Chapter 6 #2
You were meant to, he thought. The certainty of it settled into his bones like warmth. She was meant to find him. They were meant to meet. Whatever had brought him to this moment had led him to her.
But the words to express this eluded him, so he simply tightened his grip on her fingers and said, “Good.”
She laughed, a bright startled sound that made his chest ache. “Good? That’s all you have to say?”
“Good,” he repeated firmly. “Alina found Rhyx. Good.”
“I suppose it is,” she murmured. Her thumb traced absent patterns across his knuckles, and he wondered if she knew she was doing it. He wondered if she could feel the same rightness he felt, the certainty that they belonged together.
She told him more about her work after that, about the machines that let her study the planet and the colony where she lived with other humans.
He understood perhaps a third of it, although more meanings kept springing into his mind, but the sound of her voice was soothing, and watching her face as she spoke was even better.
She became animated when she talked about her research, her free hand gesturing happily and her eyes brightening with enthusiasm.
He learned that she was young for her people. He learned that she had come to Mars because she loved it and wanted to understand it. He learned that she was curious and determined and braver than she gave herself credit for.
And he learned that she was exhausted.
It showed in the shadows beneath her eyes and the way her words began to slur together. She tried to hide it—tried to keep teaching him new words and asking questions he couldn’t answer—but her body was betraying her.
“Sleep,” he said finally, interrupting her mid-sentence about something called an atmospheric processor.
She blinked at him. “What?”
“Sleep.” He tugged gently on her hand, pulling her closer. “Rest.”
“I can’t just—” She yawned again, cutting herself off. “I need to figure out how to get back to the lab once the storm passes. If they send a search party, I won’t be able to explain you—”
“Later.” He didn’t know what a lab was, or a search party. But he knew she needed rest more than she needed any of those things. “Sleep first. Then go.”
“I really should—”
He sighed and lifted her onto his lap again, tucking her against his chest.
She went rigid for a moment, her whole body tensing. He half expected her to try and push him away again. Instead, she let out a long, shuddering breath and seemed to melt against him.
“This is crazy,” she mumbled into his chest. “I don’t even know you.”
“I am Rhyx,” he said simply. “You know Rhyx.”
“That’s not—” Another yawn. “That’s not how trust works.”
“Trust?”
“Believing someone won’t hurt you.” Her voice was getting quieter, her body heavier against his. “Believing they have your best interests at heart.”
He considered this. The concept felt familiar, like so many things did. Trust was precious. Trust had to be earned.
But with her, it felt different. Simpler. She had found him and woken him. She had given him water and food and words. She had touched his face with gentle fingers and called him impossible and laughed her bright startled laugh. She had let him hold on to her.
“Rhyx no hurt Alina,” he said. It was a promise, maybe the first real promise he’d ever made. “Alina is… safe. With Rhyx.”
She made a small sound that might have been agreement and tucked her head beneath his chin as her eyes drift closed.
“Just for a few minutes,” she murmured. “Then I really do need to figure out what to do.”
“Yes,” he agreed, knowing she would sleep longer than a few minutes. “Rest.”
Her breathing slowed. Within moments, she was asleep in his arms, her warmth pressed against his chest, her heartbeat a steady rhythm against his scales.
This is right, he thought. She fit against him perfectly, like she’d been made to rest in his arms. Like he’d been made to hold her.
He shifted carefully, arranging them both more comfortably against the cavern wall.
The vines above pulsed a soft purple light, casting gentle shadows across her sleeping face.
In repose, she looked younger. More vulnerable.
His protective instincts surged, fierce and primal, and he found himself curling around her like a shield.
Mine, something whispered in the depths of his mind. Protect. Keep. Guard.
He didn’t know where the instinct came from, but he trusted it. He trusted the rightness that sang through his bones every time she touched him.
His own exhaustion was creeping up on him now. The aftermath of waking, and of processing so many new sensations and emotions. His eyelids grew heavy as his muscles relaxed.
Just for a moment, he told himself. Rest. Then wake. Watch over her.
He closed his eyes.
The dream came like a tide.
He was flying, wings spread wide against a sky that was the wrong color—too pink and too thin, nothing like the blue he somehow expected. But it was beautiful nonetheless. Beautiful and terrible and achingly familiar.
