Taken to Voraxia

by Elizabeth Stephens

  My tongue presses to the raised piece of silk and she screams as if she were in the throes of torture, her hair spraying across the sleeping mat, drenching it in the scent of berry and blossom.

  The moment lasts and I notice that if I press my tongue ridges to her soft mound, that the moment extends even longer. She jerks, huffing and heaving my name. Not my name. My title. Her arms are spread wide. One of her hands reaches for my hair and pulls, but I do not feel pain.

  “Ra…Ra…Raku!” She shrieks and a spasm contorts her entire body. She shudders involuntarily as if she has lost all control and the sensation of cream covering my chin and jaw ignites a fire inside of me. I am sparked, like the kindling of a dry brush blaze, sure to decimate everything.

  “Rakukanna,” I say in a tone so low I can hardly discern it myself. She settles again against the mat, the eye of the storm passed.

  I nuzzle my mouth on the insides of her thighs, capturing their softness against my roughness with eyes closed. When they reopen, her folds glisten before my gaze and I lap up all the cream I find there. Spiced fermented jujji does not compare. There is nothing that does. Not in this universe, of that I am sure.

  I plant the kiss to her silk mound and her breathing deepens. Her hips buck. “Oh stars…I’ve never been so sensitive…”

  “Too sensitive to rut?”

  She gasps, perhaps at the vulgarity of my words, or the fact that I have asked her a question, something a Raku does not do. I do not care. I care for nothing but my pleasure and, above that, hers.

  “No,” she says on a breath, “nox.”

  I growl and my arms shake as I prowl up the length of her body, noting her small shape. I push on her hips to turn her over and am surprised again when she yields.

  She moans and her legs struggle to take her weight so I slide one arm beneath her hips and pop them up until her tail brushes my shaft. Lifting it carefully to the side, my Rakukanna barks out a moan. She seems so unfamiliar with the pleasure centers here, it pleases me to be the one to show her. And I will show her…over the course of many matings, just as irreverent as this one.

  We have acted in the kiss, I have tasted parts only made for babes and breeding, and yet has any Voraxian male ever felt a pleasure as great as this? Nox. This is a defamation of all things mating.

  And my Xanaxana is thrilled by it.

  My hand shakes as I grip the head of my xora and lower it down past her first puckered hole. My free hand I bury in her tresses, which glow a rich, nutty color in the dim light.

  I have the strange compulsion to want to look at her as we are mated, and tilt her head to the side. She sees me over her shoulder and on her face, she wears a pleasure expression that has the impact of a sabron collider shot straight to the breast. Her grappling hooks bore into the cavernous hole left behind and with one pull, she tears through bone and flesh and plates and leaves me open. Then she crawls inside.

  “Xivoora, Xiveri.” My hearts. My mate. The words are intended for mates that share only the deepest bond. Our journey may have only just begun, but as I utter the words, they feel only right.

  “Are you ready?” I say, repeating her earlier words back to her.

  Her lips stretch. Her thighs tremble. “Hexa,” she whispers and I do not hesitate.

  My xora plunges forward into her and I watch her mouth open into a perfect O as the bulging head of my throbbing xora reaches that final barrier, without breaking it. The pressure…

  She told truths. She has never been tried. And she is half-human. So fragile. My Xanaxana is screaming now and I can hardly think through it. Her swollen silk is the tightest thing my xora has ever felt and never have I felt such slipperiness.

  I could glide into her so easily and rut her filthily, like an animal, defiling her soft, lithe form again and again until we are both winded and wounded and broken and rendered whole by the Xanaxana’s first release. There will be many more, but the first release is said to be the most haunting and I want — no, I need — her to feel pleasure from my xora as she has from my hand and my lips.

  Voraxian females tell tales that this first Xanaxana breeding cannot bear anything but heirs and pain, but I wonder if for my hybrid, there might be another way.

