Chapter One
I didn't know how to feel or what to do. I stood at the doorway to the house, what was meant to be my new home, staring into the darkness for what felt like hours after Bannack left. Finally I stepped back into the house and closed the door behind me, pressing my back against it and sliding to the floor so that I could curl my knees against my chest and rest my forehead against my folded arms. Everything around me in the Denynso compound was strange and unknown, and now suddenly I was feeling a pain that I never knew existed, with an intensity that was far beyond anything I thought that I could ever feel. The air around me felt oppressive, while the places on my body that Bannack had touched now felt cold and abandoned. I felt empty inside, both in that my heart felt torn from my chest and in that my body still ached for him even though he had left so abruptly. I couldn’t understand what had just happened.
I sat against the door, letting the darkness of the coming night close in around me without moving to turn on any of the lights throughout the space. Everything had been going so perfectly. The feelings that I had experienced for Bannack since the first moment that I saw him had grown within me until they felt like they were burning in my belly and overflowing within my chest, creating a sense that made me at once overwhelmed and elated. I had been so young when the rest of my kind had died off due to the horrific plague that scourged our home that I had never had the opportunity to feel love, or even real attraction, to anyone. I had seen my parents together and how they felt about each other was obvious. I could remember even then how they would hold hands, gaze at each other, and find any excuse to be close to each other, even after they had spent more than half of their lives together. I hadn't understood that until I had seen Bannack.
Being alone in the mirrored realm that existed beneath the Denynso compound had been isolating and lonely, but I had grown accustomed to my life alone underground. Over the years I had become absolutely comfortable with not having anyone else with me, and even felt that I preferred the quiet and isolation because it meant that I could live exactly as I wanted to and have no one and nothing to tell me otherwise. When the Klimnu invaded, the terror had been more that they would change my lifestyle than that they would hurt me, and I had managed to stay completely out of the way the entire time that they were down there. Even when I saw the human woman and the Denynso traitor, and then the other human women, come into the mirrored realm, I felt no compulsion to interact with them. I had hoped that the Klimnu would simply tire of my world and leave me alone so that I could go back to my simple, independent life and not have to worry about anything else.
The moment that my eyes touched Bannack, however, all of that changed. Everything around him disappeared. I couldn't perceive the other warriors or the slimy, disgusting creatures that were battling them. It was as though nothing else in the entire world mattered in those moments but this beautiful warrior who in a single second changed everything about how I felt about life. Suddenly I didn't want to live completely alone underground anymore. I didn't want to continue on with the lifestyle that I had built and evolved into after my family and friends had died. I didn't want to be left to my own devices, or to have a life that was totally my own. In that instant I could understand why my parents spent nearly all of their time together, and why when my father died, my mother followed him only hours later even though she had barely been sick.
He, of course, didn't know it, but I had watched the entire battle between the Klimnu and the Denynso. I had followed him carefully in each of his movements, making sure that he stayed safe as he fought. I didn't even know his name then, but I could feel the intensity of his presence and the energy emanating off of him in a way that I had never experienced. In the final moments of the battle, I had saved him. He stumbled while trying to approach Jem, the incredibly courageous warrior who had given his life to ensure the future of his people, and a moment later caught himself. He thought that he had simply managed to find his footing and regain his hold on the vine that was coming from the tree where he stood. In reality, I had reflected the surface of the tree so that he could step steadily onto it before finding his way back to his original stance.
The action had been risky. I nearly betrayed my existence in that single moment, but I was willing to do anything in order to ensure that he got through the battle safely. It was a decision that I had made impulsively, without really thinking, and it hadn't struck me until I saw him again the next day and had the compulsion to again save him from tumbling into the reflection of the sky by creating a floor of the image of the stone wall that it was him that I had saved. It was as if I was reacting to a memory that I hadn't made yet, a thought or a feeling that I had deep within me that wasn't really there but was waiting to be there. It was difficult even for me to explain, but something that I wanted to feel more of.
The glow of my skin was even more evident in the room now that I was cloaked in complete darkness and I thought about the first time that Bannack saw me. He had felt something when he got down into the mirrored realm. Something within him had told him that things were changing and that he was about to experience something that would forever change him, but no matter how hard I tried to look into him, I couldn't figure out exactly what that was. When he noticed my glow across the sky, however, that feeling had intensified and I knew that he felt the same draw and need about me that I was feeling about him.
He had trusted me then. He had given himself over to me and to the unknown that waited when he took a completely unafraid step away from the branches that crossed the reflected sky and created the only source of stability that they knew down in my world, and onto the stone floor that I had made for him. There had been no sense of fear in him, or even unsureness. It was as though he knew, even if he had no concept of what or who I was, that he was safe as long as I was there.
What had happened between that moment and the moment when he ran out of the house and into the darkness of the night without a single word of explanation? He had taken my hand in my world beneath the compound, led me out of the ground and literally into a world that I had never once seen or experienced. I had offered myself to him in the way that he had offered himself to me, stepping into something that I had only heard about and never once witnessed myself, for the first time in my solitary existence truly wanting to go above ground, and for the first time in the years since I had become accustomed to being alone that I had wanted to put that life behind me and share life with someone else.
In those moments I felt a connection between us that was only growing with each second. Resistance had begun to build inside him, though, and he had started to fight the feelings that I knew he had when he looked at me. He didn't need to say them. I could feel them when he touched me, when he rested his mouth to mine, and when he tucked his hand between my thighs to create unimaginable sensations and emotions within me. Just before I welcomed his body into mine, however, he moved me off of him and started to dress. I had dropped my dress over my head and tied the laces as quickly as I could, but it wasn't fast enough to stop him from crossing to the door, his shirt clutched in his hand, and running out into the darkness of the compound.
My own voice screaming after him was reverberating in my mind and tears like I hadn't cried since I was a small child pooled beneath my eyes and poured down the skin of my arms where my head rested. He had given me no explanation, offered no reason for suddenly leaving me in the silence aching for him, but in that moment I felt more alone than I ever had.