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"Looking at me as if you want to eat me," she clarified.
"My favorite pastime," I grinned.
Heat rose into her cheeks and made her look more fragile, not like the warrior she was, more like a kallini in love with her warlord. A notion that pleased me very much.
She waved her hand and reached for a bread roll. "So, it's by the Dark Sea?"
"Kar, but my territory is not as rocky as Grymburg," I explained as a deep longing for my home spread through me. It had been too long. Months. I had never been gone from my lands so long before.
"The humans raise what they call cows on the rolling hills. They're our main export to the rest of the Thyre territory." I filled her in while the memory of those black and white cows as they grazed peacefully on the fertile ground rose in my mind. Contrary to the other parts of Thyre, the humans who had settled on my lands were breeding cows instead of horses, but lately I had been thinking about adding horses and horse handlers to raise our commerce.
"That sounds nice," she said, her eyes taking on a dreamy expression.
"Dokkymburg is not built on a cliff like Grymburg, but at sea level, and you can ride for hours in both directions."
She closed her eyes as if trying to picture it, so I continued, "The sand is fine and shimmers like crystals. When the Comden sun shines on it, you can look out at the ocean for miles and miles."
"Hmm, that sounds incredible," she smiled, making her look relaxed and so beautiful, I nearly pulled her into my arms.
"The town of Dokkymburg lies just beyond the rolling hills and will offer anything your heart desires. We trade with other outposts and territories, and you'll find many exotic foods and gadgets at the market," I continued my attempt at tempting her.
After a moment, her eyes opened. "That sounds wonderful."
There was a wistfulness in her tone that made me chuckle because I knew what else she needed to hear. "We also train every day, and sometimes we have to fight the Udruns off when they get too pesky."
Just like I had thought, that perked her up. My wonderful mate had feared she would get rusty or bored at Dokkymburg. "Udruns?"
"A nomadic species that roams Thyre and refuses to settle down. They love nothing more than to harass our farmers, small villages, and outposts and steal our cattle."
"Sounds intriguing," she smiled, having her warrior nature appeased. "Fighting and feasting," she nodded.
I laughed. "Fighting and feasting," I promised.
We continued eating in companionable silence for a bit, listening to the storm howl outside and the wind battering the hut relentlessly until I requested, "Tell me about Earth."
She sighed. "There's not much to tell. Once upon a time, it was a beautiful, diverse planet, but then some politicians decided to unify the entire planet and incorporate all customs and beliefs into one, making us all the same. Which sounds nice in theory, but in practice, it was just a different form of enslavement. The government slowly took away our freedoms and choices, like deciding what we should do for a living and how we should live.
“Soon, overpopulation pushed out nature until there were only cities next to cities. Diseases ran rampant, multiplied and killed most of us.
"Unfortunately eighty percent of the people who survived had one strain of DNA in common, making them so closely related that more babies were born with birth defects than without them. Until the government put gene banks in place along with strong reproduction rules.
“There are, of course, some that resent that kind of control, so they live on the outskirts of the cities, roaming ghost towns and some streets, making them unsafe."
Uneasily I listened to her story. This didn't sound like a healthy society at all, where the citizens had only two choices: be controlled and play by the rules or live like an outcast.
"So you chose the army?"
"I wanted a family," she said, making my heart sing. I had feared she was a warrior through and through, but maybe she wanted exactly what I did.
"Using gene banks is very expensive. If you don't have the funds for it, you can join the Terran Forces, and, at the end of your service, they will pay for the gene banks and allow you to have a family."
"Is that why you joined?" I asked.
She nodded.
"So what happened?" I prodded, not wanting to sound insensitive but unless she had joined the Terran Forces later in life, she appeared older than the young woman she described who had joined.
"The man I was going to settle down with finished his tour of duty sooner than I did, and he didn't wait for me. He chose another woman who had already earned her right to the gene banks."
