Atrocity

by C F Rabbiosi

  Well, so will I.

  Kassien’s as mad as the rest of them, but at least he understood that some peace needed to exist between us. As I lie here, chained to the bed and Brekter’s presence looming ever closer to take what he wants of me, I’m angry at the prince as well. We wouldn’t be here if he’d just left me alone to die that night. They’d be safe. I’m done trying to be an example to these girls. They deserve better than being told they have no worth except as brood mares. I pull at the shackle violently until it carves in, bruises trickling under my skin.

  Someone in the room whimpers.

  “No. Stop!” Blond Alice shifts in the sheets, a pained cry pulling from her throat.

  “You are the one chosen for me,” comes the unknown voice, and in the dark, my imagination strikes up. It could be Arek, though he seems to hate her as much she hates him. But then, maybe hate excites him.

  “I’ll never belong to anyone,” she bites out, and her free hand shoves against his mass. “Get away! No—” Her desperate moan makes me cringe, a sound of the most blood-curdling defeat.

  He grunts and her bed shakes, two forms thrashing, and the girls’ screams ring out all around me. Where the hell is Vaerynn? She should be watching over us!

  Blond Alice tearfully begs, and the room is alive with panic, but we’re helpless. We can do nothing to save her. She braces with unnatural pain, and I remember Brekter’s claws into my wrist, the unnatural pressure in an unwilling body. “Whatever Koridon shit you are, get away from Alice or I’ll have Kassien execute you!”

  The room grows silent and blond Alice takes a sharp breath. “You have no power, half-breed bitch,” the Koridon says, and I’m thrilled he’s so easily distracted. A cruel laugh shatters the silence.

  “I’m a queen being held against her will, and when he comes for me, you’re first to die, Koridon bitch. Well,” I smile into the darkness, “after Brekter.”

  The male bursts off Alice and his snarling breath blasts against my face. “Perhaps then, it would be fair if I get a turn on you too, before I die.”

  “Who are you?” I ask, sure he isn’t Arek.

  “My name is Kjartonn. Learn it well.”

  “Who in Dante’s hell is that?” I ask, trying to fit a name with one of the males I’ve seen here.

  He touches my hair and prods at my face. “I am the commander’s oldest son, so you see, I am a prince too.”

  No, he’s not. “What do you want with Alice?”

  “Her face. Her cunt. She is pleasing upon the eyes, and the most beautiful woman is mine to claim.”

  “You dare bed her before the ceremony?”

  “What makes you think I will honor a human woman with our sacred traditions?” he growls. “You aren’t of our kind. We think maybe we will all take turns upon you. One monstrous cock after another knotting you until you can no longer fight. No longer move.” His largeness presses into me as he speaks with excitement.

  I jerk my head up and bash it into his nose. He hardly flinches, but I’m quite happy anyway, embracing the sharp pain in my forehead. “Wild animals do the same to their own. They sink their claws into the female’s back and mate her as she roars. You aren’t worthy of us higher beings.”

  Claws dig into my neck, sharp pain cutting off my voice, caught in the lion’s paw. His tongue twists with curses as I choke, but through my tears I grin. He won’t kill me, not with the consequence he would face by ending the first child conceived in years.

  He releases my throat and runs his fingers down my lips. “You know what I would like to do to her? Your pretty blond friend?” He takes a deep breath, and his hand moves into his pants. “First I will mount you, and then the rest, one by one. It will make my tissues swell with desire, my knot growing bigger and bigger for the next.” He works his cock in his palm. “Then I will put it in her, my betrothed mate, forcing the largest knot possible into her tight walls that milk me while she screams.”

  The chain breaks as my fist flies and connects into his jaw. My knuckles crack upon impact. He rips my bed clothes up, then my drawers down. “Yes, fight me.”

  A light flares up in the room, and Kjartonn flies to the ground.

  Vaerynn lands another foot, this time into his crotch, and he bellows. “These girls are not to be touched.”

