Page 10 of The Zagorath (Shadowed Dreams #3)

Chapter

Ten

D ahtao’s head rested against her chest, listening to the steady rhythm of his female’s heart as the endless fog of list slowly retreated from his mind.

There were many times that he believed he lacked such an organ.

He was not like any other living creature, and many times he doubted that he was alive at all but holding her made him feel real again.

When had he first begun to sleep through the passage of countless years?

He could not recall. It was long, long ago, that much he was certain of just from observing how much humans had changed and what they had accomplished.

Other than her heartbeat, however, there was merciless silence that made him close his eyes gratefully in silent thanks to whatever merciful gods who might still harbor tender feelings toward a creature such as him.

There were no demands, no ravenous hunger filling his waking mind.

The forest was silent for once—satiated in a way that he did not recall ever experiencing before.

Instead of hunger, it felt fully and fertile, nearly bursting with life as it hummed over his senses.

He purred deeply as he settled against her. That was a song that he would relish hearing again instead of its frantic, angry screams.

“What are you?” his female whispered, her voice pitched strangely in his ear due to hearing the echo of it within her.

“The Zagorath,” he replied, his voice equally quiet. “Forests have a multitude of kings and spirits, vast courts that dwell within the sacred woods that extend through all the realms. But there is only one Zagorath—the blood guardian of the forest.”

“I didn’t realize our forest had such a thing,” she replied, and he shook his head.

“All forests are one forest in its most basic spirit with every tree connecting and speaking to each other. It is divided into territories each with its own host of spirits that dwell within it, but the forest itself is eternal and expands everywhere seen and unseen by humanity. There is one forest… there is one Zagorath.”

“That sounds lonely.”

Endlessly, painfully lonely. He did not speak it aloud, however. Those words were ones that had echoed through the deep recesses of his presumably dead heart even in the depths of his dreams where he sought to escape it.

“Yes,” he said instead.

He did not want to think about it. Thinking about it made him want to sleep and find escape from it. The last thing he wanted was to leave her.

“I am sorry about your friends,” he rumbled. “I did not enjoy what I had to do. I know I brought pain to that female with you when I chased her male into his demise.”

She snorted disdainfully, surprising him. “In his case I can say that you did her a favor. What a prick.”

His lips twitched despite himself. If the forest was a bloody mistress, it seemed that his female could nearly match her. Still, he nodded in his head in agreement.

“He left her.”

“Yep.”

He paused for a moment, his gaze skating to meet hers. “I would never abandon you. Even if the forest commanded it, it could not command me to harm or leave you.”

She studied him for a long moment, her brow furrowing slightly. “You can ignore it for me but not for them or any of the countless others you likely killed?”

He bowed his head. “I do not know why it is that you alone block out the madness of the forest’s blood song.

You do not hear it. You do not know how impossible it is to ignore.

It corrodes your mind until there is nothing but that song.

Until you. There was you,” he rasped, silently begging her to understand.

She squinted at him and at last blew a long breath on a heavy sigh. “Do you have a name, Zagorath? Or is that what you wish me to call you?”

“Dahtao,” he replied. “I was born knowing this name and none other. No other being has heard it. Names are power. But I give it freely to you.”

“Wow,” she whispered, her eyebrows winging upward in surprise. “It is not the same for my name. It’s Olivia, but I prefer to be called Liv.”

“Liv.” He tested the feel of the name on his tongue and smiled with pleasure. It was short, somewhat aggressive in sound, and beautiful… just like her.

“This room is incredible, Dahtao,” she whispered after several minutes passed laying together, wrapped in each other’s arms. “It must have taken you a lot of time to build it.”

He peered around the room proudly. Every so often he changed some old and worn feature of it, but he treasured his home.

The massive bed set on a frame made from twenty-year-old saplings from the largest of trees, strong but malleable in their youth and his bed carefully constructed and piled thick with the most luscious of furs from various beasts that he had hunted.

The bed sat on one side of the room that was rounded like every part of his den that he had painstakingly carved out of the earth—storeroom, hearthroom, and bedchamber—the walls of which he had paneled with smoothed wood and fitted around the massive roots to confined and protected his home.

