by Calista Skye
“It’s a dragon,” Delyah states urgently. “Like Troga? Like the ones we saw in the tubes downstairs?”
It plainly is. And while those things looked dangerous enough while in a death-like state, this one is downright terrifying. It radiates menace and something else that I struggle to place.
“God, it’s so full of contempt,” Delyah marvels.
Yes, that was it. Amused contempt. And a degree of intelligence. Not what you want to see in a predator like this.
“Don’t look at it,” I suggest. “They can hypnotize you.”
She doesn’t reply.
The dragon beats its tail viciously through the air and prowls around us with a fluid motion that speaks of power and aggression. If it attacks us, where shall I direct my stroke? It has four powerful legs with sharp, long claws on them. The mouth is closed, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it contained hundreds of equally sharp teeth.
“Let’s leave this place,” I whisper, as if the predator circling us can understand. I walk backwards towards the direction where I think we came from, but still the creature circles us and appears to block the way.
I glance at Delyah. She’s just staring, and there’s an empty look on her face.
I shake her arm. “Hey!”
Still she stares at the dragon, and she looks so peaceful it scares me. She’s been hypnotized again, and now she’s straining at my arm, trying to drag me along closer to the beast.
My hunter’s instinct tells me that it’s not reacting to anything I do, which feels strange. I also can’t detect any smell from the creature, and it casts a shadow on the ground, although Delyah and I don’t. It might be true that it isn’t real, like Delyah said. But it’s real enough to take all her attention and make her unresponsive.
I physically put myself between her and the creature, then grab her chin and forcibly lift her gaze to mine. “Wake up.”
She blinks. “What?”
“Don’t look at it!”
“Shit. I was gone there for a second. It’s just so damn attractive! It’s not affecting you?”
“No.”
There’s a strange sound from the dragon, a hissing of air. Then an immense fireball emanates from its mouth and engulfs the whole room with a soft whoosh.
I barely have time to yank Delyah behind me so that the flames will hit me and not her.
A long moment goes by before I realize that the fire wasn’t real.
The dragon is gone, and so is the rocky landscape. Now we’re surrounded by strange mountains with straight edges, made from mirrors and reaching to the sky.
“It’s a city,” Delyah hisses. “Like a big village. We have those on Earth. But this is from somewhere else.”
I don’t care much what it is. I do care about the many predators surrounding us. They’re creatures of the same type as the first one, except these are much larger. But they have the same air of amused superiority.
“Don’t look,” I seethe.
“It’s okay,” Delyah says. “I’m making them blurry.”
I glance at her, and indeed she has one hand in front of her eyes, peering at the dragons through a narrow slit between her fingers.
On a hunch, I look straight up. And sure enough, there are more predators circling up there. They look like irox.
“They’re not irox,” Delyah says, reading into my thought. “They’re dragons, too. With wings.”
I look closer. Indeed they are dragons. The addition of wings doesn’t make them any more endearing to me.
“We can just stay here,” Delyah says calmly. “You can put your sword back in its scabbard. None of this is real. But it’s giving us some clues about this room.”
“I’ll keep my blade bare,” I grunt. There’s no chance I’ll sheath it with an endless amount of fire-spewing enemies this close, real or not.
“An alien city,” Delyah calmly ponders. “It doesn’t look like a movie set. I mean, of course it could be. But this doesn’t feel like entertainment. This feels more like a documentary. Or an instructional video. Informational. Like something you’d use a holodeck for. Not that this is a holodeck like in Star Trek. This is more primitive. Still, it’s some kind of external VR. For showing someone this. Someone about your size. Someone to fill all these couches.”
I can’t even think of an answer to a statement with that many alien words, so I just grunt.
The dragons are milling around us, but they don’t seem to notice that we’re here. It gives me a chance to study them more carefully. They’re the size of Bigs, although not the largest ones. I’ve seen bigger creatures. But these have a different feel to them. The Bigs do what they do. There’s no evil in them — they just survive, much like we warriors do. Certainly some of them can seem unnecessarily cruel at times, like the irox. But these things here — they feel like a real enemy. Someone who wants you to suffer. Someone with intentions and plans.
Especially these large ones with wings. They have a look in their eyes that I’ve seen before, on the face of the leader of a party of raiders that my tribe fought off some years ago, when he thought he had the upper hand. He died one breath later, but that look has haunted my dreams since. It was… evil. And these things are the same way.
Delyah sits back down and dangles her legs on the couch. “I think I can figure out some of the answers to this. We can just watch the show.”
I’m not going to sit down, but I stand behind her so I can look around for real dangers while she’s relaxing. Or whatever it is that she’s doing. I don’t know what women need to do after they’ve been Worshipped.
The room still smells of her slit and the wetness, and now that these dragons appear to be somehow not as real as they look, I feel my crotch swell again. I Worshipped her! A woman! And it was glorious. She is glorious.
