silence was the appropriate action.
Some things might have an easy fix, but that didn’t always mean a woman wanted to hear it.
And, incredibly, a bazillion miles from home, Ella finally found a man who got it.
The depth of their conversations increased with time, and Ella found herself opening up to him in ways she’d barely touched upon with her therapist back home. And he, likewise, shared with her. An equal exchange of thoughts, hopes, and dreams. That and a good deal of laughter.
The man had quite the wit, and not just for a priest. He was smart, she knew, but the more they spoke, the more she realized how well-rounded a person he was.
“Of course, after that area of study, I felt the desire to travel,” he told her one evening. “There was so much to experience. To learn.”
“You mastered spaceship mechanics, astral navigation, and interstellar physics, and somehow you thought that wasn’t enough?”
A beautiful smile spread across his full lips, his eyes twinkling with amusement. “There is always more, Ella. This universe is such a marvelous, vast place. I could study until my dying day, and I’d still not even scratch the surface of all there is to know.”
“I suppose I can’t argue that. I mean, here I am, after all.”
“Yes, an unusual specimen from a distant world. Quite novel.”
“Did you just call me a specimen?”
He chuckled. “Shut up. It’s not like that, and you know it.”
“Ass,” she cracked back.
“Such language from a lady. I am shocked, I tell you.”
“Uh-huh. I’ve heard you say worse.”
“Well fuck you, then,” he quipped with a grin, quickly glancing around to ensure no one might be present to overhear him. “You’ll just have to start feeding yourself then, I suppose.”
Ella felt a warm flutter in her chest. This easy, snarky banter was something they’d settled into almost as soon as she’d regained her senses.
A casual familiarity that just felt right somehow.
And unlike some of the stuffier priests, Draikis seemed to have retained some of his bad boy traits from before he joined the order and took his vows.
He hadn’t always been a goody-two-shoes priest. He’d lived, and from the stories he told, he’d done quite a bit of it at that.
“I am feeding myself, thank you very much,” she shot back, reaching out with a newly mended arm to pluck a berry from the dish next to her bed and pop it in her mouth.
“Very impressive. Maybe you’ll work your way up to a piece of bread one day.”
“Oh, screw you.”
“You know that’s not happening,” he countered with an amused grin. “I do have to admit, your appetite is encouraging our healers, and pretty much all of them are shocked at the rate of your recovery.”
“Gee, I feel special.”
“You should. Most would be barely able to move at this stage of the healing process, let alone reach the table beside your bed. But you? You are moving well, your bones have mended, and your skin is healed to a remarkable degree.”
“It still itches.”
“As it would. You were burned over most of your body. And yet, somehow, your skin has managed to absorb the healing compounds far more than our own kind. Truly, your race is remarkable in how it reacts to our medicines and treatments.”
“You’ve said.”
“I know. But look at your skin,” he replied, lifting her dressing to reveal the nearly pristine flesh of her belly.
“Look. There is almost no scarring whatsoever. What little there is, the healers say appears as if it will absorb into your body, leaving no scars at all in only a few more days.” He ran his fingers over her tummy, tracing the curves with an amazed expression on his face.
Little shocks of delightful tingles crackled through her body, her nipples growing hard in a flash beneath the material of her gown. “Okay, enough of that, Mister. Now you’re making me self-conscious,” Ella said with a confused little smile.
“Apologies. I didn’t mean any disrespect by it.”
“I know. I’m just messing with you,” she replied, though the warm buzz growing in her stomach said otherwise.
“It was interesting, how the healing machines were able to trigger a growth cycle in your bones.”
“Interesting? How so?”
“Well, since your race are not yet programmed into our systems, they had to do a bit of guesswork, both with their external mechanical efforts as well as the medicinal ones. Some of the compounding healing balms were created with a great deal of guesswork, but the results, which you are quite aware of, have been nothing short of miraculous. Your body reacted far better than anyone ever expected.”
“They did a good job; I’ll vouch for that.”
“Yes, they do seem to have rather supercharged your healing factors somehow, though even they are still unsure exactly how.”
