Page 69 of Sway’s Peace (Delivery Service #2)

Sway

The forest was bright and lovely in the daylight.

The vibrant yellows and oranges made for a tropical forest that seemed like it was golden and idyllic.

The insects buzzing and flitting around were all bright and jewel toned.

Sway was sure there were animals, he could even hear them calling to each other, but he had yet to see them.

However, they were definitely there, and certainly big. Whatever had dug this burrow was large enough that it needed enough space that Sway and Loyalty could both stand together in the hole without crowding the other.

The burrow was angled into the dirt, the opening half covered by a net of detritus.

Whatever animal owned it before had matted grass and sticks and roots together into a crude mat and used to cover the opening.

It was mostly pulled off now, leaving the entrance half open for Loyalty to stand in and look look through.

Aside from the music of the forest, the burrow was silent.

Sway was sitting at the back, on what remained of the nest of whatever beast once made this home.

He had his back against the roughly hewn wall.

The soil was oddly solid. Whatever dug the hole had spread something over the dirt that hardened it like stone so it wouldn’t collapse.

It also made the hole much cooler than the bright, tropical air outside.

Sway had one leg up, his arm resting on it, staring forward at nothing. His thoughts seemed to be racing endlessly, yet also not forming into a single coherent thing.

He needed to get back. But no part of him wanted to step foot in the city.

He was filled with a potent and poisonous combination of self-hatred, disgust, hurt, and longing.

He couldn’t even figure out where any of his emotions were coming from.

Every thought and memory was an icy needle striking him through the chest, all compounded by the guilt of not immediately leaping to his feet and going after his female.

“I don’t think we’ve been followed,” Loyalty said, stepping away from the entrance and coming to sit down across from him in the depths of the burrow. He mirrored his pose, the glow from his quills and eyes an eerie light in the dim hole.

For a long moment, neither of them said anything. Loyalty just continued to look at him as Sway sat there, staring at nothing.

Finally, Sway broke the long silence by asking, “What happened to you?”

Loyalty made an unconcerned gesture with his hand. “Got ran out of town. I suppose you could guess that though. That day you two went to meet Veesway, the domini guards grabbed me and threw me out into the wild. I guess that’s how your people deal with undesirable problems.”

Sway frowned. Loyalty had been out here all this time, and he hadn’t noticed? Hadn’t even spared the other male a single thought. Caught up as he had been with his female, he didn’t even consider where the xenom male had gone or why he was taking so long to get back.

This time, it was Loyalty who broke the silence, continuing as though Sway had asked him a clarifying question.

“It was actually pretty easy to live out here. This forest is wild, but there’s not much in the way of dangerous wildlife.

At least, not to me. My home planet is much worse.

Found this burrow. I’ve been working on that maintenance door for days, trying to break it so I could get in.

Just another layer of guilt. Loyalty was a good male. He was trying to help them. Really living up to his name. But Sway hadn’t spared him a single thought since he’d been gone.

“You smell like her now,” Loyalty continued, giving him a smile. “I guess she’s your female officially, eh?”

“Not yet,” he muttered.

Loyalty cocked his head, smile fading. “How long are you going to keep this up? I don’t mind youngsitting your self-pity, I just think we should probably go after Grace sooner than later.”

Anger snapped and Sway glared at him, crest starting to raise. “Youngitting my self-pity?”

“Is that not what’s happening right now?”

The urge to strike him for the insult, for the condescension, rose up in Sway’s throat.

And turned his stomach.

Violence.

Again, violence. It always came back to violence.

That creeping self-hatred swept over him, drowning him in the distant echoes of screams. Cries reaching out from the depths of his memories. All the way out here, in this dark and cold hole, there was nothing to distract him from it.

He finally had to confront the fact that he was, and always would be, a monster. And nothing he could do would ever change that.

Loyalty blinked at him. Certainly unable to miss the way Sway got heated then almost immediately deflated again. He could feel the slump in his shoulders, weighed down by his past. By the truth of who he was. And the futility of trying to change that.

“So, what happened to you ?” Loyalty turned the question around, asking him now.

Sway hesitated before answering. “They found out who I am. Who I was.”

