Chapter 8 Into The Rising Light
Into The Rising Light
In the nights and days following Ty’s threats, Idan returned as often as he could to the high ground above the clinic to keep guard.
He claimed a shelf of fractured stone and wind-scoured scrub, boots braced against the slope.
His gaze fell on the tents below as he kept an eye on shift cycles, generator surges, and the subtle cadence of human movement.
Inside the temporary demountable ward, Lago lived it up, using his country charm to score meals, laughs, and tender care from the nurse attendants.
Idan’s Ssignakht focus, however, was on Sheba as she moved through the infirmary with decisive, efficient energy.
She gave orders, fixed IV lines, and calmed staff who shook from exhaustion.
Every time Idan caught sight of her, his pulse spiked at her smile and amber eyes, the memory of her silky, honey-colored skin, and the evocative notes of her perfume.
He clenched his fists, his yearning for her a physical ache that refused to abandon him.
Skies over Sacra, it drove him wild.
Worse, a tether seemed to have formed between them, where she also sensed him from afar.
One night, she walked to the back veranda of the emergency ward and stared into the dark cliffs where he concealed himself.
She tilted her head and emitted a dry huff.
‘You’re out there, aren’t you?’ she called out, sounding more amused than annoyed.
Idan chose silence, though his muscles bunched in that same raw, uncontrollable reaction he had to her.
A few nights later, she appeared one more time, peering out into the darkness.
‘How long do you plan to haunt us?’
She stood with her hands on her hips, chin inclined toward the ridge.
Idan let his quietude speak for him, one built over centuries of discipline and the hard truth that talking led to trouble he could not afford.
‘No answer, no surprise,’ she shrugged after a minute. ‘If you’re here to protect the clinic, I’m glad for it. But if you’re here for me, that’s a whole different reckoning.’
Hell over Devansi, he was there for both.
He cursed under his breath, sensing her irritation flare and then settle into a wary acceptance of his presence.
She went back to work, though the tension in her spine told him she was tracking him, even if she could not see him.
Meanwhile, Lago seemed to be enjoying the nurses’ attention too much, getting pampered and spoiled.
Soon, Idan’s self-control snapped.
The animals at the farm had been abandoned for too long.
The fences needed tending, as the basilisk bulls were due to return from their roving season soon.
Besides, the constant craving to be near Sheba became too overwhelming for any sane Sacran to handle.
He made a choice.
One evening, instead of observing her and the clinic from the cliffs, he glimmered into the compound and through a thin wall.
Prowling to Lago’s bedside, he placed his hand over the sleeping youth’s ankle.
Light pooled under his palm, a warm, thick heat uncoiling as he let his power flow.
Healing bone slid back into its final place, and the scars knit together and disappeared.
The glow from his hands filled the room and then faded.
‘The hell?’
Fokk. Caught in the act.
He registered the shock in her tone, took a breath, and braced himself.
He turned to face her, arms crossed over his chest.
Sheba marched toward him, her expression tight and enraged.
‘I saw that! Did you just heal him?’
He took an inhale and dipped his chin in confession even as Lago stirred awake to stare at the couple glaring at each other over him.
‘So, you could have done that the whole time,’ Sheba continued.
Idan sighed, then nodded.
Lago stared at his leg, moving it in total disbelief.
Sheba rounded on Idan, her anger clear and bright. ‘It was a compound fracture, a serious one,’ she said. ‘You might have relieved him of his pain all along. Why wait?’
Idan met her gaze, clenching his jaw and squeezing his hands to stop from reaching to stroke the stray curl of hair on her brow.
Because I wanted a reason to stay near you, his heart longed to admit.
‘Are you some kind of sociopath who likes watching people suffer?’
He grit his teeth as the words hit home.
He’d fokked up.
His face turned to stone, his expression closing off.
Without a leg to stand on to defend himself, he shifted to his farmhand and tapped the young man’s forehead to put him into instant sleep.
With a twist of his lips, he picked Lago up in his arms and stalked out of the small ward.
‘Idan, wait!’ Sheba called. ‘I didn’t mean that. I only want to understand. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said -.’
He kept moving, disappearing into the dark, her apology fading behind him.
While her admonition stung, had he also been wrong to let Lago heal under the clinic’s care, to give himself the excuse to get close to her? Had he been that selfish?
Nada, he argued with himself.
The young man’s leg had required close monitoring for blood flow.