  He scrambles up, holding himself in pain. “My father will hear of this.”

  “Yes,” Vaerynn says, circling him with the torch. “You were abusing these humans, ones that may be vital to our existence, and he will need to know what you have done.”

  Kjartonn peers toward us, hate splashed across his face. “Edjen pretentis—”

  “So they can understand,” Vaerynn cuts him off, and I’m surprised at her consideration.

  “I did not plan to hurt them,” he says quickly. “But they fill my nostrils, their scents haunting the breeze…”

  “Each one is to be matched and placed with a high-ranking male. Your body must not desecrate theirs in time for the ceremony.”

  “One of them is already mine. I will work her in if I please.” Kjartonn touches blond Alice through the sheet, and I can feel her fear multiply.

  “No, you will not.” Vaerynn pulls him backward until he’s on the other side of the door. “Commander Drakon has not given the final word, and until he has, she is not yours.”

  “Until her bedding ceremony then,” he says, hitting the door open. “I will be saving it up for her, how about that? What a show it will be.”

  10

  Kassien

  “Tanak, entevego levedend… my friend.” My words are a rasping sound that hurt every fiber of my being to make. “We are lost. Forgive me.” He was good. He fought by my side for Calypso and was kind to her even when being forced to mate her in front of his wife.

  Everything has turned black, and I know wherever my DNA reoccurs, or when, all the ones beloved to me here will be lost forever. Because there are no parallel universes. Just universes and randomness.

  I float through the darkness, my consciousness nothing more than far off dreaming, and I muse at the feeling of death, the feeling of my essence drifting. It wouldn’t feel the -400 degree blackness of space, or have the need to suck in choking oxygen deprivation. It’s that chaotic dream state: the soul’s consciousness, experienced when the brain shuts off in sleep, and now this is all that is left of me. I will not feel the joys of the flesh again for centuries. Longer, probably. I will not remember my lost child. My friends. My Calypso.

  * * *

  Muffled voices pull at my transcendent thoughts and bring them to the surface. I wake, and big eyes come into focus. “Calypso?” I mutter.

  The dream figure pulls away. “It’s him.”

  My limbs feel like a thousand pounds as I reach for her, and pain seizes my movement.

  “Don’t move. You’re still on the brink of death, but I’ve cleaned your wounds and stitched them.” The voice is unfamiliar to my awakening ears, and I blink several times to identify my savior. “I’m not Caly,” she says. “I’m her mother.” She places a cup to my dry lips. “Persephone.”

  My lady’s mother. Here, saving my big, nearly invincible ass from death’s icy grip. Of course it would be Calypso’s mother. I’m thankful to her, but there’s no time for niceties. “Get the healing tool, it should be in the hospital bay.” The stitches pull as I force myself up and the lady easily pushes me back down. “Woman, I am warning you—”

  “There’s nothing here,” she says, “but,” she signals to someone behind her, “go see if you can find this tool he speaks of.” The scuffling of feet draws my blurry gaze to the door, where another unknown figures stands.

  “It is silver, with a handle and cylindrical end.” I cough, my lungs shredding. “Tenak, my second,” I choke. “Where is he?”

  She dabs my head with a wet cloth. “Where’s my daughter?”

  Her words stab me deep. I love Calypso in many ways, but one of which is as someone precious whom I want with all my soul to prote
ct. “I will get her. I swear to you.”

  “You will? In this state?” She presses sharp fingertips into the hook wound beneath my collar bone and I push into it, ignoring the fire in my lungs with every inhale. This time, I sit up quite successfully and she brings her hand to her lips. “Nothing will stop me from getting to her. Pain is nothing. I thrive on it,” I growl, close to her creamy complexion.

  A slight smile breeches her lips. “Good. She told me you love her, is that true?

  “She made it back to the village?” I have the urge to embrace this woman with auburn streaks and chocolate eyes the same exotic shape of my Calypso’s. My wife’s.