“A killer from Rik-Vane, you mean?”

“Yeah…” He winced. The way Loyalty said it, so blunt and straightforward, hurt that much more for being completely neutral.

Like he was commenting on the color of the sky, of the trees.

“I should have anticipated that they’d actually search for my real identity.

The crimes attached to my name aren’t exactly secret. ”

“True,” Loyalty agreed, just as blunt as before.

“They’ve exiled me for it. And that’s fine. I don’t care. But they’re going to do the same to Grace. After they make sure I didn’t leave a youngling in her belly.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

“Great. We can just wait until they toss her out and we’ll grab her and try to find a way off this planet. They aren’t going to hurt her. The most they’ll do is exile. They can’t really justify anything else in their warped sense of right and wrong.”

Sway frowned, finally focusing properly on him. “Warped?”

Loyalty scoffed. “I mean, isn’t it?”

“Pacifism is warped? The idea that it’s wrong to do harm onto or kill others is warped?”

“No, that’s perfectly fine. It’s what they’ve done with it that’s warped.” Loyalty made another one of those careless gestures. “Then again, maybe it’s just my personal belief system meeting and clashing against theirs.”

Sway stared at him. Confused. He’d also been thrown out of the Song, condemned by everyone in it. Yet, he was completely unaffected.

“They would call you a monster too,” he said, staring at the xenom male. Trying to get a reaction. Wondering why he wasn’t getting one.

“I imagine they do,” Loyalty nodded once.

“You don’t care.”

He laughed. “Why would I?”

Sway didn’t have an answer for him. It seemed so obvious that it shouldn’t be something he had to explain. And as such, he couldn’t actually form a logical explanation as to why.

Loyalty gave him a calm smile. “To my way of thinking, they’re the monsters.”

Sway reared back, stunned. That was just… wrong.

No one considered farasie monsters. His people were isolated specifically for the purpose of self protection, because everyone in the universe knew that a farasie wasn’t going to harm you, even if you harmed them.

They might be called fools, easy, weak, even cowardly.

But everyone would feel safe with a farasie.

To call his people monsters…

It just made no sense.

“You know, my people, we value family above all things,” Loyalty said, leaning his head back, looking up at the ceiling of the burrow.

At the long claw marks petrified into the dirt from whatever had created this space.

“I know the rest of the universe sees us as these terrifying parasites. And, in a way, I can’t even argue.

We are parasitic.” He held up his hand, looking at the way his veins moved under his flesh – something fully in his control.

“My prime body can survive on its own, but it’s very weak.

Very vulnerable. And I have to take over the reproductive machinery of another species in order to create my gametes and produce my own young.

Something has to die in order for me to live.

“But that’s true for all species, isn’t it?

Everything has to eat something else. Even your people.

For all that they’re vegetarian, they still have to kill and eat plants to survive.

Life survives on life. I’m different because I don’t just eat the things that die.

I have to subsume their form and that is too much for the sapient universe to forgive. It’s monstrous.”

Sway said nothing. Loyalty dropped his hand back to the ground, grinning at him.

“But that’s normal to me. I don’t see a problem with it.

My previous body was a six-legged beast from my home world.

I didn’t possess vocal cords, so I couldn’t speak, but my people’s language is movement based anyway, so it didn’t matter.

I didn’t consider taking that body to be any different from taking this one.

The only real difference to me was that I had to pay the owner, while I just took the last one.

“But regardless of what body I claim, your people consider what I do, how I have to live, to be such a horrific crime against nature, I had to be forced out of their city. Even when they knew you and Grace would protest, they didn’t care.

They considered it more righteous to lie to you about what happened to me than to tolerate my presence even a moment longer. ”

“I’m sorry,” Sway said, wincing. “I should have looked for you. I shouldn’t have believed the lie that you just went out hunting.”

“It’s fine. Honestly, it’s not a bad lie.” Loyalty chuckled. “Probably would have happened if I would have felt safe leaving you there alone.”

“Huh?” Sway blinked. That wasn’t what he was expecting him to say. “What do you mean?”

“You know. All this.” He gestured out the entrance of the burrow. Not indicating so much to the forest, but to everything that led to them being in the forest.