Page 22 of The Faebound Trials (Mates and Madness: The Phantom Prince and The Bloodweaver #1)

He showed me the alphabets of their ancient language called Thesavria. The way he held his quill was gentle and precise. The way he drew the curves of the letters was beautiful.

I watched in awe as I studied the characters form together as they become words.

Then words become sentences.

Then as he slowly spoke, telling me how the letters differ depending on their vowels, my eyes darted to his lips.

He wore a band resembling tree branches as the sides of his hair were braided using it.

His hair was straight and too pale to be blonde, it resembled steel blades, the reason I kept calling him Silver.

I blinked to gather myself. I was staring so hard at his beautiful face that his words were becoming murmurs in the background.

And I felt bad.

I should be listening, not staring.

“Can you show me how you write your name?”

His eyes narrowed but I had seen the way he tried to fight off a smile.

“Why do you want to know how I write my name? You didn’t even know it.” His voice dropped to a more affectionate tone.

I shifted and looked away.

“That’s why I was asking you to show it to me.”

A smile was tugging at the corner of his lips. I guess he couldn’t fight it anymore.

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” My eyebrows raised.

“Asking someone’s name in this era means you are asking them to be your lover.”

“Huh?”

I was dumbfounded. Shocked.

I remembered asking Drystan his name too. And I was being playful at that too.

“Are you serious?” I was panicking.

“Yes, I am. Have I ever lied to you?”

“Countless times, yes.”

“And when did I ever lie to you?”

My mind drifted to yesterday. My eyes unfocusing.

“You told me you don’t feel attraction to me but I had seen the way you looked at me. I noticed how you looked at me in the fields the other day. Your eyes held yearning, there was longing in it.”

He turned silent. Even his breathing stopped.

And yes, it wasn’t a dream. I really said that straight to his face.

If there was one thing annoying about me. It was my ability to say things that made people uncomfortable.

He cleared his throat and I noticed how the ink in his quill turned a little downwards, creating a mess, the curve went too long. Splotches of ink ruined the last letter.

He was taken aback.

“That was because I thought you were a dream,” his eyes were faraway when he said that.

“What?”

He didn’t answer me and instead went back to writing.

This time his full attention was on the sentence he was completing.

I didn’t push it.

I was lucky that I got the chance to gather knowledge in this era through his help.

“What does it say? Is that your name?” I asked curiously, now that the letters forming had unfamiliar strokes from the ones he showed.

“Nevian Zethia Vale.” It sounded rich and elegant against his lips.

“Nehvi..an. Zet.ha..ya. Veyl?” I tried mimicking his pronunciation and his face brightened with a smile. “Are you laughing at me?”

“No. No. No,” he panicked. “That was perfect.”

I punched him straight into his thick arms. And my eyes widened at the habit.

He caressed the part gently and he didn’t seem to mind.

Wew. I thought he’d get angry. I shouldn’t have done that.

“Sorry. But you were being sarcastic.”

“I wasn’t. Your pronunciation was perfect. You got it right on the first try.”

“Really?” Excitement bubbling in my chest.

He chuckled. His head tilted slightly to the right as he looked at me with softness in his eyes.

“Yes. You’re perfect.”

“I told you I am good at this.”

“I never doubted you for a second.”

I was smiling ear to ear as I started practicing the syllables he laid out to me.

I looked back at him to see him truly captivated as he watched me. I cleared my throat. He just moved back a bit but he was still close to me.

“What should I call you then? Nevian or Zethia?”

He savored his name on my tongue as I saw how he breathed in heavily.

“Call me Zethia.”

“Zethia,” I said once more just to see how breathless he was at the sound of his name on my lips.

And he showed me how I was right. The rise and fall of his chest was heavier, breathless at the caress of my words.

I looked down on my paper and started focusing, but a smirk played on my lips.

The next thing I did was try to form coherent vowels.

Some letters that rolled in my tongue were very difficult, it made my head hurt.

The characters were actually hard to read when the letters were partnered with different vowels, as a slight curve at the top of a letter was kind of similar to each other.

Reading Thesavria in cursive would make me cry.

We spent hours together just reading and writing. I was lost in learning an ancient language.

He would then correct my pronunciations. He would help me roll my tongue better when I’d get stuck at a word.

Then he would fix my word constructions on paper. I could speak it but it was different when writing it, suddenly your mind was blank as I wrote it.

He would listen to me for hours, muttering words I didn’t know I was familiar with. Thesavria had the same structure as the future’s language, but the words were more… free , and more controlled.

I wondered how he was able to spend so much time doing things like this with me.

Does he work? Do princes have so much time they don’t care about the world?

The sun was going down.

“Zethia.”

“Hmmm?”

He was the type to give me all the attention he could give.

“We lost a lot. I mean. There were a lot of mortals that died from the last test.”

“And?”

“Can you help lessen the fatality of the tests to us mortals? At least, do not drown us like animals?”

He laughed so loud at my sarcasm.

“The tests were made to know if the things we have here in this realm were fatal to mortals. Death is guaranteed no matter what I do.”

“But, can you at least do something? When all of us die in the next test, you’d have to bring another set of mortals again.”

“I’d never let you die.”

“There you go again.” I saw how his jaw clenched when I rolled my eyes. “Prove it then. At least let someone tell us the instructions, so we could brace ourselves. Prepare for what’s to come.”

He left before the moon rose in the sky.

I kept scribbling until my Thesavrian sentences turned decent.

This is so much fun.

I had always loved studying, it makes my heart pound loud against my chest but my past predicaments stopped me from enjoying it.

I savored the moment while it lasted. And pushed the last conversation we had to the back of my mind.

Then the third test came.

But the biggest question on my face when they brought us to a winter garden with gigantic flowers surrounding us and servants standing behind us, I didn’t see the three men who assaulted me.

The three men were gone.

We were now down to six.