Page 16 of Vylit: Glowing for Her (Consumed by the Alien Heat #1)

VYLIT

T he words hung over the tribunal like a black wave cresting.

The silence pressed in on me, thicker than water, thicker than the shame that burned through every filament of my being.

In the ancient stories, a Mavtrosian could lose a limb, lose an empire, but nothing compared to losing honor.

My ancestors had cast their own brothers into the crushing depths for lesser slights.

And here I was, standing at the center of a reef-palace packed with every dignitary and warlord the sector could vomit up, as the entire room waited for the single human in the spiral to declare whether she’d been forced.

I could have braced for a blade in the gut. I could have faced exile to the brine deserts, or even death, with something like dignity. But this? This was annihilation with an audience.

I tried not to show it, but my bioluminescence betrayed me.

A cold, bruise-colored pallor rippled across my chest, every spiral and glyph that moments ago blazed with the Glow Oath now blunted and ugly.

I didn’t dare look at Maya, but I could sense her in the heat-haze of my peripheral vision.

The whole world narrowed to the hot, impossible spot where she stood.

She didn’t say anything at first.

The tribunal’s center judge—Elder Ustred, carapace so thin I could see the threads of light weaving his bones together—leaned forward with predatory patience.

"You are called Maya Poe," he said, the name spiking through the comm-translation like a flare.

"Speak for yourself, before the registry and the ancestors. "

I wanted to shout, to plead, to explain that I had done nothing against her will. That every touch, every word, every fragment of the bond had been offered and not demanded. But on Mavtros, the voice of the accused meant less than nothing. The only thing that could save me, save us, was her word.

"Speak human. You will not be punished for the warrior's misdeeds," the elder proclaimed.

She stepped forward. It wasn’t dramatic…

there was no flourish, no slow-motion heroics.

Her legs almost buckled, and for a pulse I thought she would collapse right there, and that would be the end.

But she caught herself on the moss-liner, straightened, and looked straight into the hive of eyes focused on her.

The glow from her mating marks flashed up the side of her throat, brighter now than even the initial bonding. The effect was, in a word, stunning.

She took a breath. The entire chamber seemed to suck it in with her.

"My name is Maya Poe," she said. Her voice trembled at first, but not from fear. It was the kind of tremor you get right before a thunderstorm. "And I was taken from my world without my consent."

The gasps came instantly, not just from the Mavtrosian side, but from the Agency delegation too.

One of the insectoid envoys recoiled, knocking over a floating data globe…

a half-dozen surveillance miniatures darted to catch it.

The judges leaned forward as a single organism, mouths opening in a chorus of horror and greed.

My own breath stilled, every heart chamber locked in a stasis of pure dread.

She didn’t stop. "My DNA was sampled and sold. My abduction was arranged by the Intergalactic Dating Agency, without my knowledge or consent." Her gaze flicked to the IDA envoys, who actually tried to duck, as if being smaller might shield them from the blame radiating off her words.

"Everything I am—every cell, every instinct—was auctioned before I even knew aliens existed." She glared at the humanoid spokesman in the Agency cluster. "You call it matching. I call it trafficking."

No one breathed. Even the microdrones in the upper gallery went still, lenses locking into place to record every angle.

She turned back to the tribunal, and her eyes found mine. In that instant, I knew it was over. Not for me, but for the Agency, for every tradition that thought it could grind the individual down to fit the shape of the machine.

"But." She let the word hang, letting the silence draw out until I thought I might go mad with anticipation.

"The only being in this galaxy who ever gave me a choice is the one standing next to me.

Vylit of Mavtros asked for my consent. He risked his own life for my freedom.

And when the pirates came, he became my shield. My warrior."

My hearts, which had felt near collapse, now hammered so hard I thought it might split me in half. The bruised colors on my chest bloomed into white-hot halos of light. I tried to control it, to keep my composure, but the relief and awe crashed through my body in tidal pulses.

The ancient judge’s eyes flickered with surprise and something like respect. "Do you claim this warrior, Maya Poe, of your own volition?"

"I do," she said, and the words ripped through the crowd like a quake. "No one forced me to bond. I chose. And I am choosing now… here, in front of the world, I choose Vylit."

A scream erupted from the Agency’s section, the jelly-mass exec bubbling and convulsing in its containment field. The humanoid mouthpiece tried to speak, but the translation patch shorted, and all that came out was a thin whine.

Elder Ustred leaned back, every light in his body now trained on the Agency reps. "So recorded. The human is bonded by choice, and the Registry stands corrected."

The chamber exploded in a riot of sound.

Every judge, every witness, every petty bureaucrat started shouting, demanding to know what this meant for the treaties, the pairings, the entire economy of the Agency.

The echo was a physical force, the air thick with the spray of a million questions and accusations.

But all I could see was Maya.

She was shaking. The energy it took to stand up to the tribunal, to tell off the Agency, had left her raw and exposed. I reached for her, tentatively, not daring to overstep after all that had been said.

She took my hand. Clung to it, like a lifeline.

"I’m sorry," she whispered, so low only I could hear. "I didn’t mean to?—"

I quieted her the only way I could, with a hand to her face. A wordless, frantic joy poured out of me in an aurora of color. My marks touched hers, and the resonance that sparked between us made the whole reef shudder.

There would be consequences. The Agency would fight back, the pirates would come, the world would keep spinning its webs of deceit. But for that single, impossible moment, the center held.

"Let the record show," Elder Ustred intoned over the riot, "that the ancient law of consent is upheld. The bond is valid. The Biolock is now required."

I blinked, suddenly aware of the ceremonial step I’d nearly forgotten. The Biolock… final, irreversible, no going back for either of us. Once sealed, the bond would withstand not only the courts and the registries, but also anything else that threatened to separate us..

"Do you accept the Biolock, Maya Poe?" Ustred asked, this time with a hint of curiosity.

She squeezed my hand, hard. Her eyes blazed with determination. "Yes."

I led her forward, up to the dais where the ritual was performed.

The mosses here were not ordinary… these were Ancestor strains, living threads that stored the collective memory of our species.

As we placed our hands on the central node, it writhed and wrapped around our wrists, biting deep enough to draw blood and memory both.

The pain was sharp but fleeting. The real sensation was in the bond itself…

an electric surge that overwrote every lingering doubt, every fear.

My name and hers wove together in the living archive.

I felt the whole of Mavtros recognize us, stamp us, accept us.

Maya swayed a little, her face pale but steady.

"It is done," Elder Ustred said, his voice resonant with finality. "The first human-Mavtrosian Biolock is sealed."

The crowd went silent, and then, slowly, the applause started.

First from the judges, then from the witnesses, until the entire chamber was vibrating with the rhythmic pulse of acceptance.

Even the Agency execs, outnumbered and outgunned, could only stand and watch as the future they’d tried to rig collapsed before their eyes.

I looked at Maya, and for the first time in my life, I had no words. Only light. Only the unbreakable, living strand that now joined us.

Later, there would be trouble. There always was. But for that one, perfect heartbeat, I was whole.

For the first time, I realized what it meant to be more than a Last Warrior, more than a symbol or a weapon.

I was hers.

And she had saved me.