“Three hundred cycles, human.” Shay-In answered when I asked how much time we had waited since we came back from Jalyons’ territory and Kendara. Which wasn’t telling much, because whether I spent time on the subject or not, the concept of their cycles couldn’t really reach my brain.

As I wasn’t leaving the commune tent and stayed with my brows high in front of it, the Maor eluded. “Four weeks.”

“How does it work?” I decided to ask, being ignorant on the matter restraining me from grasping the hours going by around the dome. Shay-In closed, a bit abruptly, the book they were holding and placed it over the long table at the center, where goblets, plates and spoons had been displayed all across it.

“It is no exact science. But I’d say that fifty cycles equal five days for you humans.” Their annoyed face was transparent when they watched if I was about to feel satisfied by the answer.

“Did you Maors always measure time this way?” I continued anyway.

“We had to invent something here, as we were not driven by the sun falling and rising.” They grabbed the book again and sat on the chair, opening the grimoire and following the writing with their fingers.

I took that invitation as a polite dismissal. With a nod, I exited the tent, when all the Maors joined for the supper, chatting in our language, a few Maors words dropping here and there inside their conversation. They looked all very hungry and excited for dinner. I left once the dishes were served.

The inside of the library had become our refuge, Kâl lounging on the large sofas and I, figuring out if I should or shouldn’t talk about the book to Samay. The latter hadn’t returned from the Door since I watched him cross the Glaze, and the two Maors had the strict order not to let anyone in.

He sometimes reached out, to answer a few questions of mine or talk of the advancement but it was mostly silent on his end.

The hours seemed to stretch into eternity and the days never passed but I wouldn’t have imagined two weeks had disappeared forever into our lives.

I walked back to the dark wooden and black stoned library, Kâl spread on the red leather armchair I usually took for myself, her eyes riveted on a book I couldn’t see the cover but figured was deeply interesting as her attention didn’t even snap out of place at my entrance. My steps were light and I casually walked towards her from behind, not a sound echoing on the walls besides the fire in the hearth and my friend’s soft breathing. With a swift movement, I grabbed the top of the book and easily stole it from Kâl’s grasp. While she acknowledged the situation, I strategically imposed some distance. “What do we have here?” I asked, all smirk.

She had been very implicated on Maors’ history, on their injustice and how they were treated before they were forced away. She was profoundly driven by that kind of malicious attitude toward minorities, and knowing we would be trampling on Fryor’s ground anytime now, we would need to know how the customs worked, and how we would manage the Malrys and Maors being reunited at last. “Nolis, give me that back!” she screamed, and I understood why as the words I was reading found their way to my brain.

She was not reading about Maors, or history in general.

The first sentences rang inside my ears, my mouth opening instinctively.

Their eyes couldn’t stop staring each other’s bodies, the nakedness new, striking, pure. Their hands wanted to touch, feel, grasp, needed the skin to fuse, the minds to become one, and while one reached for the lips with the tip of their fingers, the other kneeled.

“I preferred you when you were moody and destined to be on your own,” she replied, not without a tinge of amusement in her voice, the light flick of her lips upward. My face was hot. “You’re blushing.”

“You took me by surprise.”

“You took yourself!” She got up and snatched the book back between her hands, turning it downward on the small table next to her seat so she wouldn’t forget the pages. “Not familiar with this?” she joked, her laughter now clearly displayed on her features, her green burgeon-like irises dancing from the dim light of the library.

She must know I wasn’t. She said she had followed me for a while, had gathered information back at the capitol. She must have checked my whole agenda and realized between my missions and my few apparitions at the market, I wasn’t much elsewhere. I was home. Alone. “And you are?” I rather asked.

She huffed and shrugged. “Besides reading, I haven’t much experience either.”

She sat back down on her armchair and I chose the one close, simply separated by a column with trinkets and other types of books. “Where there…”

“You would be surprised,” she finished my sentence, not remotely shocked that I’d asked. “There was a whole covered business about these in Kendara. People had been lonely. Not everyone is attracted to men. Some didn’t have other options.”

“I didn’t even know there was this option,” I interrupted.

“Would you have bought these?” she pointed at the book next to her. “I can read you another passage if you want, so you can have the real idea of…”

“I’m not completely oblivious, Kâl, thank you.” Nina’s face and body flashed in my mind and I repositioned over the chair. “I’m not sure I would have acted on it, though. I was… handling myself well.”

