Lahnthean Aria

15

"I…was looking for a snake bite," Kiran shyly defended.

Noorh just stared at her.

"I wanted to help you!" She was scarlet. "It was not out of any lustful desire for you or your body. And technically, you're not n***d…yet…"

Noorh raised a brow at her, biting back a smirk. He understood what she meant, but he liked seeing her flustered. It was a pleasant, stark contrast from her lifeless form not too long ago. "How are you?" he asked as he fixed his pants.

"Me?"

"You passed out," Noorh explained, fixing his shirt.

More like died, really, but he couldn't bring himself to talk about it. He didn't want to scare her any more than she already was. She seemed clearly distraught at whatever happened to him.

Was she even aware that she was sitting intimately on his lap?

"I did, didn't I? I was so shocked at the snake that I gasped and this horrible stench just stuffed my nose and filled my mouth, and it stung like hell. It was terrible! Then everything was black. I thought I was dead but I saw a white light and it-"

"Oh and do me a favor," the voice said. "When you wake up, don't tell Noorh about me."

Kiran paused. She almost slipped and made a mistake.

"What happened to the white light?" Noorh prodded, placing his hands on her waist to make sure she wouldn't fall.

Kiran pursed her lips in thought. If the orb didn't want Noorh to know about its presence, Noorh must know it personally. Did that mean they were friends? What if they were foes? What if it was a villain pretending to be a harmless and helpful character in their complicated isekai plot?

"Um…Are you friends with a talking, white, light?" Kiran whispered, afraid the orb might hear her in some way.

"A what..?"

"A talking orb of white light?"

"Light orbs talk?"

"Never mind then. It's nothing." Noorh didn't know the orb at all. Maybe the orb warned her against talking about him because it would make her seem crazy.

"Are you sure you're alright? You're not in any pain?"

"I'm okay. I'm not hurt anywhere. I think I actually feel a bit more energized."

"And you can see me without your glasses."

"My glasses? No way, my eyesight is bad." She suddenly realized that her vision wasn't framed by her spectacles.

"It fell. It's probably somewhere in the nests below us…if it’s still in one piece."

Kiran quickly turned around to check if it really was there.

Noorh quickly pulled her back to his chest. "Stop. Do you want to fall down there too?"

"B-but my glasses…my mom bought it for me before I started the semester. It's cheap but it's…she bought it for me. I can't lose it. I can't…" Lose her. "I'm not supposed to lose my glasses!"

Kiran was breaking down. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Her shoulders were shaking as her eyes stared over the edge of the cliff. The loss was real. Losing everything could happen to her. This wasn't just some isekai adventure she could wake up from.

"Hush," Noorh whispered, gently combing her messy brown hair with his long fingers. "It's okay. You're alright. You're safe. You'll be okay. I won't let anything bad happen to you. I promise."

"I…S-sorry," Kiran weakly mumbled as Noorh's other hand supported the hollow of her back. She squeezed her eyes shut and took several deep breaths to calm herself.

This wasn't the time to cry.

"Let's stay like this for a while and think," Noorh said. "We need to figure out a way to get past the nest before the hatchlings' parents return from their morning hunt."

Kiran resignedly leaned her forehead against the side of Noorh's neck. His steady heartbeat calmed her down. "How did you get past them the first time?"

"I made sure the adult winged-serpents were away. And the hatchlings were just eggs at the time. I thought things would be the same, especially since we got here sooner than I expected."

Things just weren't going the way he thought it would from securing Alessa Dia to hiking down the mountain. It was as if all the odds had suddenly stacked themselves against him.

"But they've already hatched. We can't just jump over them."

"No, not when they are all rabid and hungry from coming out of their egg shells. The winged serpents fill their nests with carcass that they pick up from across the land."

Kiran had wondered if the human corpse she saw in one of the nests was someone like Noorh - an adventurer travelling the land for an important purpose. The poor stranger must have perished somewhere. Instead of receiving a proper burial, his body was picked up by the winged-serpents as food for their hatchlings.

"The scent that the decomposing carcass emits mixes with the toxins of the wood in the nests," Noorh continued. "It creates a fatal miasma that keeps predators away from the hatchlings."

"They have predators?" Something as terrifying as giant winged serpents could be prey?!

"They do. The miasma will fade as the hatchlings consume the carcass, but the adult winged serpents will be back in the nest by the time it happens." He picked up the black cloak that lay discarded on the stone step beside them and wrapped it around both of them.

Kiran snuggled into the crook of his neck and stared at the horizon in thought.

She noticed a flock of birds soaring from a distance. The more she looked at it, the more it seemed to grow bigger. She caught five of them first, then eight…twelve…too many for her to properly count even as she squinted her eyes to see them better. It was nice to see the abundance of birds in Lahnthea. That meant it wasn't as polluted as the world she grew up in.

Then she realized that the flock was steadily flying toward their direction.

"Noorh," she began, grasping his shirt sleeve until her knuckles turned white.

Noorh looked curiously at her as he tried to fix the cloak around them. "What is it?"

"The adult winged serpents. They don't happen to look like that flock of birds up ahead, do they?"

Noorh looked at the horizon and found the flock of birds that Kiran was talking about: a group of flying reptiles with black feathered wings.

Their kind was said to create winds strong enough to destroy an entire village.