Taken to Voraxia

by Elizabeth Stephens

  I beg.

  “Please…” I’m begging my tormentor now, because he is tormenting me. My tail is a bundle of nerves and I can’t stop my heavy breathing and worse than all these things is the fact that I’m undulating very subtly, wishing he would keep touching me before I splinter apart. Or maybe, so I can splinter apart…

  Water rains around us following the path his hand takes from my navel, passing my hips to rest at the bald bareness between my legs. Svera, Kiki and the other human women have tufts of hair there, but I don’t and I hate myself for wondering then if this brute, whose kind has done nothing but brutalize me and my friends, finds me strange looking.

  His fingers slide across my fat, wet mound, burrowing deftly between the folds at the same time that the pressure around my tail increases. I fold forward, slumping against his arm. I need…so close…the world disappears. There are no more consequences.

  “Clit,” I whisper.

  He answers me in his brutish tongue, but I don’t have the patience to try to understand him. I reach down my body, grab his hand and take two of his fingers to the maddening bundle of nerves at the top of my labia.

  Recognizing what I want, he sweeps my hand aside and replaces his claw-tipped fingers with the heel of his hand. He rubs my clit in a circular motion while his hand on my tail squeezes like a noose…and that’s all it takes.

  I scream and choke out a gasp. My gut clenches and releases and my mind spirals into oblivion. I cling to him as devastation ruins me. Rebuilds me. Unearths me. Because I’ve never felt anything like this.

  He whispers low in my ear while his palm grinds against my clit and his other hand twists around my tail. I never knew sex could feel like this. And we haven't even had sex yet. Yet?

  “Oh stars…” I’m panting as the chaos lasts eternal and when I finally, finally climb down from a realm of pure euphoria, I’m too weak to move. And that’s fine. That’s just fine…

  He catches me and shuts the water off, turns my body around, cradles the back of my neck in one great hand. He says something to me and I recognize only one word — Xiveri — because since the last time it’s been burned in my memory.

  “Xiveri,” I whisper but I don't know why. All I know is that the single word produces a kaleidescope of color fleetingly in his brow, before settling on a deep, dramatic blue.

  “Hexa,” he breathes and his breath smells like shade and sweetwater and blood. He fought for me today. And when we left the colony, he didn't hurt anyone. Even though I broke my promise.

  “Xiveri,” he pauses, takes a breath, “Xiveri Miari.”

  Hearing my name in his rich timber sounds downright sinful. I can't catch my breath and when he releases my tail quite suddenly I tumble to the side, only to find myself tossed back up in his arms in a single swift movement.

  The water shuts off and a dramatic burst of air comes at us from all sides. I cower away from it in the safety of his chest, and when it ends, I catch the curve of one side of his mouth in the makings of a shocking smile. Shocking only because it's handsome. He is a handsome male. No. He’s a monster. Fine, then a handsome monster…

  Out of the white paneled room, we enter another. Dim lights reveal blank paneled walls surrounding a low bed. He places me in its center and I squeeze my thighs together, the fever of my pleasure parting as it occurs to me that the tail trick was a clever diversion. Distracted as I am, he wants something else. And for just a second, I feel completely prepared to give it.

  Spurred by the sight of him standing there, fully nude, cock jutting, I grab for the sheet and try to wrap it around myself, but my arms are shaking and the moment I get it around my middle, he snatches up one corner and tears the whole thing away.

  I shout when he slides one knee onto the bed and then the other, and then falls over me. His heat hits me like a wave, its power unforgiving. I moan and I feel him shift, feel him arch over me, feel the stiffness of his malehood press up against my weeping folds, my aching slit.

  “Stars, no…” I’m not ready for this. My body may be, but my thoughts are in turmoil. “I just…I just want to see my friends…please…”

  He holds my forehead down and I try to wrench free of his grip. I can feel his frustration as he rumbles words at me that I can’t understand. He must know that I’m equally frustrated.

