by M E Wolf
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Now she knew why it was so hard for her to find any of these creatures by evidence left on the land. Their feet would make a foot print so huge that she might be standing in it without noticing any signs of it. Something that big, however, would have to live somewhere. For the moment she would have to stay as alert as her throbbing head and sore eyes would allow. Something heavy pressed into her chest.
A high-pitched squeal left her lips at the intrusion and her brain wanted to explode with the pain. Her skin parted above her sternum and she heard a crack and a pop as the metal object went through her chest the way an icebreaker ship goes over and through the ice in the ocean. Just as the tip touched her heart separating the muscles and blood vessels around her heart, a bolt of electricity flowed through her entire body.
She went into convulsions and her body floated up off of the ground still spasmodically twitching. Black smoke covered the whole area of the crater as the electricity from Alexandra burned its way up the silver spear and charred the meat on the creature that had plunged the silver forked spear into Alexandra’s chest. An electrical pulse ran along the ground in a perfect circle around Alexandra for hundreds and hundreds of miles killing everything in its path or sending it to somewhere unknown off planet.
Alexandra was oblivious to what was happening to her being only partially conscious as her body fought the silver contagion that was infecting her entire being. Some Dochani died with the introduction of silver into their bloodstream and some were unknown to the effects that silver caused to her race. The situation that had arisen with Alexandra had not happened ever in a Dochani.
A manifestation was taking place in Alexandra that would in fact make her stronger, but at what cost? The smoke cleared and the spear had gone into Alexandra’s heart and out through her back and about fifteen feet into the soil and bedrock beneath her. Her other heart still beat and still pumped blood through her body. Unconscious, she was now naked lying flat on her back with her eyes open and with a white clear film over them.
The creature’s roasted meat and baked bones were next to her, but it was dead and she was in a trance-like state. Alive, but her life signs did not show. There was no sign of her family in the area only some strange mist that hovered above the spot where she was holding her husband’s hand. Her magi tattoos that covered her entire body glowed and the mist covered hundreds of miles around her body. Due to superstitions of those people left on this planet most likely no one would disturb the area for many thousands of generations.
It was a cold night and the ground floor of the crater felt like a sheet of ice beneath her back. She could feel a tingle along her nipples where the frost began to soak into her body. Colder than she would be even if she were dead. Parts of her were blue and others had a tinge of black from frostbite. Icicles formed within her chest cavity that resembled the stalactites of an underground cave, icicles of blood. It was not long before she had become frozen solid with a sheet of ice film covering her and the bottom of the crater.
The silver spear still stretched into the sky far above the height of the walls of the crater and far above the clouds. She knew she was changing, but was not conscious enough to grasp what she was actually changing into. Alexandra hoped that she was not paralyzed since she could not feel her legs. The spear had to have severed her spinal column, but hoped it was just the numbness of being out in the cold too long. Whichever it was, it still was not good.
Her eyes were still glazed over and it still looked as though she was looking through some clouds or a thick layer of ice as her entire body and face were cold, too cold to shiver. The clarity that she was used to seeing through her eyes made it seem as though she was blind. Alexandra could still feel the spear in her chest and could not understand why she was still alive, or was she. She was far too weak to remove it or even to move from where she lay on the frozen ground or was she in the ground.
Pinned to the ground by the spear she succumbed to her trance-like state again, but this time she had enough strength to meditate. Silver was felt coursing through her veins and was mingled with her blood. In this state she could not lift up her head and look at her condition. All that she could do was meditate and hope that she could get enough strength to pull the spear from her chest. Morning must have come and gone as she was meditating because she had felt the brief warmth of the sun as the rays of sunlight passed over her.
In fact she had recalled a long time before when she had felt the sunlight’s rays pass over her. Days must have gone by as she lay on her back with little warmth if any at all with a light layer of ice all over her naked body that kept unfreezing and freezing over and over again. The first time she was here was actually warmer than it was now. She also just realized that she must have lost consciousness and it must be at least a week gone by since she lay here maybe even a month or maybe more.
The crater did seem to be less deep than it was before as if she had been in this spot long enough for more than a thousand years to pass, long enough for the Fenshian next to her to fossilize and turn to sediment. It began to snow for the umpteenth time and cover the bottom of the crater with a white blanket at least fifteen feet deep. Very cold, it was, and she could not remember if winter actually had touched this area before the first snow that she remembered before this.
Was it not a tropical area all the time that she was living here? She still could not see or open her eyes, were they frozen shut or was she in a block of snow or ice? Alexandra was cold and most of the heat within her body had already left her and was replaced by the cold. She could not feel anything, her whole body was numb. All that she could feel or sense was the spear being pulled or pushed from her chest. As the wound in her chest and back began to close up after a very long time, a membrane came out of her chest and sealed her up in a cocoon.