  I think of her silken button, and the pleasure she felt when I stroked her tail. Dropping forward, I brace one arm by her side while I slip the other around to reach her swollen velvet button, that delicious pleasure morsel. At the same time, my tail moves around my hip to coil hers firmly. She is locked in its grip, locked in my grip, unable to move, unable to do anything but suffer the pleasure I will bring her.

  In the heat of my passion I have to be more careful than I believed possible to ensure that I touch her folds only with the pad of my finger and not the claw. I circle her button once, twice, a third delicate stroke and eventually I hear the telltale signs of her shortening breaths.

  “Comets and chaos,” she chants, her face twisting into and out of wicked masks of delight, “Raku, you didn’t tell me it would be like this…”

  I do not answer her. Because I had not known either. I gently bite down on her shoulder and as her body shakes apart, I slam forward, able to feel the universe collide through my bones. The Xana, the divine spirit that guides the universe, and her mate, the Xaneru, join together and start to sing.

  Her untried barrier breaks apart on my first stroke. She screams. And then she screams even louder. Her feathery walls drown my xora in cream and spiced nectar and xok the ancestors as her walls clamp even tighter.

  I can’t breathe. This is punishing. The pain I feel as I balance on the cliff’s jutting edge, fighting against an inevitable fall, is utterly unbearable and I know that my Rakukanna is a savage thing as she punishes me for this mounting. And I accept the punishment without anything but full and utter reverence, capitulation, and rapture.

  I roar. Pounding my hips forward, I rut her madly, with a feverishness that borders on insanity. I last mere moments before thick ropes of seed explode out of my body and fill her up for what might be seconds or days.

  Heat and lightning descend as my three stones twitch and jerk. The round curve of her bottom catches my hips as I slump forward and release, and release, and release…

  She moans into the sleeping mat and takes it all beneath me without one utterance of protest. I tilt her face towards mine and in her eyes, I see the stars and hallucinate the next world for a moment. The one where I take her inside of me and keep her there, just to protect and have close.

  When I come back, my mouth is pressed to the nape of her neck. Through her hair, I deliver the kiss to her. She breathes lightly and quickly, and her eyes are closed, but her lips still receive mine when I bend over her body and take the kiss to her there as well. Her mouth is tilted up in pleasure and her tongue tastes mine playfully.

  I feel a desperation that is foreign to me clutch at my second heart, because that desperation has long since claimed my first. Her upper body is buried in the sleeping mat, my torso pressing her into it, while the spasms of her inner walls jerk and twitch and delicate whispers spill from her throat.

  My seed — the last drop of all that I had stored for her this past rotation — meets her cream, exploding into her, and when that last drop is spent, I bellow out her name. Not her title, but Miari. Just as I want her to say mine.

  I do not know why and I don’t try to understand it. I stop fighting. A funny thing, because I did not realize that I was fighting, that I have always been fighting.

  Careful of my weight, I collapse to the side of her body and pull her against me without removing my xora from her hot, wet heat. I utter a weak-issued order to the voice-recognized controls to douse the lights and secure the room with every precaution. Nothing will harm her while I am in this weakened state.

  As the darkness crashes down on us abruptly I am troubled by a siege of dangerous thoughts towards the female. Thoughts of her name Miari Miari Miari. I want to hear my own on her tongue.

  “Thank you,
Raku,” she murmurs, half-asleep, but the words are enough to make me tense around her, shaking with a desire to pull her close enough to crush. She chokes out a little pleasure sound and I bury my face in her hair. She pleases me so greatly. But there’s still something else that I want from her. And a gift I have to give her first.

  “My born name was Xoran.”

  My tongue moves without my mind’s consult and I tense, waiting in abject horror for her to recoil from me. I am not a youngling and I am not a slave. I am Raku. And I fail to understand my need to give her such a great honor when she does not know what it means, or its value. Is it truly for so little in return as the thought that I might someday hear it on her tongue? Hexa. Yes, as I would say, were I human.

  Her tongue peeks between the flash of her white teeth as she grins. I bend forward and nip at it, tasting it again. She makes the pleasure sound, but does not deny my entry and we do this kiss for a little while more while my xora stirs to life inside of her. She gasps as she feels it lengthen and grow.

