I wiped away the tears as we turned onto the street next to the park, where the Veril's main military base in the capital had been set up. The adrenaline rushing through me when I saw the checkpoint helped me to compose myself a little; I could not afford the luxury of a mental breakdown right now. I needed to stay alert while I was being dragged away into the General's world--the General who was sitting silently at my side, still too close to me. His presence was all-encompassing, like a black hole, making me gravitate towards him. At least he was focusing on something else and didn't have his hands on me for once.
The street was blocked by a provisory wall reaching up to the height of a human's shoulders, made out of a strange combination of wire, sand bags, and plants that grew in thick and twisting thorny vines over the barricade.
Some of the plants were emitting the strange blue undulating glow that I had come to associate with Veril magic, and I remembered the stories about Sleeping Beauty's castle, surrounded by vines that would ensnare anyone who came too close to them, trapping them to die a gruesome death in their thorns.
We drove straight on, and to my complete fascination, the plants untangled themselves and parted as soon as the car in front of us had reached them, revealing an opening between the wall of sandbags, and I was starting to believe that all the stories were true after all.
The heavily armed Veril warriors standing guard in front and behind the barricade--some of them carrying guns, others crossbows--had stepped aside and saluted by moving their right fist towards their hearts in one simultaneous motion. I shivered as I realized that the man next to me commanded all of them. I glanced over to him, but he was merely looking ahead, seemingly unimpressed by what was going on.
Cold dread took a hold of me as we crossed into Veril territory, and I had to fight down the panic rising in my stomach.
I dug my nails into the fabric of the seat, as if holding on to it could keep me from being dragged deeper into this place that had once been a normal part of the city but was now so strange to me that it might as well have been the Veril dimension itself.
My arm brushed against the General's leg, and he looked down at my tense fist grasping the seat.
"You have nothing to fear of my soldiers when you are with me," he said, placing his hand on mine.
My skin tingled at the contact. I was getting really tired of my body's reaction to him, but I didn't dare to pull away. Why did he always have to touch me?
"I'm more afraid of you than of your soldiers, Gen...
Shenik
Tsul." My response was almost a whisper.
His eyes narrowed as he fixed me with his gaze. "I see," was all he said in reply.
After a moment of silence, I asked, "How did the soldiers know that it was you?"
I hadn't seen any insignia on the vehicles that could have identified our convoy as the cars of General Tsul.
He laughed a little. "You are scared of me, yet you are so comfortable asking crucial information about the organization of my army?"
I thought that this would be the only reply I was going to get: insinuations and enigmas, as always. But then he pulled the right sleeve of his uniform up to his elbow, exposing the faintly glowing marks running all over the green skin of his muscular forearm.
The General leaned over to me and smiled. It was the same pleased expression he'd had when he explained why killing with a blade was better than with a gun. I shivered, not sure if I even wanted to hear the explanation. His thoughts and views were a constant reminder of how different he was from a human man.
"My soldiers know it is me because they can feel it through the mark of the Kirtim Shenk." He took my hand, which had still been trapped under his, and guided my fingers over his arm until they came to rest close to his elbow on a symbol composed of a half circle sitting on a thin line inside of a full circle.
The glow of the marks rippled almost imperceptibly under my touch, like water in a breeze. Fascinated, I explored them with my hand, letting my fingertips trace the slight elevations on his soft skin. They felt like scars, and I remembered how it had stung when he marked my face. These seemed somehow deeper and more permanent.
"Did they hurt?" I asked him.
His smile grew wider, revealing his pointy teeth and lighting up his face. He was so beautiful that I felt the urge to kiss him and forgive everything he had ever done--to me as well as to the world.
"Oh,
so
much. You have no idea, my sweet." He laughed. "But of course it is a
great honor
," he said, lowering the corners of his mouth mockingly.
"Don't you think so?" I asked him; he had peaked my curiosity.
"Where I come from, a man without marks is not a man. So it is really not a question of what I do or do not think about them. Besides, they are undeniably useful."
I shuddered as I recalled that the marks on both of his arms reached up as high as his shoulders. How much pain had he endured to get them? I shook my head. Too bad; it served the asshole right. But still, I couldn't keep from running my fingers over his skin.
I took my time studying the symbols and inhaled sharply as I recognized one of them: three lines below a three-pointed zigzag topped with four small circles. I looked at the General as the image of red lines on a white cloth fluttering in the wind above Hamburg's City Hall flashed before my inner eye.
"
Tsul
," he said simply. "The first mark we get is our family name. And I got this one a few weeks later." He pulled up his other sleeve and showed me the mark of the Kirtim Shenk, which was repeated on his left arm.