Every bit of stone had been hauled in by him and chiseled by his hand.

Only the ceiling was left open as nothing could cut off the forest completely.

It was the one sacrifice that he made and tolerated.

“It has,” he agreed at length. “I enjoy fashioning things with my hands. It was a joy to build it.”

Which was followed by the sorrow of never having anyone to share it with.

No one dared to approach the den of the Zagorath.

Only the beasts freely wandered—and the fahgor who strangely roosted nearby as if they were the hounds that humans kept, eagerly waiting for his bidding.

He often saw them in the trees outside his dwelling, watching and creeping towards him, purring and crooning.

But that was ages ago. He did not recall the last time he had stepped into his own woods.

From his vantage point he watched as Liv’s eyes lifted to study the ceiling, her gaze trailing over the gargoyles that he had found and hid away where no one would find them.

“I found them one day, attached to a crumbling building that stood in the way of my fury. I destroyed every human that drew breath but when I turned to leave, I could not abandon them,” he murmured.

They were trapped within their stone bodies but the forest often spoke to him through them when it wanted to whisper information into his ears or deliver a gift to him.

Those were the rare occasions where it did not torment him or demand that he fulfil its whim.

The gargoyles at least spared him that. He did not know how, but he knew deep in his gut that they protected him in whatever manner they could, just as he protected them.

They would never deliver anything to him that might harm him or influence him further. He was certain of it.

“Abandon them?” Her eyes drifted down briefly to meet his and the corner of her mouth curved faintly. “You speak as if you believe that they are alive.”

Dahtao inclined his head. “They are. Do you not feel it? They are trapped within their stone, but they are alive.”

Her eyes snapped back toward them warily and she swallowed. “Do you mean that they can see us? The were watching us… and what came from that big one’s mouth—” her voice trailed off and she visibly shuddered, her face going pale. “What did it do to me?” she whispered fearfully.

He understood her worry. It was only because it was from one of them—the largest and fiercest of them—that he was not automatically suspicious of their interference with his mating.

Any gift from the forest had to be treated with some circumspection through normal channels.

But coming from one of the gargoyles it was nothing short than something to be valued.

He did not understand exactly what the gift was or what it did, but it had ignited and changed something within him, heightening their pleasure and cementing them together.

He could practically feel her under his skin where there existed a silent echo of her every heartbeat and breath.

Inexplicably, he innately understood that because of that, he felt a sense of wholeness and peace that he had not felt before.

“Nothing that you need to be afraid of,” he assured her as he gently stroked her cheek with his knuckles. “They would not harm me—nor, by extension, you.”

Her eyes flicked back to him, and she gave him a nervous chuckle. “Somehow, I’m not as convinced as you appear to be. I’m just supposed to trust that something spitting up some mega-sex juice into mouth has strictly benevolent intentions toward me?”

He could not quite hold back his chuckle, though it sounded rusty and strained. It had been too long since he laughed. He could see how the situation would appear that way to her. Despite all of the benefits that he knew had come from the gift, the truth was that he also craved her even more now.

“It was a gift,” he explained, “from the woods I dwell within.”

Her eyebrow inched upward. “The murderous woods commanding you to viciously murder people decided to give me a gift?”

He laughed again, the sound coming easier. “The forest can be… temperamental. But it is also beautiful and life-giving as well. It feeds your world, giving life to it, does it not?”

“I suppose it does,” she agreed. “But this homicidal tendency isn’t exactly cute, Dahtao.”

He could not disagree with that. “Like all things in nature, it needs to feed and like all beings, it can be angered. The forest does not think as you do, or even as I do as a much older and crueler being by comparison,” he added.

“It just is. But I can show you the beauty, too, if you will allow me?”

Drawing up from the bed, he half-kneeled on it as he extended his hand toward her, hoping that she might take it and seek to truly understand.

She stared at it and then at him for what seemed to be an eternity as she struggled to come to some kind of decision.

He waited patiently, sympathetic to her plight.

He was a destroyer of life as much as the forest was, and some part of her would naturally not be inclined to trust either of them.

But he held his breath and continued to wait until at last she slipped her hand in his, permitting him to exhale with relief, and nodded.

“Okay. Show me.”