All he’d done this evening was rush the final healing, with Lago’s veins and arteries now unconstrained due to the medical team’s intervention.
Despite the logic, his heart hammered with savage emotion all the way to his farm and even as he settled Lago into his bed in the barn.
He spent the rest of the night walking through the mountains, trying to make sense of why he was so drawn to her.
Why her? Why now?
Still, over the next few nights, he found he could not abandon her.
He returned each evening unseen, prowling the perimeter of the compound, eyes on her silhouette bent over charts and patients.
Listening to the husky register of her voice as it soothed and instructed through thin walls.
He battled how her presence tugged at him, how his desire for her surfaced without invitation or permission.
He’d long sworn himself finished with women, fokkin’ done with yearning. Especially after Artya outed his secret lineage to the ruling Council, severed their bond, and helped cast him from the heavens.
He’d survived on this merciless planet by shaping a life into its bedrock of stone, surrounded by livestock and silence, with no freakin’ softness or yearning for comfort.
Now Sheba threatened that hard-won equilibrium with every breath.
Hell on Devansi.
One night, while braced against the cliff face, his focus locked on Sheba as she pressed in her tent for night shift.
Suddenly, his senses picked up a signal.
One that scraped across his awareness, a glacial pressure at the base of his skull that yanked his focus taut.
He knifed up and let loose his Ssignakht, mouth pursing as he perceived distinct silhouettes skulking near his hut.
His enhanced psionic vision locked onto the interlopers.
They wore high-spec armor and carried heavy-yield rail rifles, but it was the unique symbols on their flanks that made his blood run cold.
Fokkin Rhixon sentinels, trespassing on his home.
Idan bared his teeth and muttered in Sacran.
It was no curse; it was a release of spectral power that unleashed the wards he placed around his farm months ago.
The air around the first wave of Rhixon hounds pulsed with a potent frequency.
As the lead scouts stepped over the invisible threshold of the south pasture, the space encircling them warped.
Ethereal, shimmering gold bands of light, ancient Sacran hexes woven into the fence line, snapped into sight.
One soldier reached out, mesmerized, his hand dissolving into glowing particles before he could even register the pain.
The jinxes acted like a localized event horizon; the intruders got sucked into the luminous geometry, their physical forms stretched and disintegrating into fine, golden ash that the wind swept away as if they had never been.
A spray of pulse-fire erupted near the lower creek.
Idan’s sight shifted to find Lago.
His shepherd was in the open, trying to lead the sheep herd away from the treeline as plasma bolts scorched the grass close to his boots.
‘Futa!’ Idan snarled, the curse tearing from his throat as he glimmered from the cliff face.
Space folded around him in an aetheric crystalline fracture, as he reappeared on the porch of his hut in a burst of static.
In his Ssignakht vision, the world turned into a map of glowing ley lines.
With a wave of his hands, more radiant gold bands of the hexes surged upward.
With a flick of his wrist, they barreled toward the men hedging Lago in a spiral of divine lightning.
The guards fired with blind abandon, their rounds passing through the luminescence, but still the bands kept coming.
As the aureate light touched their armor, the mercenaries unraveled.
Their atoms got stripped of their bonds, their high-tech gear and reinforced plating turning to glittering dust against the relentless, shimmering hunger of his wards.
Within seconds, the farm was silent again.
The only trace of the hit squad remaining was the scorched patches of grass and the fading pulse of a savage storm that retreated into his palms.
The clock in the central tent read nine p.m.
Sheba stepped from the shower, steam clinging to her skin as she reached for clean clothes.
As she dressed, readying herself for bed after her late shift, she glanced outside.
Smiling as laughter rose from the mess and soft music poured from a neighboring dwelling as the compound settled into its evening rhythm.
With no warning, a blast split the air.
Not from thunder nor an engine misfire.
Gunfire.
On instinct, Sheba dove for the ground as even more explosions sounded.
The complex alarm wailed, and she sat upright, fighting the urge to slide beneath her mattress and remain hidden.
The patients, she thought.
Tamping down her terror, she pulled on sweatpants and a tee, slipped on boots, and ran.
The canvas flaps of her tent snapped as she burst outside, to a sight that had her gasping.
Two raider-class skiffs and a corvette knifed across the sky, their hulls dark and angular, rail guns spitting incandescent lines into the clinic wards below.
Demountables disintegrated under the fire, steel frames folded.