The silence that filled the room had me realize what I had just said. “I mean…”

“I’m seeing perfectly what you mean, Nolis, no need to grace me with the details,” she smiled, grabbing her knees over her chest.

“That is not what I…” And I figured there wouldn’t be other times to explain what I’d been living for the past few months. What my brain had created. What I had been fantasizing over and over again. So, I confessed. “My imagination has been thriving.”

“Oh?” she cocked her head to the side, brows frowned.

“I started having… realistic dreams about a woman. Red hair, blue eyes. And we’ve been developing a relationship. Each time I fall asleep, she’s most definitely waiting under my lids.”

“Were you having erotic dreams next to me?”

“No!” I screamed immediately but couldn’t really remember if it had happened. It wasn’t impossible. Hell, I had to start doing push-ups at this very place a few days ago because of the arousal. “I mean… Maybe.”

“This is hilarious,” she concluded, teeth showing, yet again changing positions, resting her chin on her hand, deeply focused. “You’ve created a whole persona in your head to fantasize over.”

Stolen novel; please report.

“I didn’t… choose. She just appeared. And I’m not conscious when she’s there.”

“Pity. You could manipulate your dreams at will if you practiced. It could have been helpful.” she smirked, her taunting attitude either laughable or uncomfortable.

I shook my head. “I can’t believe we’re talking about this.”

“I envy you! I wish my dreams were this interesting. I usually just reimagine the worst nights of my life over and over again. Can we exchange?” she joked but I could see she was completely serious.

“I would share if I could.”

A few heartbeats passed in silence. “What’s her name? Does she have a name?”

“Yes, Nina.”

“Nina…” she rolled the name over her tongue like she knew her for some reason.

“Does it ring a bell?”

“Nope, not at all. Why?”

I bit my lower lip, thinking. “I figured I didn’t imagine her out of nothing. We usually create faces in our dreams from all the people we have seen in our lives, even for a fraction of a second. But her… I’m positive I have never met her, ever.”

Kâl shrugged, unbothered. “Maybe you have. And you just don’t remember.”

“So there would be two women in Kendara? Seems improbable.”

“True…” She looked at the ceiling, pensive. “Do you have sex with her?”

The shock made me laugh, but she was genuine. “Hum… it happened.”

“Did you do it for real? With the Jalyons you seemed…”

I interrupted. “Inexperienced? Because I am. Did you?”

She shook her head, a hint of a smile on her face. I’d asked before even realizing this could reopen wounds she had tried to seal shut for numerous years. I wasn’t really comfortable abording the subject and knowing I would hurt her asking these types of questions, it was just better to speak of anything else. But she answered with a firm and resolute voice, like she had no troubles in the world blabbering about it. “No, I didn’t. There were not many moments where it could have happened, to be honest. I was so focused on my main mission. And the men in Kendara, they were just not interesting. At all. That’s why I figured I wasn’t attracted to men.”

“Not a single one?”

“No. Even at the bar, where I would regularly go, nobody even talked to me. They were just silently acknowledging my presence, and were afraid, if anything, that I was around. It meant that I was on the hunt. Gathering my strength before a strike. They didn’t have the courage.” She held my gaze and stretched her legs over mine. “There were looks, sometimes. But it didn’t go far.”

We were so alike, had lived so many lonely moments in our own respective homes without even knowing each other. Nina’s scent drifted back in my nostrils and the soft memories of her skin under my fingers pulled shivers all over my body. Some nights, between the heat of the outside and the warmth of her body close to mine in my fantasies, I would need three cold showers to lower the tension in my every muscle. “Besides,” she continued, “it wasn’t safe being intimate with anyone, since for the rest of the population, I was supposed to be a man.”

“How was it?”

“Terrible?” We laughed. “Pretending to be someone you are just not in your very core is one of the toughest things to experience. But I was protected this way. I couldn’t take the risk.”

We were both chased for different reasons, but again, it made us understand the other much more than anyone else. For so long, I had thought that we were both the opposite side of a coin, only my whole identity had completely changed when I realized Hidram had lied, and the Y on my back was for something else entirely than the Yons. As the quietness again settled between the two of us, my hands patting her ankles, I decided this was the moment. “My father said something about me. Something I have believed until very recently. He had never let me inform on the subject and I had no other options than to believe him, but now I know it isn’t true. He said I was a Yon.”