  “Someone tricked her,” says Persephone. “She led them straight to us, but not before she told me where you had been keeping her.”

  Brekter. I jump to my feet and ball my fists, pulsing with pure aggression. “The slow death I promise him will scream through the ages.”

  She wrings out a bloody rag in the basin. “They would have taken all of us to enslave or worse, but Calypso negotiated using the life within her belly.”

  “She holds my child?” A wave of emotion strikes at my core where even the prospect of death and the torture of steel hooks could never touch.

  “She believes it.”

  A young man enters the room and shakes his head. “There’s nothing like what he described here.” Tall, with bronzed skin over a well-developed form, I wonder what Calypso means to him. Dusk’s haunting last rays of light bleed through the transparent walls of the ship, and I try to understand how many days I have been asleep. A nervy shiver racks through me, and my legs weaken.

  “Here.” Persephone catches my dizzy lean and helps me back to the cot. You have a fever, an infection.” She forces a foul-tasting liquid onto my tongue. “This will help.”

  “Of course I do. Look at this primitive medical care.” The tiny tissue healers of our technology have replaced need for medicinal liquids or disease agents, because the cellular bots rebuild the damaged tissue immediately. No time for infection to develop.

  “And without these crude stitches and bacteria-fighting funguses grown by my people with immense care, you wouldn’t make it another day.” She sloshes the rag over my forehead, sending cold water into my eyes. “By the Queen of Heart’s axe, are all of these bastards like this?”

  “Who is this Queen of Hearts?” I ask, spitting out foul-tasting water and wondering just how many hearts she has cut out to be given such a name. “Is that one of your leaders? I would like to speak with her immediately.”

  “It’s me,” Persephone says with a snicker, “and I’m quick to give death sentences at the most minor of offenses.”

  “Very unwise to tease a desperate being three times your size.”

  “Hmm. Perhaps,” she says, and her shining tongue darts along her bottom lip. “But one such as you would never hurt the mother of whom he loves.”

  “Never,” I agree. I am shined down upon to have her come to me at my last breath and save me. I really should learn to control my temper.

  The young man speaks. “What’s being done to them, Koridon?”

  “Them?” I ask. “They took more than Calypso?”

  “Several of the women from the village have been taken.” A tremor disturbs the deep steadiness of Persephone’s voice.

  I turn my head toward the trees that blow softly in the wind through the transparent walls around us. “They are going to force them to be bred and produce offspring.”

  “Like what you did to Calypso,” says the young man.

  The exhilarating touch of her kisses upon my skin materialize, and a rush through my veins sends a nasty throb through my head. Yet, I would never trade this feeling. “Yes. But she understood and wanted me to have her so we could build something anew between our people.”

  “But my sister is ill. She couldn’t possibly handle what they’re doing to her!” His resonance hits a woeful nerve in me.

  “Finn,” says Persephone, “Kassien is their prince.” She turns her large eyes upon me, and they’re so familiar I can see Calypso calling to me through them. “He will get them back. A prince has loyalties, ways about him, to conquer.”

  “Is that what your books say?” The way her shoulders slump makes me regret shaking her hope. “Of course I have countless arsenal at my disposal. I will send word to my rulers and they will come back to see our laws restored. But it will take time.”

  “Some of them don’t have time,” says the one Persephone called Finn. “You will have to do better.”

  “Get Tanak, my second. We will act immediately.”

  The confusion between them sets my stomach to twisting, and I already know what Persephone will say as she leans in. “I’m sorry, but if you mean the Koridon that hung beside you… He’s dead. Had been for days when we pulled you down.”

  I think of the darkness I’d lived in for days upon days and tried to sort through the different memories in order to find when I lost him. I was delirious. For the life of me, I cannot figure it out. I drag myself out of bed, and they jump back.

  “That isn’t advisable,” the mother says, but I just laugh at her—on the inside, as even the slightest chuckle would jar my torn flesh, and worse, hurt my soul.

