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He really wasn’t going to let me go with him.
I understood him wanting to keep me safe, but we had established that there was no such thing as safety in the Aboa. For all I knew, another whale monster would break through the wall and capture me while Zoran was gone. And something told me I wouldn’t survive a second round of that hell.
“Don’t abandon me,” I said, my voice shaking.
He lifted my hand from his arm to his lips and brushed a kiss to my knuckles before he stood and released me. “This is protection, not abandonment.”
“Please, don’t leave,” I signed back to him, since the other fae in the room had averted their eyes but could definitely still hear us.
“I’ll be back as soon as possible,” he signed in response.
When he turned, a sharp strip of water broke through the flimsy wall I’d created the day before, and the king ducked out easily.
Watching him walk away filled me with fear—and anger, too.
“He’s a male fae. They can’t help but be protective,” the woman next to me said. “Nothing will get in without him knowing.” She gestured to the wall of water that had grown in place of my stone barrier.
“Being abandoned is a trigger for me,” I said quietly, sliding my knees up to my chest and wrapping my arms around them. My thin dress fell around my thighs, pooling beside me on the floor.
Zoran would’ve known that, if he’d asked.
He would’ve known it, if he hadn’t acted like I didn’t exist for the past few months.
Maybe his instincts screamed at him to protect me, but if the only protection he offered was physical, I was nowhere near ready to walk myself into a relationship of any kind with him.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said.
I didn’t reply.
What was there to say?
So I leaned up against the wall, and waited.
Eventually,I heard a roar. It was loud enough to shake the entire Aboa, violently.
The whole cave system grew quieter and more still after that roar, so I assumed it was Heliai.
“The Mother’s power feeds the creatures when she’s awake,” the male fae with us explained to me, when he noticed the crease in my forehead. “Without her energy, many of them will return to sleep alongside her.”
I nodded, still staring at the water that separated us from the rest of the Aboa. Though I itched to ask my fae companions for their names, it had been way more than a reasonable amount of time since we met for me to ask. “Why is the Aboa still here? Why haven’t you just… you know, killed all the monsters?”
I immediately felt like a terrible person for asking, but it still seemed like a valid question, so I kept my mouth shut.
“The monsters are their own society and ecosystem. They’re intelligent, like us—they just don’t value life the way we do. Their lives are focused on killing or being killed, so our ancestors gave them a place in which they can live in their way without hurting us. The Aboa exists out of respect for the creatures who came before us, and it always will as long as there are water fae here to defend it,” the woman explained.
Her reasoning caught me off-guard. “So your people hate me because you think I’m a threat to the Aboa.”
“The only risk to it has ever been earth fae,” she admitted. “They could open it, physically.”
“Only a few are anywhere near strong enough to do that. And Crest has done more damage than any earth fae, thus far,” I pointed out.
She grimaced. “Crest’s betrayal was unexpected.”
Ihad expected it.
That man had always been a bastard.
“Even if earth fae wanted to break the Aboa, most of us are way too weak to do anything to it at all. Quake said I have average-level magic, and I’m an absolute shit show when it comes to doing much of anything with stone. I doubt anyone’s magic is even strong enough to see into the Aboa far enough to affect it at all, except maybe Quake’s. And he’s been repairing all of the elemental lands for so long that I would think he deserves at least a little of your respect.”