“Us Earth girls are just special, I guess.”
“Clearly. But, you know, I am somewhat surprised we have still failed to receive any data on your people’s recent addition to the Dotharian Conglomerate.
General distribution can take ages, but the expansion overseers are usually quite prompt adding that information and distributing it to the core network which we are part of. ”
Ella felt the pleasant glow in her belly shift to a sharp twinge of fear.
“Oh, well, you know it’s probably just what you said the other week.
How with the realm being so vast and the edges of it so far apart, sometimes it takes longer than expected for word to reach the central systems. You said it yourself, information lags, and that’s just part of the nature of the expansion. ”
“True. I didn’t think you’d remember that, though. You were in a lot of pain back then.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I don’t pay attention.”
Truth of the matter was Ella had forced herself to focus on every single thing she heard as her very life depended on it. Not that she thought Draikis would kill her, but she’d learned many things in her early weeks that had sent chills down her spine.
For one, she was decidedly not from a Dotharian world.
That in and of itself wasn’t a problem. What was, was the distinct lack of the required runes every single person in the realm possessed.
As a human who’d never even heard of the Dotharians, her pristine skin would have been her demise if not for the one unexpected ray of good luck in her otherwise terrible ordeal.
The burns she’d endured covered her body.
Normally, on Earth, they would have been fatal.
But here, the technology existed to heal her of those injuries.
But that wasn’t the truly good luck. Where the gods had smiled upon her was in the destruction of her epidermis.
She’d even heard the others talk about it while she feigned sleep.
The poor woman had lost her runes in the fire, barely surviving as it was.
Obviously, not having runes would call for the immediate execution of anyone else, but in her case a bit of confusion wound up saving her life.
They didn’t know she had never possessed the runes.
And with the small translation rune still intact behind her ear, they just assumed she was part of the Dotharian Conglomerate.
A woman who had suffered great bodily harm that had cost her her runes.
They had no reason to suspect otherwise.
But the truth of the matter was she had no idea what they were talking about.
Tattoos? A living pigment that pulled energy from the stars and imbued some of it to its symbiotic host via a special set of runes?
It was fantastical. Ridiculous. But these people believed in it as much as any religion back home.
Then there was the Infala rune. The one held most sacred. Some sort of central, soul-bonding bit of mystical hoo-ha that she didn’t believe in one iota. But these people did, and no way would she even let out the slightest hint of her incredulity.
Rather than voice disbelief, Ella had simply bided her time, carefully weaving questions and comments into her many conversations with Draikis over the weeks, gleaning tidbits of information and tucking them away, slowly piecing together what proved to be an even more confusing mystery than she’d originally believed.
She had learned a lot. How the Dotharians oversaw everything even if there were still independent races within the realm. Kind of like nation versus state, she figured, though these states were often entire worlds, and the nation spanned galaxies.
On this world, however, there were many of those smaller realms represented.
A scattered miasma of representative cities spread across the globe.
And somehow, she had found herself in the one Dotharian stronghold on this planet.
The High Dotharian Conclave of the Norvalian Sect.
Had her ship crashed anywhere else her fate would have been much different, if she’d survived at all.
But now? Here? She’d lucked into being in the one place she could quietly absorb as much important information as possible without raising alarm.
Outside she’d be questioned. Here, however, she was an injured guest, and once assumed and accepted to be a member of the Dotharian Conglomerate by one, she was afforded that fortunate assumption by all of them.
She may yet face other problems, but her being an illegal alien on an alien world was not one of them. And soon enough they would ink her body for what they thought would be the second time. Little did they know, and she was not about to correct them.
She would be marked with their runes, and her safety would be complete. Until then she would bide her time and continue to learn. And if it just so happened to be in the company of her handsome alien protector, well, all the better.
“So, Draikis. How much longer do you think I’ll be cooped up in here?” she asked, her eyes drifting from his striking face to the musculature barely hidden within his tunic.
“Soon,” he replied, a warm smile on his lips. “In fact, I would wager it will be sooner than you expect.”