  The thicket of lust in my belly that has consumed almost all of my reason is thorny and well-rooted, so when I manage a strangled, “Stop,” even I’m surprised.

  He pulls back and even though his face is as expressionless as ever, his ridges flash white and then pink before settling again on purple.

  He says something to me and when I don’t answer, shakes his head. I lay still as he sits up, frozen except for the rapid rise and fall of my chest. He glances at it, but only for a second before grabbing my ankle and dragging me across the pallet towards him in one sweeping pull.

  I squeal and use my hands to shield my face, but the blow I expect to feel never lands. Cautiously, I open my eyes only to see him hovering over me, ridges the flaxen color of stone flour. He takes my hands and presses them beneath his own against the mattress on either side of my head and simply stares at me, frowning, while I take in the closeup of his profile.

  I’m surprised to find that his eyes, though black, are shockingly complex. Something’s swirling in there, a shifting black like the slow burn of a flame or the gentle dance of smoke. They shine like eternity. Like a promise of something gentle. And I know it’s a lie. These beings are nothing but liars and rapists and savages and this one here? He’s the king of them.

  Monster, I remind myself — I have to remind myself — monster…

  I look away and squeeze my eyes shut tight, refusing to be distracted by the sight of him, or the rich smell of his skin.

  Removing his hold from my wrists, he switches his grip to my face and presses my left cheek into the bedding. I can feel him working at something — his cock maybe? — and I grab his hands, trying to hold him off, but it makes no difference.

  A second later and cold liquid sloshes over my ear, tunneling down the canal. What has he done? I yelp, but he ignores my cries and turns my head the other way to repeat the process.

  Whatever he’s infected me with has no smell, and though it isn’t painful, the liquid viscous, almost like it’s a living thing, making its way slowly inwards towards my brain and when it finds it — pop!

  My head spins, all thoughts scrabbled, and when the sudden intense pressure clears, I’m lying on my back and he’s bent over me, utterly expressionless. Why hasn’t he entered me yet? The small voice in the back of my mind is two parts grateful, one part disappointed.

  And then he says, “I have implanted a translator. You will tell me if you understand my words.”

  “Holy stars, how…with the juice?” We don’t have anything so sophisticated on the colony. I’ve never even heard of technology like this.

  The corner of his mouth twitches like he wants to smile but doesn’t know how. “The juice, yes.” He holds up a yellow vial where I can see black liquid inside squirming. Great. So, it is alive.

  I shudder but I don’t feel any outward signs to distress me. And besides, I’ve got bigger problems. Much bigger. He is huge. A whole head higher than I am — no, two — with muscles that glimmer like smooth stones as they shift beneath skin that’s smooth in some places, in others, tough like wood and leather. His long legs more than eat up the rest of the bed and though his hips are slim, they flare up into shoulders twice as broad as mine.

  “What are you waiting for?” I blurt out, trying and failing not to sound intimidated. My voice comes out loud and warbly, cracking into the silence like a whip. He doesn’t so much as flinch.

  His sideways lids peel over his eyes. When he licks his lips, I catch sight of his tongue — his ridged tongue. My lower lips squeeze, the treacherous bastards and I try to hold my legs together, but can’t with him kneeling between them.

  As if in response to my body’s at
tempt to salvage any scraps of decensy I have left, he says, “For you to open.”

  I start. This is the first time we’ve ever spoken and already so much has happened between us. I don’t know what to say, because the cadence to his tone makes it sound like such a thing is inevitable.

  “I don’t…I won’t,” I say dumbly.

  He bares his teeth and I notice those at the back look filed. “Why? The Xanaxana has selected you for me to breed, and me as your protector. I am the only male you will ever have and you dishonor us both by denying this. The longer you resist, the more painful it will become for us both and we have already waited far, far too long. This past rotation has been a torment. Did you not feel it? Your own body’s desperation? The need for your Xiveri mate?”

