FREE USE in Primitive World

A flicker of raw, deeply human memory passed through her gaze... even though her eyes were close, due to her senses, she was seeing everything happening around her, terrifying sight of moments ago: this madman throwing himself into a tempest that would have peeled the flesh from any Layer 4 warrior’s bones.

She remembered the sight of him tearing through the white-hot vortex of compressed spirit energy, skin flayed open by thousands of razor-sharp wind blades, bleeding from a hundred cuts without giving an inch of ground.

She remembered the sudden, shocking jolt of his thick, strong hands locking onto her trembling ankles, his own vitality roaring like a wild beast as he shoved his strength straight into her collapsing foundation to yank her back from the edge of oblivion.

And right behind that life-saving violence came the feverish memory of what had led to it under the weeping willows.

The phantom sensation of rough tree bark biting into her bare spine. His broad, heavy palms bruised into the soft meat of her hips, anchoring her in place so completely she couldn’t have pulled away even if the sky had fallen then.

The breathless, filthy friction in the dark, and the deep, relentless, burning ache of his seed flooding into her receptive core again and again until every shred of her icy discipline was stripped away and her senses shattered into pure, weeping oblivion.

A faint, almost imperceptible warmth rose along the regal curve of her neck, though her chin remained held high with sovereign pride.

”Sol,” Veylara spoke.

Her voice wasn’t just loud yet it carried a layered, harmonic resonance that bypassed the ears and vibrated directly against the marrow of their bones.

The clearing seemed to echo with her tone, the remaining water in the pond trembling at her timbre as the last traces of the golden rain settled into the damp moss.

”Veylara,” Sol replied, his voice a low, gravelly husky that completely shattered the holy, breathless tension. He offered a faint, lazy nod. ”Nice of you to finally wake up. You missed a whole party out in the bushes.”

Veylara’s gaze shifted toward the dark thicket behind him.

Even without stepping an inch, her expanded senses swept the forest trail. She felt the cooling blood, the shattered bones, and the butchered remains of nearly forty apex beasts lying in mangled heaps in the jungle.

She felt the severed horn, the crushed beetle carapace, and the massive, headless bulk of the Layer 3 Blood-Bore rotting in the grass near the tree line.

She didn’t need to ask who had done it. Only one madman in this entire territory would charge a horde of ravenous beasts bare-handed and buck-naked just to keep a clearing quiet.

Veylara exhaled, stepping forward.

Her stride was smooth, entirely devoid of the unsteady, trembling weakness that had plagued her legs earlier. She walked across the damp moss toward them, her movements carrying a frightening, effortless grace.

”You defended the perimeter alone,” she stated, stopping five paces away, her sapphire eyes searching his face. It wasn’t a question; it was an acknowledgment heavy with an unpayable debt. ”If they had broken through while the fifth layer was coalescing... my core would have collapsed.”

”They made too much noise,” Sol said, shrugging his shoulders as if it was truly irrelevant to her. ”And I don’t like interruptions when I’m seeing something through to the end.”

Veylara stopped right in front of him, close enough that the lingering heat off her skin pushed against his chest. Her gaze traveled down his bruised ribs, taking in the cuts from the essence storm and the crude fern leaf tied around his waist. A faint, almost imperceptible twitch tugged at the corner of her mouth.

”Your tongue is as reckless as your fists,” Veylara said softly, her voice dropping into a private, dangerous register. ”Though... it seems your recklessness is the only reason the Veynar are still standing.”

She turned her attention slightly toward Zephyra.

”High Shaman.”

Zephyra lowered her sleeve, dipping her head in a formal, respectful bow... the deepest bow Sol had ever seen the proud old mystic offer to anyone. ”Warchief. The ancestors have truly broken the sky tonight.” Even though she knew the cause and effect, she didn’t say anything and offered her a convenient explanation to use later. ”Layer 5... in the northern basin. It is unprecedented. It is a myth made flesh.”

”It was no myth,” Veylara replied, her eyes cutting sideways toward Sol with absolute clarity. ”And it was no ancestor.”

Zephyra smiled knowingly, but wisely held her tongue. ”The spiritual disturbance was massive. The essence drawn from the outer perimeter will not go unnoticed. While the beasts were drawn here like moths, our own scouts and warriors will have felt the sky shift. Even through the drunken stupor of the feast, a shift of this scale cannot be hidden. Soon, the elders will be here, demanding answers.”

”Let them demand,” Veylara said, her sovereign tone snapping back into place. ”The Coalition is crushed. The Zharun are broken. The Zerith are our thralls, and the Marauders have surrendered their ridge. If any of the old bastards have complaints or wish to question how their Warchief gained the power to flatten a mountain, they are welcome to challenge me in the trial ring.”

The hesitation, the old fears of failing her clan or leaving Kira defenseless, had been burned to ash in the furnace of her breakthrough.

She paused, looking down at the bare, muddy ground where her crimson linen tunic still somehow lay discarded from hours before.

With a simple, flicking motion of her wrist, Veylara channeled an effortless thread of her new power. A localized gust of compressed kinetic wind picked up her garments, gently setting them onto the dry stone beside her.

She picked up the linen, sliding the tunic over her head with unhurried poise, pulling the leather ties tight around her waist before slipping into her boots.

Even clad in simple, battle-worn cloth, the aura she projected made the linen look like royal silk.

”Sol,” she called out, not turning around as she fastened her ropes. ”Where are your clothes and blade?”

”Blown into the southern brush when you decided to turn into a hurricane,” Sol grunted, rotating his neck. ”Along with my trousers and my dignity.”

Veylara let out a short, breathy laugh... a sound so rare and light that even Zephyra blinked in mild shock.