  “Nox,” I say, tasting her with finality and running my claws through her curls. “The Xanaxana is sated on this first mating.” I whisper against her shoulder, to which, I deliver the kiss. “Your first mating will have left you sore. I will allow you to recover.”

  She drops her head onto my arm. “Mhmm.”

  I make the pleasure expression in response though I remain inside of her, our bodies joined as one.

  My hearts beat hard, but my Xiveri — my Miari’s — eyes are closed. She drifts away from me to a world where I cannot follow her.

  Knowing that I cannot is almost enough to try to rouse her to keep her here with me, but I do not. Instead I close my eyes and attempt to sleep as she does. It is a restless attempt for my xora still needs and so does this burning sensation in my chest. I cannot shake it.

  And then in the darkness of our cabin, her pleased lips whisper, “Thank you, Xoran.”

  My whole body jerks. I gently bite the side of her throat, lapping at the salty skin I find there. Between soft touches, I whisper, “Miari, xun ka’ana nek mahfeh.” What am I saying? These are not the words of Raku. Nox, they are the words of Xoran.

  I lace my legs with hers and hold one of her chest mounds in my palm. She sighs softly in the darkness and I am frightened in a way that cannot destroy me for I am already destroyed.

  I remember Miari’s words. She thinks I will tire of her. Nox. Because as I hold her to my chest with my half-hard cock still bathing in her exquisite heat and the Xanaxana purring lowly and contentedly in my breast, it is with the knowing that I will never, never let her go.

  She already means too much to me.

  8

  Miari

  I thanked him. What in comets was I thinking? I thanked him twice. I thanked him and his name is Xoran. And I hate Xoran. Don’t I? Xoran showed me that everything I thought I knew about being mated was wrong. Xoran showed me the best lunar of my life.

  And then Xoran left.

  He’d clung to me like dirt to a rooted tree as I slept and it had felt…it felt good. Natural. Safe. I felt, swaddled in the swath of his arms, that there wasn’t a thing in the world that could hurt me. And with his…with it…still sheathed inside of me, titillating my most sensitive of senses, I’d felt connected to him like…like light to a star.

  It made it not so bad that I had traded what some women on my planet, like Svera, protect until marriage — so long as they are able to get married before their time in the Hunt.

  Stars, it made it feel less like a trade than like…oh universe…like he’d given something to me. And even though I know I shouldn’t want it again, I can’t help that I do. And that when I’d felt the drag of his softened male part as he lifted out of me in the dark, it hurt in a way that had nothing at all to do with the soreness he left behind between my thighs.

  In sleep, I’d thought maybe he was just going to the bathroom to relieve himself, but that was a half span ago and now I’m jolted awake by the sound of the ship lurching — docking — and wondering what’s going on and if he’s coming back. Was it truly so awful? Did he not…did he not feel the same thing I did?

  Ignoring the thought, I roll up to sitting, my head spinning slightly as I shift ungainly onto my knees. My inner thighs quiver a little bit, and when I command the lights on, I see in stark clarity the wreckage of what happened last night across the sheets in vibrant blues and pinks. Is my orgasm pink? I giggle a little at the thought, feeling a strange flush as my gaze tracks the purple splotches where the blues and pinks meet.

  Quickly, I slide off of the bed and plant my feet on the floor, needing to be away from it. Because even just the sight of it brings back memories of last night and how much I’d enjoyed the way he yielded so quickly to my kiss, and then mastered it, taking kisses from me that I was only too willing to offer.

  I feel insane. Like a madwoman. It just happened so quickly. The explosion inside of me the minute my kiss turned into us kissing. It stripped my breath and whatever sense I had right away. I want more. Need more. But what if he didn’t like it?

  This is bad, I think to myself as I waddle into the wash room. The lights come on automatically but it takes me some poking and prodding on the control panel outside of the tube of water until I get it to work.

