Page 99 of I Married A Syllen

With that, she turned around, mounted her Nordjarimm, and flew away. We followed.

Chapter 19

Mirella

The return home felt like being a part of a funeral procession. Everyone had somber expressions. I didn’t know how they did it, but the Syllens identified beyond any doubt that all the Kalrins came from the Ungaro Tribe’s orchards. Therefore, Togar—one of Athusa’s Osheos—took their remains back home, except for the queen who Taelen had given peace to. She belonged to the Drossara Tribe, so our healer, Josey, brought her back to our village.

Athusa and a handful of his tribe members remained at the human colony. They would make sure no one would bring relief to the foul scientists impaled in front of the razed Procrea building. They also planned on scouting the city to identify the places that would need to be audited first when the Syllens returned in a couple of days.

Orian and her tribemates flew back to their own village, except for a handful among those who had come riding an Elijinn. They would also help Athusa’s team scout the town.

Once we reached the village, we made a beeline for the gathering area on the beach. My stomach dropped when they placed the dead queen in the middle of an empty Yako Clam shell. The only time I’d seen one of those was when the Ungaro Tribe cooked three of them for our meal when we first visited. So seeing the healers place the shell with the corpse on top of the large metal plate that covered the fire pit freaked me out.

“They’re going to cook her?!” I exclaimed, horrified.

I understood that their culture tried to make maximum use of everything and avoid waste. However, aside from the fact that God only knew what kind of experiments they had performed on the poor creature, eating her just felt wrong. I wouldn’t eat a pet, and she was far more intelligent than your common cat or dog.

Taelen gave me a surprised and slightly confused look before understanding dawned on him. He gave me a sad smile while shaking his head.

“No. First, we couldn’t feed her to anyone or anything because she was sick. It would be too high a risk of her meat spreading a disease or infection, even if she was thoroughly cooked,” Taelen explained. “But we don’t eat people or advanced creatures like her with whom we have formed an emotional bond. We use ash powder on their remains to return them to the land.”

As if to confirm his statement, the four awakened healers spread evenly around the circular plate. They started moving their mouths in the same subtle way the Syllens had done outside Procrea before the building crumbled. It still blew my mind that they could reduce thick metal beams to tiny shards just with the power of sounds beyond human hearing.

Why they would use those ultrasounds on her corpse confused me at first. Then I noticed how her chest collapsed. They were weakening her bones the same way they’d weakened the metal. Then Josey carefully sprinkled over her body the gray powder that had covered Procrea’s rubble. Once done, he closed the container and took a couple of steps back.

Then as one, the four healers emitted that dreadful sound appropriately called the death tone. The closest comparison that came to mind was the nail-on-glass hissing of a demonic critter, with overlapping voices. One was high-pitched, the other one so deep our surroundings vibrated. Both blended into that one nightmarish tone that made my skin crawl.

I didn’t know how any of this functioned, but that sound triggered some form of chemical reaction in the powder. The way the queen’s body instantly turned gray, you’d think Medusa had just turned her to stone or into a gray sand statue. But she had been turned to ashes.

Josey and another healer picked up the Yako shell containing her remains, each one holding one edge. As they marched towards the river, the rest of the tribe followed to the edge of the water, singing a haunting, wordless hymn. The healers kept the shell between them, floating at the surface as they swam away from the shore, their tails lazily swaying behind them to propel them forward.

About two hundred meters out, the healers lifted the shell then slightly tipped it as they continued to swim, slowly scattering the ashes in the river. The singing ended once the healers dove underwater after dropping the last speck of ashes.

That evening, the Syllens didn’t hold their usual happy gathering around the pit before bed. Taelen and I didn’t make love that night or the next. He wasn’t distant or resentful towards me. My mate was grieving and distraught by what had happened. He didn’t understand what could justify any of this.

Connecting with the queen and seeing through her eyes what she had endured severely scarred him. Even his dealings with the Settlers hadn’t affected him as badly. Back then, the off-worlders attacked them directly. The difference in technological advancement had not really been a factor as they were equals in terms of sentience level. What he couldn’t reconcile was the gratuitous torture and mutilation of peaceful beings who should instead stir any decent person’s protective instincts.