  He waits, like he expects me to say something, but there’s nothing to say because I can’t contradict him. I did feel it. Every night in the quiet dark of my room. Waking up with cold sweats, plagued by fire and thirst. Touching myself to the memory of his fingers on my face, his whispered alien words…

  Betrayal. That’s what it had felt like. My betrayal to Kiki and Svera and all of the humans, my body’s betrayal to me. And now, with him lowering down onto me, lining up our hips, probing my lower entrance with the bulbous head of his heavily veined cock, huge and ridged, I don’t push him away.

  I’m sopping wet and so tender I hurt. He falls forward onto his elbows and all I feel is need and shame. “Look at me,” he says, but I’m staring at the wall like my life depends on it. “Look at me.”

  To all the stars in the universe, I can definitively say that this man that this mysterious Xanaxana has picked for me, is the scariest one. I flinch and close my eyes and I can feel anger roll off of him like a sandstorm over the horizon.

  “I am yours and you are mine. I will have you on this solar. Though there was no hunting ceremony on your colony, I still hunted you, found you, fought for you and returned with you. I have not used a breeding belt for your kinswoman claimed you did not want this. But now that we are here and I have waited and have performed the rituals of your tribe, I will not be denied.”

  No Hunt? No harness? Rituals of our tribe? I want to ask him more but he’s pressing forward, his cock spearing past the first of my folds, finding heat that makes me panic.

  I jerk away from him, trying to crawl backwards across the bed. I shout at the top of my lungs, “Then what’s stopping you?”

  He stills and the rough pad of his hand drops onto my hip, my waist, my breast, my chest, my jaw. He tilts my chin up and there’s something soft and desperate in his touch. Killing khrui, holding their hearts in his fists, bathed in his own blood, gashes covering his own chest and face and legs, he hadn’t looked half as frustrated or exhausted as he does now.

  “I have never taken a female against her will,” he says, and it sounds like it causes him great pain to admit it.

  “What?” I say even though I heard him.

  “You ask me why I do not take you. This is my response.”

  “But the first time you saw me, you wanted…”

  “Hexa, I wanted and I still want. The Xanaxana demands that I take you. On Voraxia, both Xiveri mates feel equal pull. It is clear that in this instance, for whatever reason, mine is…stronger. Perhaps it is because you are human.”

  His claws scrape across my scalp, coiling with my damp hair. At the same time, I feel the startling glance of his tail twining with mine, and just like we had in the washing tube, my tail acts on its own accord, eager to circle his. I swallow. Nobody’s ever called me human before.

  He smiles and it is a heartbreaking thing, tender enough to tear at my insides. “I know that you feel it too. Perhaps as a shadow of my own, but the Xanaxana has not forsaken you. It is there. I want to know why you deny it and more than this, what it will take to make your mind as yielding to me as your body already is.”

  Whimpering a little, I try to pull my legs together again, but they just close around his hips. His eyes roll back as the smooth skin of my inner thighs connects with the plates on his sides. His hips piston forwards and I feel the head of his cock enter me where no male and nothing of equal size has ever been. Shock makes me swallow a cry, but Raku pulls back and grips my shoulder, as if trying to anchor himself in place.

  I hold his arms. We lay locked together like this. When nothing happens for several breaths, I finally manage, “You…you want my consent?”

  “Consent,” he repeats, breathing hard, showing a strain that I feel mirrored succinctly. He waits a few moments for the translation to make sense to him. Then he frowns. “I want more than tacit agreement. I want your willingness and I want your desire.”

  My face flares with heat. “You can’t…I can’t manufacture desire…”

  He bellows out something furious and jerks back, first onto his knees and then onto his feet. Our tails untangling, he stands, paces the small room and manages to look even more imposing against the flat, paneled grey walls. I know that if he were to lift his arms straight up, they’d graze the high ceiling.

  My chest deflates and the cogs in my mind start to whir and churn. So far every thought has been survival survival survival, don’t get trapped, get away.

  Well I almost didn’t survive and I definitely did get trapped and I definitely didn’t get away, so now I need a new plan. A less shit one. One that doesn’t require anything but my mind’s willingness to give in to what my body is already prepared to give up.