At that moment she lost consciousness and was not even conscious within a dreamscape. Total and utter unconsciousness but still alive and existing. Many seasons seemed to come and go by the time she began her metamorphosis. Inside the cocoon Alexandra began to change. The change was very slow at first and it did not seem to show for some time. It remained cold for an eternity while she remained frozen within a block of ice that seemed to move this way or that over a long period of time.
Heat, after a very long time, began to penetrate the many layers of ice that was between Alexandra and the dormant sun. Once the ice began to thaw, the changes began. At first the tissues spread apart and dormant cells in her Dochani physiology began to divide and multiply. Cells mingled with the silver in her bloodstream and took upon themselves metallic properties like conduction, hardness, resilience and various other minute properties.
Her heartbeat slowed to less than one beat for every hour per heart as she continued to change. As her body continued to change she began to resemble a chaotic soup of yellows, reds, oranges, pinks and greens and various other colours. Nothing of her was in any specific shape. Just a blob of chemicals and the only thing that remained that would tell her of her previous life was her consciousness. Even her hearts and her brain resembled nothing more than small spheres that had an opaque glass look about them. The brain was silver and metallic and the hearts were white crystal. Both the hearts and the brain were the size of a softball.
It was hard at this point to distinguish from the blood vessels, organs, bones and tissues other than the hearts and the brain. As time went by other organs emerged from the soup of her essence, her being. She was still female, but her organs did not have the qualities of typical humanoids since she was Dochani and was going into complete metamorphosis. The fact of having two hearts as a Dochani is what saved her from the spear, although even if she only had one heart she would have survived anyway.
After the formation of her lungs, liver, spleen and other organs, her lymphatic, nervous and blood systems were formed. As they resembled something close to humanoidal, her bones, skull and muscles formed. Her bones and skull were made from the purest silver and he
r muscles were as hard as iron. Once everything was in place a thick membrane encased her entire body that was as hard as steel.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
More than twenty five thousand years had passed from when the spear entered one of her hearts to the final stage before she left the cocoon. She was not sure what she had changed to, but she knew that she was a lot stronger than she had been. She also had her mother’s abilities and memories and everything that her mother had done was known to her.
There was no light in the cocoon and Alexandra could not see if there was any anyway, all that she knew was that it was like a furnace used to smelt iron into weapons in a blacksmith’s forge inside the cocoon or hotter, like molten lava or the formation of a planet. Her stomach or what she thought was her stomach, growled ferociously in hunger. Extending the claws like a cat in her hands she tore at the casing of the cocoon. Like a kitten fresh from its feline mother’s womb, she was blind.
Senses of smell, sound, touch and taste heightened in the absence of sight she prowled around on all fours wagging her tail and stretching her wet fibrous translucent wings. After licking the amniotic fluid from her short silky crimson fur, she began to eat the cocoon and eat all evidence of her ever changing in this area. Her Dochani senses were the highest ever known in a Dochani and she knew that her husband was somewhere not on this world still alive and well with her family, but he was on a planet that she had never been to before and it was too far for even her to discern how to get there.
She knew that he had just sensed her awakening from the cocoon and he welcomed her. Like her though, all he could do was talk within her mind and their being able to communicate with each other had to be enough for now. She was still naked and her femininity still showed fiercely even with the fur covering her entire body. Because of the magic within the magi tattoos they remained although hidden under all of the hair on her body.
Inherently she was still mostly of humanoid characteristics except for the feline tail, retractable claws in both her feet and her hands, red fur over her entire body, feline teeth with slightly enlarged incisors in both the upper and lower jaw and the fibrous membrane like wings that spanned a good thirty or more feet from tip to tip. One difference from before is that she could walk on all fours like a lioness or walk upright like she had before the change, but with feline grace.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Beneath the silky red fur was a light milky silver skin softer than the softest silk and harder than the strongest metal. Alexandra was still hungry after eating the remains of the cocoon and was still blind. She would have to hunt, but without the use of sight. As a humanoid she did not remember having such an insatiable appetite. Stretching her body and arching her back like a cat and testing her wings she let her wings carry her out of the crater.
Flying not far above the ground, she let her senses go as she circled the area to see if she could find some animal or creature to quench her appetite on. It took time for her to get used to flying as opposed to walking, but something instinctive let her know how to fly. A bit of it was unexplainable, but that is what amounted to her life right now. This was something that was completely unbelievable with respect to the way life was now. In many ways she was still Alexandra and in other ways she was not.
In this form she was completely unstained and being utterly rebuilt meant that she would have an entirely new life and that life looked to be bringing her into new excitement and adventure. Smelling something ahead to the north she stopped thinking about many things and focused her attentions on the men below that sounded like they were hunting something that might satisfy her hunger for a bit of time. She heard and smelt three sets of hunters searching for tracks and hovered above them for a moment then followed the ones who headed north just high enough in the sky so that they did not see her.
