A couple of weeks passed, and I made slow but steady progress. My wound was drying and had formed scabs. Nora and the male, whose name I got to know as Nadir, took care of me. They would feed me the bitter healing liquid thrice a day. I couldn’t talk a lot initially and it was sometime before I gained the strength to converse. My first proper exchange started with them asking my name.

“It’s Vicky,” I said to them.

“Why did you save us that day?” Nadir asked. “The other player was telling you to kill us, but though you raised the sword you spared us.”

“It’s just that I didn’t want to kill you.”

“You didn’t want the loot that players receive on killing monsters?”

I shook my head.

“I was not interested in that,” I said.

“You are intriguing,” Nora said, “people come into this world to kill us and have fun. Are you even a player?” She laughed.

“I am not,” I admitted.

Nora and Nadir exchanged frowns.

“But you aren’t an Evilun either,” Nadir said. “Though to be honest there is something about you that makes me feel like… like you are one of us. I cannot explain it.”

“Well, I am just a normal human,” I said. “Neither Player, nor Evilun.”

“But you are a player,” Nadir said, “You got the wound in your stomach while fighting with a monster most likely.”

I shook my head again. They peered at me with increasing curiosity.

“Some players injured me."

“Why? You got into a fight with your friends?” Nora asked.

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“No,” I said, “I was sleeping when they came to attack me. I had to run for my life.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Nadir was a pot of bubbling confusion. “Why would other players start attacking you for no reason? But tell me, why did you ask us to help you? If you had died then you would have simply respawned.”

Once again I declined.

“I would have probably died. Respawning is not for me. I didn’t come to this world like the others do. I can’t tell you how I came here because of a promise I made. The only thing that I have in common with the players is that I came from the same world as them. But our similarities end there”

“So that means that if you die then you will be forever gone, just like us?” Nora asked.

“Yes, just like you.”

The next few days as the healing process stretched on, I bonded with the monsters and they grew friendlier with me. They were called the Skhites, which in their ancient dialect meant 'cave dwellers'. All of them lived together in a single 'village' that was spread over a large territory. Nora and Nadir told the others that I wasn’t a player as they had initially believed. This further made their behavior more cordial towards me.

The children of the monsters would flock to my room and peep at me from the door. Some of them would venture in shyly and ask my name before dashing out. Once I inquired Nora and Nadir why some monsters had one head while others had two. The children were unanimously single headed.

“After we, the Skhites, come of age,” Nadir replied, “we are allowed to fuse with a member of the opposite sex. It’s how we reproduce. It’s our natural way of life. Some of us however choose celibacy and never fuse in life.”

Ok, pretty interesting. I imagined marrying Kiara some day and fusing with her and walking around with her head next to mine for the rest of my life. That was immediately succeeded by the more depressing thought that I was probably never going to marry her since I was fated to spend the rest of my life in Dharti.

“Do you have children?” I asked the two of them.

Their faces fell.

“We don’t,” Nadir said, with a look of guilt as if he was the one responsible for it. “The gods have not blessed us with any so far. I am probably the one to blame. Nora, you fused with the wrong male.”

“Don’t you say so!” Nora scolded him. “You are the best male there is. You just wait, the gods will bless us with more children than you can count.”

To help with my boredom, Nora and Nadir would often narrate stories from Skhite folklore. As per the tales, the town and most of the territories currently owned by players in the world of Dharti had originally been home to various races of monsters. The players continued to invade monster territory to the present day. The players were the real demons who killed for fun and profit. The Eviluns engaged in violence mostly for evilese. They didn't have a choice, they had been created to rely on it. Without evilese they perished.