My hazel pearls smashed with her green one and I waited for a surprised expression on her face, or maybe nothing at all, as she had been very understanding from the beginning, never judging about a story I would have shared. Instead, she had cocked her head to the side, and furrowed her brows, as if I was speaking of a concept she had never heard of. But she must have. This was a direct repercussion of the Great Suppression. The very reason she had to hide from prying eyes. “I was born from magical powers and abandoned for Hidram to find me. For as long as I can remember, I had been said to never let anyone know of what I am, the repercussions being too grand, too terrible to share that kind of secret.” My tongue untangled itself and let the words flood freely. Kâl had not moved.

“I grew among fear, I was chased for so many reasons I had forgotten what having a friend was like, if I ever had a friend before. What vulnerable meant, what my purpose was besides protect myself at all cost. Hidram said reprisals against Yons were as disgusting as the Great Suppression, and so I barricaded the door to my trust and emotions and had been living this way ever since.” She sat up and looked at me from hooded lids. Her face was still unreadable. “And then everything happened. The Jalyon saw my back and I reacted too fast, completely brainwashed.”

“How did you learn it was all a lie?”

“Here. With this book.” She looked at what I was pointing at and frowned a little bit more. She didn’t get up to watch closer or even touch, she was waiting for me to elaborate. Her eyes fell over mine rapidly. “When we fought and you stormed out of the room, I talked with Min and Geia and they answered a few questions about the book. They said it was written in the very first language that had ever existed. Trushzai, I think it is called.” Kâl was so focused on my lips, she had her stare riveted on them, expecting each of my next words. “And I realized that it was improbable, rather impossible, that a book relating the Yons and the Great Suppression would be written in that tongue. It wasn’t correlating. The times were not adding up.” Her mouth opened and she took a deep breath before answering, making sure I wasn’t about to add more of the story.

“It’s not just the times, Nolis.” Her expression was a perfect mix of uncomprehension and pity. “I have never heard about Yons. I don’t think… it ever existed.”

The information took a long second to reach for my brain. But instead of being devastated and outraged and disappointed at Hidram for his numerous lies, I was just tired. Like my whole life had been crumbling from the start and what was left of me was almost nothing. Nobody would stay to grab the million pieces of me on the floor. They would rest there, with my willingness and my decisions. I sighed and shook my head, a laugh still escaping my mouth before I could restrain it. “I’m sorry,” Kâl started but I hushed her with a bat of my hands.

“I’m not. Deep down, I think I already knew. Hidram told me bullshits since he grabbed me from the ruins. That might even be a lie too. I have no idea who I am.”

She bit the inside of her cheek and looked at me with compassion I had never experienced before. The ball in my stomach released a tad of its weight but the acknowledgement of my whole life being a farce was still pounding inside my ears. “Why Yons?” She queried, with her stare wandering around the room. “Why this word?”

And instead of telling, I got up to show. With one hand, I grabbed the back of my top and passed it over my head. Kâl’s mouth opened, startled but she didn’t say anything as I turned around, and showed my back. The Y fading underneath my skin, lacerated with the wound that the Jalyon eviscerated. I wasn’t really sure how it looked, with the cut that hadn’t properly healed. But I had a vague idea once Kâl’s cold fingers traced the outlines of it. The ridges, the bumps, the curves. It felt enormous but probably wasn’t as big. For long seconds, she didn’t say anything, only her breath was spreading against the skin of my back. She touched the tattoo next, down until the dimples. “He said the Y was for Yon?”

“He said it was the mark of a child born from magic.”

“He was… inventive.”

“Might have been his only quality trait.”

She turned around me and left her soft hands over my shoulders, her eyes reaching my chin. She was very tall. “You suffered.”

It wasn’t a question. Still, the wait after the sentence, her eyes searching for mine, the openness she showed. “Yes. We both did.” I answered.

She only shook her head. Like we had struck another deal. Silently remembering our difficult moments. And without another word, she took me in her arms. Uncontrolled tears swelled behind my eyes and the burn in my throat forced me to swallow, holding with all my strength for them not to fall. The parts of me that were crumbling might have been my walls. The shell I had created, the character I had to invent in order to survive in this world. At least I hoped it wasn’t my very soul that was getting crushed under the heels of life.