As his respect for Sarah grew, so did his attachment to her. He was not certain he would ever love her as he did Farona, but he knew that he could learn to care about her, and he had no problem even now with desiring her. His concern for her safety told him that his feelings for her had already shifted, growing stronger with each moment he spent in her company. He needed her to be safe, and thus he pushed them both harder than they should be pushing to get her out of the urvaka and back to the skilev.
They were wounded and tired, and Jotaha’s chanu zayul were weakened by the loss of some of their number, so they weren’t able to heal him as quickly as they normally did. The fact that they would soon be approaching maturity meant they were stronger than when he’d first accepted them into his body, but it also meant they were slowly withdrawing their tendrils from his nervous system in preparation to leave him, though there was still time before that happened.
He could handle the pain he currently felt, and had trained with sentils who were not blessed by chanu zayul to soothe and heal their wounds, so had taken the same punishment to his body as they did to harden him. It was Sarah’s suffering that concerned him the most, even while he pushed to get them home. He knew they couldn’t survive another attack from the twisted nixirs while he was in a diminished state. Though the urvak zayul had not sent word of any more creatures approaching the boundary, the nixirs had proven they could move with a purpose through the urvaka now, sniffing out the trail Jotaha and Sarah left behind, in order to find their own way through.
This was a complication he must tell the elders as soon as possible. He could not delay in bringing this news back to the temple, even if he was willing to risk Sarah’s health and safety. Though he suspected the zayul residing within the temple priest who spoke for the urvaka would give him some knowledge of what had taken place here, that priest would need Jotaha’s combat perspective to truly understand the message the zayul sent.
The fact that nixirs only rarely found their way through the urvaka and were able to be led astray by the zayul was a huge boon for the yan-kanat. If these new nixirs were capable of defeating those weaknesses of theirs, then more than one Jotaha might need to patrol each hunting ground to safely defeat them. This could spread the chanu zayul too thin. He’d lost four of them already, though eight more remained within him. Lower numbers meant they were weaker and provided less advantages. It also made it more difficult for him to “hear” the hivemind speaking to him through their chanu zayul.
This new development could change the way they had dealt with the nixir invaders since they first came to Theia, escaping their persecution on Gaia. The urvaka had been Theia’s ribs, protecting her heart—their home—for thousands upon thousands of passings. The Ajda had either left this world, or allowed their physical bodies to go dormant like Seta Zul. They would not serve as the guardians they had in the past. Theia’s body and their own bodies were their final gift to the yan-kanat before most of them left to seek a new home for themselves to escape the wrath of Theia’s brethren.
It was up to the yan-kanat to defend themselves now, and they had been given enough gifts to do so. They had simply grown too complacent, secure in the knowledge that the nixirs would never figure out how to successfully navigate the urvaka. Even their clever machinery could not function for long after crossing the boundary, which forced them to send their warriors instead.
Nixirs had failed all their invasion attempts, even as elders like Arokiv infiltrated their societies and began to manipulate their leaders. This repeated failure was why they’d finally agreed to a treaty, and promised never to cross the boundary. It was a promise the nixirs, unsurprisingly, broke far too often, though their leaders always swore the trespassers were rogue elements that were unsanctioned by their governments.
Jotaha led his drahi through the tunnels of the urvaka, growing more concerned as her exhaustion was apparent in her long silences, broken only by her labored breathing. He considered that the enmity between nixirs and yan-kanat would soon come to a head. If the nixirs attempted to claim Theia, as they had Gaia, then every last yan-kanat would die to defend it.
There were also some yan-kanat who wanted to return the favor and invade Gaia to take back what was rightfully theirs. The elders tried to quash such rumblings, knowing that the danger the nixirs posed with their clever, twisted minds had only grown over the generations. Their tools and weapons had become more advanced, even as Gaia lost what magic the Ajda had given the ancient body after they abandoned it, condemning the nixirs to a world bound by physical laws they were unable to alter on their own.
The nixirs had, unfortunately, only risen to the challenges posed by those new boundaries. They managed to create things of such wonder—without the use of the magic of the Ajda—that most yan-kanat didn’t believe in the stories when those who traveled to the nixir world returned with tales of them.
Jotaha believed. As much as he despised most nixirs, he did not dare to underestimate them, and the new twisted nixirs were proof that he couldn’t. None of them could. If there was an obstacle in their way, the nixirs always seemed to find a way around it—or through it—given enough time.
He need only look at what Sarah had gone through and survived, armed with nothing but her own wits, to see how determined the nixir mind was. It never gave up fighting, even when the battle seemed lost. That relentlessness had been so effective that it had chased a physically more imposing species from Gaia, leaving the yan-kanat relying on the generosity of the Ajda to save them.
There was much the yan-kanat could learn from the nixirs, and Jotaha realized that his people might have made a mistake in treating the rare nixir females allowed on Theia to become drahi like pampered pets, instead of as teachers and guides. Perhaps Seta Zul had chosen a nixir for his mate because the yan-kanat needed more ruthlessness in their bloodlines and more nixir knowledge in their heads. It was possible they should be interbreeding more often with their enemy to increase the cunning and deviousness of their own people, not avoiding the nixirs as much as possible. If that was Seta Zul’s ultimate plan, then he could not argue with the logic of it.
Whatever Seta Zul’s reasons for choosing Sarah for him might be, he could no longer resent them. With too much time to think about the situation while he led her safely out of the urvaka, he came to realizations that made him uncomfortable. He had to admit that the nixirs ultimately had an advantage, and that only a matter of time separated them from a confrontation that could prove deadly—or beneficial.
Sarah would become his new cipher, his window into the alien mind of the nixirs, who were never content to leave the world the way they found it. He would learn from her what made the nixirs the way they were, and why they were so determined to gain the power of the titans that had spawned their creators. If he could only understand how his enemies thought, then perhaps he could be the one to lead his people back to Gaia, either in peace—or armed with the same weapons the nixirs possessed.
He would bend himself to the task of earning Sarah’s affection so she would willingly accept his seal. If they were blessed with nestlings, then he wanted her to be loyal to him and his people, because her nestlings and their nestlings would probably end up going to war with the nixirs if things didn’t change. He didn’t want to end up torn between his duty to his mate and his duty to his people, so he had a challenging task ahead of him.