The hunters found some tracks of a Boggarin heading north and they followed the trail of the tracks and disappeared into the forest, but not from Alexandra’s hearing and sense of smell. Scouts’ hounds were getting many different scents of different animals heading to the south. Half of them caught the scent of a tiger and the other half caught the scent of an Egorack. Two scouts went on the scent of the tiger and the other three scouts went on the scent of the Egorack. Shiantara’s hound caught the scent of a Rhagarian hog heading east.
She directed her hunt towards the east. Alexandra followed the three hunters who were following the Boggarin’s tracks with their panthers in front of them. The panthers knew enough not to step in the tracks of the Boggarin. These animals were well trained to hunt the Boggarin from birth along side the hunters. This hunter animal pair would train together so that neither one would be too far ahead of the other. One mistake in the hunt was enough to be fatally injured by the four horns of the Boggarin.
This was especially because of the toxic substance secreted from the horn when it broke the flesh of its victim causing them to die from asphyxiation. The hunters continued on the trail of the Boggarin for a long while. Wading through long grass, dirt, sometimes water and always being hidden by the overgrowth of bushes, trees and various swamp like plants. A Boggarin habitat was always hard to maneuver through and make an attack on the creature.
Its habitat consisted of a bog like substance surrounding the entrance of a tunnel that went deep beneath the earth and opened up into a cavern. It was always difficult to catch these beasts. After about an hour or so of trudging through the forest and mud, the hunters approached the entrance of a well used Boggarin hole. Smelling fear on the panthers Alexandra braced herself because she needed to be alert to make sure these hunters or the panthers did not mistake her for what they hunted.
They were all edgy and ready to pounce on anything that would come out of the hole, but they were not ready enough. The hunters and panthers were not trained to handle more than one of the Boggarin and today three of them would come out of the hole. It is said in the hunter lore of these trolls that if a hunter meets up with three Boggarin and survives, then the rest of his days will be blessed because he will see the benefit of life’s experiences.
Panthers circled the hole so that each of them covered a quadrant and the three hunters covered the remaining quadrant. The bog around the hole was approximately ten feet from the edge of the sand of where the hunters and panthers were. The diameter of the hole was about twenty feet and this made the entire diameter of the bog and Boggarin hole to be approximately forty feet. In signaling view of the panthers the hunters Horas, Ghonga and Dhogo stuck the spears in the ground butt first just in front of them so that the point of each spear was at a forty-five degree angle to the hole.
Horas reached into his bag and brought out a bottle of Guava cream, which happened to be fatal to the Boggarin but a basting sauce for the Rhagarian trolls’ meat dishes. Each hunter rubbed the Guava cream onto the spear’s tip and down the spear for about a foot. This was done because the Boggarin did not react to the cream for about a half hour and was known to go berserk when it realized that it was not going to be around for that much longer.
When all six spears were adequately coated with the Guava cream, the hunters set their bags down behind them and drew their short swords. They then waited. Horas turned around when he heard the roar of a Boggarin behind him. It was then that he realized that there were more than one Boggarin living in this hole. The Boggarin were not known to travel in packs or be around other Boggarins except for when they were mating and it was not mating season for these beasts yet.
Horas sensed that something really strange was going on to have these things organized enough to lure them to a false Boggarin hole like the Bulwine wolf packs did many centuries before his time. The hunters of the last Boggarin hunt never returned from their expedition and these fresh hunters were finding out the hard way why those men did not return from their hunt. As the Boggarin entered the scene, growls were heard from two more Boggarins.
One was coming from down in the hole and another was coming from behind the panthers. Hop
efully the spears would hold off the one in the hole and the panthers would hold off the one on the other side of the hole, while the hunters fought the one in front of them. Horas stepped back and ran the length of his short swords along one of the spears to get some Guava cream on it and the other hunters followed his example and did the same to their short swords.
They did this now in order to get some of that Guava cream into the blood stream of the Boggarin and defend against its strikes long enough for it to succumb to the asphyxiation. The Boggarin approached the hunters wearily like it was planning on who or where to attack. It actually looked from one hunter to the other and back again. It then turned its back on them like it was going away, but it was only a test to see if the hunters would take that moment to attack it.
One hunter, Ghonga, leaped into the air and landed on the back of the Boggarin and managed to drive his short sword all the way up to the hilt before the Boggarin flung him off breaking his short sword. Ghonga was thrown high up into the air and landed just inside the hole. He managed to catch a hold of the earth on the inside of the hole with his broken short sword, but forgot about the Boggarin in the hole.
The Boggarin in the hole bit into one of his legs and tore it off at the knee causing him pain. He knew that it would take time to come back. Before he died from the loss of blood he got some of the Guava cream and put it on his clothing in hopes that the Boggarin would die from eating him. He then let go of his broken short sword and dropped into the hole. Alexandra could hear his screams even from where she was hovering above the scene.
She had never heard of these beasts before and even though she was who she was it terrified her that she could not help much because of her blindness, but knew distinctively that the other two hunters could hear Ghonga’s screams and his bones crunching as the Boggarin began to eat him. After a few moments, there was only silence and the two hunters had to have known that their friend and lifelong comrade had perished.