  No Hunt, no harness, he saved my life, he saved Kiki’s life, he’s shown restraint and so far all I’ve shown him is defiance and disappointment and he still asks for permission. The realization hits me suddenly: for the first time in my strange orphan, scavenger life, I have power. Not a lot, but maybe, enough.

  He starts to speak at the same time I do. “You do not…” “Okay.”

  He pauses mid-step, ridges on his brow bone pulsing with color, white this time. “You will repeat this word,” he says, and the white gets brighter, streaked through with a brilliant lavender.

  “I said okay.”

  He frowns, and I jump when the color vanishes. He resumes his pacing and as he walks, his tail flicks so quickly through the air, it sounds like a lash against leather. So much control.

  He stops abruptly, his nostrils flare and when he glances at my bare, hairless womanhood, I flush and bend my knees towards one another.

  “You say your agreement and yet you still hide yourself from me,” he rumbles.

  “I agree,” I say shakily, “but with a few conditions.”

  He stops pacing then and comes to the edge of the bed, his shins brushing its low edge. With his arms crossed over his chest and his cock jutting out, I can suddenly hear the renewed rumble of his chest. His shoulders have released slightly away from his ears and if I didn’t know any better I’d say he was…relieved.

  “You will define your terms.”

  Terms. Terms? “I…I want to see my friends. I want to make sure that they’re alright and if they’re not alright, I want you to help them.”

  “Fine,” he says much too quickly. “You will tell me if these are the extent of your terms.”

  What else? I hardly thought he’d give me that, given that he’s been referring to them exclusively as traitors since we boarded the ship.

  “I want you take Kiki and Svera back to the colony and I want you to apologize to Svera for what you did to her arm.”

  “Nox,” he says and he doens’t say more.

  “What? These are my terms.”

  “You will outline new terms.” His jaw ticks. “The ones with the slave names Kiki and Svera are criminals. They kidnapped my Rakukanna…”

  “I kidnapped myself! They had nothing to do with it…”

  “They helped keep you from me and for that they will need to be punished.”

  “No! No. No deal. I will fight you to the end if you hurt either of them.” I bang my fist on the mattress. Raku looks at it, then at my face, his ridges flat and c
olorless.

  Finally, he seems to arrive at a decision. His tail flicks and I feel my own tail twitch in response. He glances at it and licks his lips and I freeze as another surge of heat pushes at my lower lips, making it impossible to clench my thighs fully together. I hold my legs open a little more and a gush of air punches out of Raku at the same time that cream drips through my folds.

  Raku growls, eyes flashing between my pussy and my face. “They will not be harmed. But they will be brought back to Voraxia where they will receive a punishment befitting their crimes. I can assure you that neither of them will sustain injury or humiliation through this process.”

  There’s something he isn’t saying, that I know I need to be wary of, but right now my heart is pounding and I’m not sure I’m going to get a better deal than this one. No injury through the process. No humiliation. How can that be manipulated?

  “Alright,” I say shakily, “So long as they aren’t harmed.”

  “They will not be. Voraxians do not hurt females.” My jaw drops, prepared to counter, but before I can speak he says, “I would also offer another exchange. You will never try to run from me again. You will accept your place at my side as my Xiveri mate. You will accept your role as Rakukanna to the Voraxian people and when our coupling produces an heir, you will raise our kit in Voraxia.”

  What. the. comets. My jaw works. “I…I won’t be able to come home?”

  His ridges pulse, flaring a dangerous red. “Your home is by my side. You do not have to like me, or this. But you will produce my heir and you will do it willingly and in exchange I will not only extend the pact I made with your Council to provide your colony with supplies each rotation, but I will rebuild your slipshod settlement.

  “If I am satisfied with our mating, I will also uphold the offer that any humans partaking in the Hunt be transported back to Voraxia with their breeders, with their consent. And they may choose to return to your moon at any subsequent Hunt, freely. Babes born of these couplings will remain with the mothers, regardless of where those mothers choose to live.”