4. Rhykor #2
"Working on it. The channels are encrypted, but I've identified geographic signatures that place at least two of the cells within walking distance of Ash Alley.
" She hesitates, measuring her next words carefully.
"Commander, the tone of these communications is escalating.
They're framing the medic as a symbol, a human collaborator who needs to be made an example of. If we act before they organize?—"
"Station guards immediately. Two on the clinic, two on the surrounding corridors. Rotation every six hours. I want eyes on that building around the clock." I pause, a new thought grinding through the red haze clouding my judgment. "Quietly, so she doesn't know. Nobody tells her."
She inclines her head and vanishes down the corridor at a pace that suggests she's learned the health benefits of prompt obedience.
I stand at the junction point alone with warmth spilling from my palms into the stagnant air.
The rational commander in my brain knows that stationing guards at a human clinic is a political liability.
By tying my name to hers publicly, I am fueling the rumors already circulating through the district and effectively painting a massive target on our backs.
The other part of my brain, the part that surfaced the night I woke up on her floor with her scent flooding my senses and her hands inside my wounds, remains indifferent to politics.
I need answers, and only one person in this district can give them to me without mockery or agenda.
Mother Serak lives in the deepest part of Ash Alley, in a chamber carved from the foundations of a building that predates the occupation.
Finding her requires navigating three locked corridors and a flooded maintenance tunnel before climbing a staircase so old the steps have been worn smooth by generations of feet.
I've made this journey exactly four times in my adult life; each time I was desperate enough to seek counsel from a Kraaj elder who speaks in riddles and sees things I'd rather keep hidden.
She’s waiting for me when I arrive, which surprises me.
Bioluminescent panels, salvaged from old Kraaj transport ships, warm the chamber and cast shifting blue-green light across walls covered in hand-painted ceremonial symbols.
Incense and old stone saturate the chamber, interwoven with metallic tangs I've never been able to identify.
Mother Serak sits in the heart of the room on a pile of threadbare cushions, her pale ash-gray skin almost luminous in the bioluminescent glow.
Milky eyes—blind or close to it, though she navigates the world with a perception that renders sight irrelevant—track my movements as I enter.
Her enormous weathered wings are folded tight against her back, rarely unfurled anymore due to age, and faded ceremonial markings cover each visible inch of her skin, stories written in scar tissue from ancient Kraaj traditions most modern warriors have abandoned.
"The Dragon comes to the Crone." The phrase is thin and papery, resonant with decades of truths nobody ever wants to hear.
"Bleeding from wounds he cannot see. Burning with a fever no salve will treat.
" She tilts her head, those milky eyes fixing on me with an accuracy that should be impossible. "Sit."
I follow her command and sit. The cushions are worn soft under me, and the bioluminescent light shifts, casting my shadow large and distorted against the painted walls.
"Something is wrong with me." The admission costs more than I expect.
Warriors bury weakness until it rots or heals on its own, and here I am—the Dragon, the enforcer whose name makes grown soldiers flinch—confessing that my own instincts have slipped beyond my grip. The words taste like swallowed glass.
"Wrong, you say. You burn hotter than you should and circle territory beyond your claim. You guard a creature your people spent generations casting as the enemy." Those milky eyes bore into me. "And when you are near her, the world narrows until she is all you perceive. Is that correct?"
I say nothing, and the silence between us confirms everything.
"You call it wrong, young one. I call it old.
" Mother Serak leans forward, and the markings on her face shift in the changing light, rearranging themselves into patterns that almost resemble intention.
"What you feel is a bond. The same bond that formed between our people and the humans when we first came to this world and the planet reshaped us into something new.
The wings, the fire, the instincts that sharpen into obsession.
Luvon made us capable of bonding, and the bond has chosen you. "
"I didn't choose this."
"The bond never required your permission.
" Her papery tone carries no sympathy, no softness.
"It recognized a characteristic in the human female, a compatibility written into blood and biology that predates both your species.
You can no more refuse it than you can refuse the heat in your hands or the wings on your back. "
A growl builds in my throat. "Then I'll contain it. I've controlled all of the instincts I've ever had. This one is no different."
"This one is entirely different, and you know it.
" Suddenly, an edge enters her words—a serrated sharpness slicing through the ancient calm.
“Warriors who resist the bond pay a greater price than discomfort, Rhykor. They simply fracture. Resistance feeds the instincts, sharpens them, and turns them feral. I have watched warriors stronger than you tear themselves apart from the inside trying to deny what their blood demanded.” She pauses, letting the truth settle into the warm, incense-heavy air.
"The bond could be your greatest strength.
But wage war against it, and it will destroy you long before any bullet or blade. "
I stare at her in the shifting blue-green light, fury warring with discipline, my muscles coiling with the effort of holding myself still.
The logical part is that I am a soldier and commander.
I answer to strategy and discipline. Ancient compulsions embedded in my DNA by a planet that decided to rewrite my species pull in a different direction.
But the other part of me—the part that woke on a clinic floor with a human woman's hands in my wounds and her scent seared into my memory—knows Mother Serak is telling the truth.
I have known it since the moment I opened my eyes and found amber-brown staring back at me, her gaze entirely unfaltering.
"What do I do?" The question scrapes itself out of me, raw and reluctant.
"You stop running." Mother Serak settles back into her cushions and closes her milky eyes, and the conversation is over. "Before the running kills you."
I leave her chamber with more questions than I arrived with and a fury building deep in my core that has nowhere safe to go.
Ash Alley's corridors blur past me with rusted walls and the constant background hum from a district slowly choking on its own infrastructure.
I should go back to the freight bay and debrief my lieutenants.
The best course of action is to plan the next move against whoever is harvesting tech from Legion sectors and feeding it into the black market.
Instead, I find myself standing on the roof above a specific underground clinic, staring down through the hole I punched through the ceiling days ago.
The excuse forms automatically. I tell myself I’m checking the building’s security and assessing structural damage, as well as making sure the guards I stationed are in position.
Even I find it unbelievable.