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Water spilled over the edges when I sat down across from her. Sweetly, she smiled at me. “No reason for me to be alone in here and you alone out there, right? Especially since we’re married now.” I couldn’t have agreed more and returned her warm smile. Her next words caught me off guard though. “What doesszariamean?”
I had hoped to have some more time before I had to dive into explaining my feelings for her, but she must have overheard the word and probably put a few pieces together. I worried about overwhelming her, but I also wanted to be honest with her.
“The people of Jahrle, we were blessed with a gift… when we meet our szaria, our soulmate, we recognize them instantly. One meeting of the eyes, one touch, one word is usually all it takes for two people to recognize each other as the one person specifically made for them by the gods.” Holly leaned back and listened to me intently. “These bondings, we call them fated-mates bondings, are for life. We search for our szaria from the moment we mature, hoping to find the other soon enough to spend a long life together.”
She looked thoughtful. “Like love at first sight?”
“It’s more than that,” I told her, trying to find the right words. “Love can be fleeting. You can love a certain color or piece of clothing, but you can also love others. The fated mate bond is something that lasts for as long as one of the mates is alive. It never changes; one cannot bear to be apart from the other.”
She smiled wistfully. “That sounds… nice.”
It was time to fully confess. “When I first saw you, Holly, I knew you were my szaria. I recognized you the moment I looked into your eyes.”
“Are you sure you weren’t just horny after so many years without a woman?” she quipped.
I shook my head. “No, Holly. Never. This is much more than that. It felt as if my heart had awakened. When I look at you, I don’t just see the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on, but part of my soul.”
“Oh, Thor.” She blinked back tears and laid her hands on my knees. “I don’t know what to say, I—”
I interrupted her, “You don’t have to say anything, Holly. I don’t expect you to feel the same way. You and I, we look alike, but we are two different species from different worlds, even though we are both stuck here.
“I hope that in time you will learn to care for me, but it doesn’t matter, as long as you allow me to be with you. To be close to you. I will take whatever you choose to offer me.”
She bit her lower lip, obviously uncomfortable with my declaration, and I cursed myself. I should have held back, should have waited before I filled her in on my feelings.
“Thor, there is something I need to tell you, too.”
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath to brace myself for her words. I was sure she would tell me that she had another man in her old world. Of course she would; she was beautiful and smart. Sweet and brave. Of course a man would have already claimed her.
“In my world, I was a paleontologist. I studied world history, old artifacts.” Questioningly, she looked at me.
This didn’t seem to be going where I thought it would, but I didn’t dare take a breath of relief yet, her expression was too serious for that.
We didn’t have anything like what she described on Jahrle, but I remembered something. “There was an ancient city on Jahrle, nobody was allowed to visit it. The elders said it belonged to the gods, but some said it was a city that had been abandoned because the inhabitants had grown apart from our gods. I don’t know what is true, but I always wanted to go there, explore it. Is that like what you used to do?”
She nodded. “Yes, if one was lucky enough to find such a city, people like me would have explored and cataloged it. The finds would be taken to a place called a museum for others to see.” The enthusiasm on her face dampened a little. “A few millions of years from now, I stumbled upon this cave.”
She gave me a moment to digest her words. “This cave?”
“This and the main one.”
I wasn’t sure how to take this information. “What did you… find?”
She leaned forward, folding her arms around my bent knees and placed her chin atop them. “Some artifacts, like expected. Stone spearheads, stone knives, bones.”
A cold chill moved through me. “Bones?”
She nodded. “And a skull.”
“A skull?” I repeated.
She licked her lips. “I believe it was your skull.”
My skull. My heart beat a little faster, and the cold chill I had felt intensified. I was not bothered because she had found my skull—we died, it was a fact of life I had long ago resigned myself to; hell, just a couple of days ago, I would have welcomed death, but now that I had found her… “How do you know it was mine?” I heard myself ask in a detached voice.
“I hired somebody who can reconstruct a skull, who can give a face to any person who died long ago.”
That sounded… like magic. And interesting as fuck. On Jahrle, people were usually burned after they died. But every now and then, we found a skull on an old battlefield or in the mountains. Every time I had stumbled upon a find like that I had held it and wondered who that person had been, if they were male or female, what their lives had been like. What they looked like when they were alive. How incredible would it have been if we had had somebody who could have given the dead person a face, to be able to remember that person better?
