POV: Kai, the Hybrid
She blinked again, slowly as the tide pulled back. The light in the cavern caught the wet sheen on her lashes and turned them to glass. Her pupils searched the dim, and when they found me, the air shifted like wind over a still pool. Even the crystals in the walls seemed to hold their breath.
“…Aren,” she whispered.
My name. Not the casual handle hunters use, not the bite of mockery the Council once threw at me, but the name I gave the world when I still pretended to be merely a man. Her voice folded my name like an offering and set it reverberating through the hollow I’d been living in.
Every part of me tensed up. I had been careful not to let what I was touch the parts of me that could be given away by a sound. I hadn't expected a handful of scattered vowels to c