  I wonder if it’s fusion ion that powers it, or if they use the same solar technology we do in the colony. Something more advanced? I wonder the same thing about the sensors that power the automatic doorways, and if they react to heat, like the shower does, motion or moisture.

  Because the bathroom door opens and closes as soon as I step up to it, but no matter how I approach the door leading out of the bedroom, it remains fixed shut. Not to be breached by yours truly. All of the drawers against the walls are locked too, even the one I know has only clothes in it.

  “Hmph. What did he expect? Me to fashion a noose out of his tunic and hang myself?”

  I chuckle, but in the hollow room, the sound is a little depressing. Maybe that’s exactly what he thought. Maybe he didn’t think I liked it because he didn’t like it. He said it wouldn’t impact our agreement, but I know nothing about his kind except for their treachery. Why would he stay true to his word?

  I shudder, sit down on the edge of the bed, careful to keep my back turned to the splotches of color on the sheets because they smell too much like betrayal, and wait.

  And wait.

  And wait…

  …

  Stars be damned, and him too if he didn’t like it. The ship has been docked for a while. So, by the time my hair is almost fully dry and my stomach begins to gurgle unhappily, I decide to do something.

  The panels hiding the controls for the outer door aren’t going to budge without tools to pry them open, but the thermal detector in the water tube is almost fully exposed. This, I can work with.

  Sometime later, I’ve managed to get one end of a copper wire threaded through a thermal ignition, and connected to an energy source harvested from the wash room’s thermal sensor.

  Scooting the whole kit to the door, I position the copper wire just above the battery, then I glance over my shoulder at the closed bathroom door. It takes to seven seconds for the wire to drop, and it takes one second for the bathroom door to open and shut, giving me six seconds to make it over there.

  I need to get inside the bathroom before the explosion goes off because I don’t have any idea how powerful this energy source is, but by the vibrations radiating through the copper wire in my hand, my guess is very.

  “One,” I whisper out loud, but before I even get to two, I hear the distant sound of footsteps over my adrenaline. They’re heavy, and they’re coming closer.

  I pull the copper wire out of the explosive I’ve jerrybuilt and quickly — but moreover, carefully — push all the pieces against the bed and cover the bomb with bits of the stained sheet.

  I perch on the edge of the bed and plant my feet flat on the floor. My shoulders curve inwards but, noticing th
e position, I roll them back and hope that I appear ferocious, instead of like a hungry, tinkering maniac.

  The sound of boots stops and the doors glide open with a whoosh. There he is. Xoran or Raku, depending on what kind of mind he seems to be in.

  The wind from the doors ruffles a strand of his hair. It’s escaped the heavy onyx braid that drapes halfway down his back and settles against his jaw and I watch its color vibrate in the light for a moment longer than I should. When I come back to myself, I register his scowl and shiver even though the air clinging to my bare red flesh is still and warm and enveloping.

  I inhale sharp and short, and my shoulders curl involuntarily. So much for ferocious… Meanwhile, his nostrils flare at the sound even though his ridges betray no color at all. He just glares at me as my gaze tracks over his washed, braided hair and mottled grey-blue face, down the ridges that drape across his brow bones and the tough hide that covers his chest.

  He changed his clothes. He’s wearing one of those loin cloth things again a black belt and what look like heavy black boots. His skin looks oiled. The sight of it makes me heat. I feel flushed. Behind him, his tail flits back and forth like a snake. Asteroid strike me now…

  He blinks sideways, like I do, and when he glances down at my body, still bared before him, I struggle not to instinctively cover myself.

  “I…” I start at the same time that my stomach grumbles. The sound is so lard and so startling my left foot kicks — straight into my machine.

  The sound of pieces clattering against one another grabs both of our attentions — his before mine, because when he lunges for the sheet and rips it back, I’m not fast enough to stop him.

  Looking down at the mess I’ve made of his thermal guage, his ridges flare red. Bright red. Terrified — because I’ve seen that color before — I make a move for the exit, but all I’ve drunk is water from the shower and I haven’t eaten anything since the sand bread and fruit leather Kiki and I shared over a solar ago.