Below him, Mars spread out in all directions. But not the Mars Alina had described, the dead and frozen world where humans built their colonies and studied their rocks. This was his Mars.
Red forests stretched across the lowlands, their leaves rustling in winds that carried moisture and warmth.
Rivers carved silver channels through the landscape, feeding into vast oceans that reflected the pink-orange sky.
Cities rose from the cliffsides—not human cities, but structures of clay and stone that seemed to grow from the rock itself.
And everywhere, there was life.
Creatures that flew like him, their scales glinting in the sunlight. Others that walked on four legs or crawled on many. Beings that swam through the seas and burrowed beneath the soil. A whole ecosystem, complex and thriving.
He remembered this. He had lived this life, flown these skies, been part of this world.
But even as he flew, he could see the dying.
The sun was smaller now than it had been.
The warmth that should have blessed the surface was fading, year by year, century by century.
The poles were creeping southward, ice spreading across lands that had once been green.
The atmosphere was thinning, bleeding away into a void that cared nothing for the life it was slowly strangling.
He watched the rivers freeze. Watched the forests wither. Watched the cities empty as fewer children came and his people sought refuge underground, trying to find some way to survive what was coming.
But there was no survival. He had known that even then, in the deepest part of himself. Mars was dying, and nothing they could do would stop it.
The grief filled his chest, crushing and absolute—the weight of a world’s ending. Everything he had known, everything he had loved, everything he had been… all of it reduced to dust and ice and the fading echoes of what had been.
Gone, something whispered. All gone. Nothing left. Nothing but you. And you slept. You slept while your world died, while your people vanished, while everything you were became nothing but memories in the mind of something that isn’t even truly you.
The dream fractured. Shattered. He was falling now, not flying, plummeting through the thinning atmosphere towards a surface that was red and dead and wrong—
He woke with a gasp.
For a moment, he didn’t know where he was, still drowning in grief, filling his lungs and eyes and mind with a loss so vast it had no edges. His people. His world. His self. All of it gone, reduced to fragments in the mind of something that wasn’t quite alive and wasn’t quite dead.
Then Alina shifted in his arms, and the grief receded like a wave pulling back from shore.
She was still asleep, her face pressed against his chest, her body warm and soft and utterly alive. He could feel her heartbeat, steady and strong, and inhale her sweet, floral scent. He could see the slow rise and fall of her breathing and the flutter of her eyelids as she dreamed her own dreams.
She’s real, he thought. The certainty of it cut through the grief and the tangle of memories that weren’t quite his. She’s real and she’s here and she found me.
He didn’t understand what he was. He didn’t understand how he had memories of a world that had died millions of years ago, or why her language felt both foreign and familiar, or what had created him in that strange golden pod.
He didn’t understand the flashes of metal and cold that sometimes surfaced in his mind, the other memories that tasted different from the ancient ones, more recent and more wrong.
But he understood that Alina was his.
The knowledge settled into his bones with the same certainty as the grief.
Mate.
The word surfaced from somewhere deep inside him. It wasn’t from the human language she’d been teaching him, but something far older. The one who completed you. The one whose soul echoed yours. The one you would protect and cherish and guard until your last breath.
Alina was his mate. He was certain of it with every fiber of his being.
He didn’t know if humans even had the concept of mates or if they recognized the bond the way his people once had.
Maybe she would wake and leave and forget about him.
Maybe she would return to her research and her life, and he would be nothing but an impossible memory, a story she told herself in the dark.
But that didn’t change what he knew.
She is mine. And he would protect her and cherish her for as long as he existed. Whether that was days or years or the same impossible span of time that somehow filled his head.
He watched the vines shimmer overhead, casting shifting patterns across the cavern walls. She murmured something in her sleep and burrowed closer to him, her fingers flexing against his chest
Mine, that ancient knowledge whispered again. Protect. Keep. Never let go.
He didn’t intend to.
The dream’s grief still lingered at the edges of his mind, a vast and terrible presence that he suspected would never fully fade.
His world was gone. His people were gone.
Everything he had been before this strange rebirth had been lost to time and death and the slow entropy of a universe that cared nothing for what it destroyed.
But Alina was here. Warm and alive and sleeping in his arms.
And now, he thought, she’s mine.