For all I believed in choice and freedom when it came to shaping your own life, if anyone deserved to get a mate dumped in his lap by a magic matchmaking dragon, it was Oxriel.
“What do you think, Ox,” I asked as we walked, “about choosing someone to love without the Lavrika’s blessing?” I asked about the Lavrika, instead of the Vrika, because the Lavrika was the deity of Oxriel’s homeland in the Sea Sands. Though I knew the Vrika had given mate visions to men who weren’t from the Deep Sky, like Kohka.
“Oh, I have given much thought to this subject,” he said so earnestly it kind of broke my heart a little. “I think I could develop very strong feelings, very quickly, for any female who seemed to want me.”
“Ox,” I murmured. He deserved more than someone who only seemed to want him.
“But I think,” he went on, “it would be very difficult indeed if the Lavrika went on to bond one, or both of us, to other people.”
“So would you wait, then?” I asked. “Even if you had a chance with someone now? Would you pass on that opportunity just because the Lavrika might shake things up later?”
“No,” he said at once. “If there was a woman who wanted me, I would jump on her immediately. Ah! I meant, I would jump on it. Jump at the opportunity.”
I chuckled. “It’s OK. I know what you meant.”
I mean, jumping on a willing lady probably wasn’t too far-off for this sweet, eager-to-please alien virgin. But Ox was a gentleman at heart, and I knew that wasn’t what he’d intended to convey to me.
“Good,” he said, sounding relieved. I felt his sight stars shift to me as we descended towards the main entrance to the mountain. “Why are you asking all this, Nazreen?”
“I was just curious. You guys all have different opinions on this stuff. Gahn Thaleo and the people in this tribe seem to have the opposite view. Seems like no one is willing to take a chance on a relationship with someone else before a mate bond gets activated by the Vrika.”
“Gahn Thaleo is trying to preserve his people’s numbers,” he observed. “I can understand this. In the Sea Sands, too, the Lavrika’s word is law.”
“Yeah, I know.” The Sea Sand population had been greatly affected by people ignoring their mate bond’s in the past. “But it doesn’t seem quite as intense. Galok, Razek, Kohka… They all chose their mates before they got a mate vision. Even Lerokan did the same, though he was exiled for it for a while.” Luckily, those men’s mate visions had only confirmed what they already knew in their hearts. It had strengthened their choice, instead of ripping it away from them.
“But Gahn Thaleo seems to be on another level,” I went on, my voice strengthening as I warmed to my theme. “I truly don’t think he’d let two people in love stay together if the Vrika gave someone a mate vision that didn’t line up with what they’d chosen.”
“If two people chose each other, and then the man received a mate vision of another woman, or some other man received a mate vision of that female, I do not see how the original pair would even want to stay together,” Oxriel said, frowning as if with deep thought. “I have heard mated men speak of it. Of the sudden, all-encompassing desire they feel for the female in their mate vision. Of the intensity of the love that instantly expands inside them. I do not see how someone could stay with theirchosen partner while their new mate bond ached so badly for someone else.”
“That’s even worse,” I moaned. “The fact that all your choices, all the work you put into a loving relationship, can just be torn apart because of the alien equivalent of a love potion! Sorry, Ox,” I said quickly, not wanting to shit on what I knew was a sacred aspect of their culture. “I don’t mean to be so judgmental. But I just…Doesn’t that bother you? To know that a woman might only want you because the Lavrika basically told her to?”
“I had never thought about it quite like that,” Oxriel said, and bless him, he didn’t seem offended by my questions at all. “But no, I do not think that it would bother me. Because she would simply be feeling the same way I was. If she were a Sea Sand woman, anyway,” he added hastily. “I know you new women do not feel an instant mate bond the way we do.”
He paused, then asked, “So how does it work with you humans, then? You can entirely choose who you love? If you were standing in a cave full of suitable males, you could simply judge each option and then select one? And then you feel a mate bond for him?”
“Well, no, not really,” I said. “There are questions of things like sexual attraction, hormones, romantic compatibility…”The grief you feel when he tells you about his scars…“All of those things play into creating a relationship.”
“But you are in control of those things? The elements of attraction and such?” He made a waving sort of motion with his hands, as if he were trying to herd an invisible group of animals. Perhaps stupidly, I thought of Linnet and her brolka. “You choose which male you wish to direct your hormones towards.”
“No.” I snorted softly. “Often it’s the opposite case, to be honest.”
It certainly was with me right now. I never would have chosen an attraction to Gahn Thaleo, of all people…
“So, what choice can you possibly be making?” he asked, sounding bewildered. “How is this different from the Vrika choosing for you?”
“Because things like giddy hormones don’t last,” I said indignantly, flustered at the way he’d turned my questions back on me. “True love is work. It’s sacrifice. It’s little choices that you make every single day, a commitment that you choose to make, even after the intensity of the initial excitement fades.”
Oxriel absorbed this quietly for a moment, then said, “I suppose that is where humans and Sea Sand people differ, then. Because the intensity of the mate bond? It never fades, Nazreen. Never.”
It was a sobering statement. I wasn’t used to Oxriel being so serious. It made me feel weirdly weepy. I wasn’t myself today. Maybe I was PMSing.
We had reached the grand cavern that led out of the mountain. I was just about to ask Oxriel if he wanted to go outside, figuring I’d have a better chance of spotting Gahn Thaleo on his return, when a sound from out there must have caught Oxriel’s ear. He stepped neatly in front of me, his knife in his hand before I could even blink.
“What is it, Ox?” I whispered at his back. My eyes darted around the lamplit space, then out into the night. I didn’t see anything amiss.
Except…there. Movement on the air. The flapping of silvery wings. A braxilk.
Gahn Thaleo landed on the great circle of stone, mere metres from us. Oxriel was already sheathing his weapon, stepping aside, and raising his tail, but it didn’t seem to do much good. Gahn Thaleo swept into the mountain, dark energy crackling around him.