  “Get back, woman. Advise yourself… not to anger me.” I limp toward the front of the ship to the dusty control panel and switch on communications. A simple code is shot into the universe, straight to the divine sovereigns, asking them to come immediately. It is time they returned to the planet they abandoned and deal with their children.

  * * *

  I am so tired of the dark, blurry nothing that overtakes me without my permission. Yet it is all I see for days more until light finally peeks through the eternal midnight.

  “Awake,” a voice in my language echoes, and finally, with it treading the surface like a dream, I do. I blink hard in disbelief at the pale, beautiful image of the distant relative who sits before me.

  Sitting up, I immediately question how long I’ve been out. With the sovereign here, it could have been years. “Eladia, drist—”

  She touches my head, and instant calm washes over me. Then Persephone appears behind her, and my soul splits in half with panic again.

  “You passed out at the front of the ship after ripping your stitches open,” Calypso’s mother says. I touch the perfect skin on my chest and look at the lady sovereign.

  “You healed me,” I say, still pawing at the place where the wound had slashed to the bone. “How are you here? It must have been merely days since I called you.” The nanomedic tool sits on her lap, and though a dull ache still lingers, it’s nothing compared to the primitive stitching and poor medication the humans used on me. I am grateful, it saved my life, but I probably would have died eventually. It would have taken longer, though, and a few days is all I would have needed to drag my half-dead carcass across the world and save her before crashing face-first into the ground.

  Eladia nods. “We were summoned weeks ago, your time. By whom, we do not know.” Rigidly straight-backed and motionless, it’s apparent how different she not only appears compared to a human woman, but also the power that emanates from her being.

  “Perhaps it was one of my clan, when I chose to take a human for my mate.” I don’t acknowledge her horror at my revelation and don’t plan to discuss any of my decisions in detail. “Eladia, we are not thriving here. While you have traveled to distant worlds, ours has been dying. As leader here, I have resorted to continuing our lines with the people of Earth.”

  She crosses her arms over the metallic blue robe she wears, long fingers out straight. “ This is forbidden, to crossbreed with a different species. There are reasons for this, Kassien. We still have been unsuccessful in finding a developed water planet that we can survive on. There are things in these places you would not believe. Lethal predators, even for us, ice ages, scorching by the sun, setting fire to every living thing on the planet every two years… oh, the dangers are uncountable. Unth
inkable.”

  Even when a planet is biologically friendly, beings that have no adaptation there—those who haven’t grown and changed with the environment—find themselves constantly fighting. “I need your help to undo what I have done. Innocents now suffer for my choice. The rulers in the west have enslaved women, forced themselves upon them—”

  She stands abruptly and turns her back. “A travesty against the natural order of the universe. You have set things in motion that can never be undone.”

  Unable to understand our tongue, Persephone and Finn stare daggers at me. Instead of letting them pierce my heart with anger, I silently send this promise to them: I will die to save her. I would die to save them all.

  “As you know…” Eladia takes from inside her garb a silver cylinder and a blasting weapon with a chamber of moving dark matter. My spirit catches fire at the sight of such fearsome power. And the cylindrical weapon—well, its chillingly destructive abilities—sends a wave of excitement down my spine.

  “I had to come here alone in the accelerated particle transport to get here quickly. But I brought these.” She hands them to me, and with a flick of my wrist, I engage the dark matter blaster’s firing mechanisms. With a cosmic buzzing, a beam of silvery light aims at the wall behind her. Finn and Persephone duck, but my divine sovereign only smiles. “I trust you can handle the situation with these?”

  I stare into the cylinder’s gleaming splendor. “Oh yes. These will do nicely.”

  11

  As the sun rises, I blink away strange noises that echo in my dreams. As I fully wake, the sounds don’t cease. I sit up in bed, the animalistic grunts and whines jolting my nerves, and peer toward blond Alice’s bed. The room stands quiet. I press my ear to the wall and hear two hushed voices as the terrible sounds continue. What the hell do they have planned for us today?