In truth, Mazeria and his people were far too pure to comprehend this extent of evil. Despite being a formidable hunter, strategist, and warrior—as demonstrated by his victory against the Settlers—Taelen possessed an innocent soul. That wild animals interacted with his people with such a lack of fear was a testament to their gentle way of life. He was right when he said that greed and thirst for power were diseases. That sickness had now touched Mazeria, and he feared it might become a cancer that would spread and destroy the beauty of his world.

Those two nights, my heart broke whenever he would hold me like a drowning man as we lay in bed. My man needed comfort and reassurance that the cruelty he witnessed was an exception, not the norm. While I stated as much to him, and as desperately as he wanted to believe it, that worry continued to eat Taelen alive. He kept a stoic and in control demeanor in front of his tribe, but deep down, he was bracing for more horrors once we began the audits of the colony’s establishments.

As the Thesh of the Drossara Tribe, he was responsible for ensuring the safety of the people, the land, and all its inhabitants, including the flora and fauna. He didn’t want to bring war to the colony. I didn’t know what other weapons or abilities the Syllens possessed. But they implied that—should it come to that—they could inflict the type of devastating damage that the colony would never recover from. Their obvious reluctance at resorting to whatever it was made me believe it would leave lasting trauma to both them and the land.

The day after Procrea got obliterated, I had a very unpleasant conversation with Maeve. The Enforcers were upset that Taelen didn’t give Maeve enough time to gather all the data on Procrea’s research or samples of their work. The total obliteration of the building deprived them of valuable evidence.

Obviously, I understood where they were coming from. It was much harder to fight an enemy that you didn’t know. How could you build a case against someone when you couldn’t say exactly in what way their projects violated the law? But some secrets were better left unknown.

The less off-worlders knew about the Syllens’ abilities and the resources of Mazeria that could be used as weapons, the better for all concerned. Taelen understood this very well. The destruction of Procrea wasn’t just about sending a message to anyone else who might be tempted to cross them. He made certain to eradicate as much data as he could to prevent enticing others into picking up where Procrea left off.

Although she didn’t say anything about it, I didn’t doubt Maeve investigated the online backup servers where they stored their data. For all that, I wasn’t mad at Maeve. She had a job to do, and her bosses were breathing down her neck. Furthermore, in her field, information was power. Knowledge could be what prevented an intergalactic calamity.

On a side note, the day after Procrea’s destruction, Professor Ludwig resigned from Acadia in protest. He made quite a stink about his cousin’s public execution. In reality, it was a spectacle to save face. The university would have fired him once they found out about his shady connections to Procrea. Therefore, he wisely fled first to avoid accountability or being tied to the tragedy that went down. That didn’t stop the ongoing investigation into his part in all of this.

So far, they had not established any direct involvement. For all we knew, he might simply have been a pawn. However, it was suspiciously convenient that his cousin Bran Ludwig got him hired at Acadia. Bran also pulled quite a few strings to get Peter appointed as the head of the Syllen Task Force. In that position, Peter would have been able to conveniently look the other way while Procrea continued to plunder the resources of the planet.

It would take a significant amount of time to track down all the people who were involved and follow the different threads. The other culprits were either going into hiding or deleting anything that could link them back to this mess. The news and footage of the destruction of Procrea spread like wildfire throughout the galaxy. Aside from the gruesome spectacle, this was the first time most people both on Mazeria and off world got to see a Syllen in the flesh. Obviously, people everywhere were glued to their screens. That included the assholes who had been a part of all of this. In that sense, I understood Maeve’s frustration at the loss of data as it would have helped her zero in on these people before they vanished.

Beyond that discussion, I also spent those two days preparing for the audit. Athusa flagged the priority locations. They included factories, hospitals, public transport terminals, and the bigger corporations, especially those with biomedical and pharmaceutical vocations. I coordinated with Maeve, the UPO, and the Enforcers to properly prepare the civilians for the Syllens’ visit.