I still keep on guard from the dragons, who are now slowly drawing away and leaving us in this alien village with its immense mirrors.
Everything flashes again, and now the mirrors are gone. This is forest with strange, alien plants that grow overhead. The sky is a bright pink, and the sun in the sky has an orange hue.
“Another alien planet,” Delyah says, still holding one hand in front of her eyes. “That’s five planets with life we know of so far. Including Xren and Earth.”
I tense up. There will be dragons coming now, I’m sure of it.
The first one dives down on us from overhead, and I reflexively slash at it with my sword, hitting only air. The dragon lands on its four legs and whips its tail. The look in its eyes is the same as with the other flying ones.
“I’d guess that the wingless ones are younger than these that can fly,” Delyah says. “They probably get their wings after their adolescence. Like your Stripening.”
“They’re all deadly,” I mutter. “Flying or not.”
“They are,” she agrees. “But these are valuable things we’re seeing. These dragons are very important to Bune, for some reason. It feels like whoever wanted us to see this really wants us to fear them.”
More dragons are swooping down on us, like much more aggressive and determined irox. I just manage to suppress my impulse to hack at them when they pass overhead. “I think they have succeeded.”
“They’re scary to start with. You’re holding up well, though. I’ve seen fake things like this all my life. On a smaller scale, maybe. But I can tell when something is real or not. For you, this has to be totally terrifying. And still, there you stand. Not trembling or twitching.” She gets up and looks up at me. “You were made for this. You protected me from that dragon’s flame, even though you thought it was real.”
I frown. It was a spur of the moment thing, not something I thought much about. “I suppose I did.”
“You did. You were willing to take the dragon’s fire.”
I was. I was willing to take it so it didn’t hit her.
The flying dragons are still swooping down, but they appear to be attacking something that is not here. If I had been alone here, I think that at t
his point, I would have realized that it was all a reality-like illusion.
Or... a dream.
I lightly run the edge of my sword across my forearm with light pressure, barely cutting into the skin and producing a couple of drops of blood that appears black.
Delyah gasps. “You’re bleeding!”
“Just checking if this is a dream. It appears not.”
“You know, you can just pinch yourself. No need to actually draw blood.”
“Pinching can be unreliable. But the blade never lies.”
She rummages through her pack and takes out a little wooden box. “That may be, but it seems a little much. Here, give me your arm.”’
With infinite gentleness, she applies a little bit of green paste. “Just to protect against infections. I don’t think you need stitches, which is for the best, because I don’t know how to give you any. There. In the future, if you’re not sure if you’re in a dream, just look at your phone and look away, then back. If the numbers on the screen are the same as the first time— oh. Never mind. Yeah, just pinch yourself.”
The room goes dark as the starry sky comes back. I breathe a silent sigh of relief. Those monsters made me very uneasy.
Delyah closes her pack. “So you can look at those dragons without being hypnotized? I think that’s pretty interesting. Shall we explore a little more?”
I check my own pack. While we’re inside this mysterious mountain, it is probably a good idea to save the food we have and ration it.
“I’d like to leave this room,” I say earnestly. “It makes me jumpy.”
“It’s pretty scary,” Delyah agrees. “Though I had some great times in here, too. Okay, which way?”
On an impulse, I reach out and stroke the back of her head, following the soft, yet curly texture down its length.
She looks up at me in a quizzical way that I’m starting to enjoy, and my crotch twitches.
“I like touching you,” I say as an explanation.
12
- Delyah -
It’s both flattering and so honest I can only think of one thing to say. “Okay.”
I don’t mind his touch. Not at all. In fact, I would really like to touch him, too. But I’m not sure how close I can get to him. I’ve never been in this situation before, where an alien eats me out inside a crashed spaceship on a jurassic planet. I’m not sure of proper protocol in these cases. And I was never the most socially astute girl.
We make our way through the room until a door opens without a sound.
“It’s the same one,” Brax’tan observes. “This is where we came from.”
It does look like the elevator from before. I may well have gotten disoriented in that weird projection room.
“Could be. We might as well check.” I push a part of the panel again, and then a couple of seconds later, the door opens to the same hall with the glass tubes, where there’s a door straight out into the jungle. Yep, this is the same elevator.
“Let’s try again,” I suggest and press another alien button. There’s only three of them, and this is the last one.
There’s no sense of movement this time, either.
When nothing happens after a minute of waiting, I knock on the soft wall with one knuckle in the spot where I would have expected it to open by now. “Brax’tan, how do you think this wall would handle being chopped with a sword?”
He prods it with a finger. “I can’t begin to guess. It’s very strange. Soft, yet resilient.”
I stand back from the wall. “Maybe you could try?”
He shrugs, draws his sword and gives the wall a hard whack, but I sense he could strike much harder if he wanted to.
It sounds like an ax hacking into a thick plank of wood, and it leaves a little line in the wall.
Brax’tan checks the edge of his sword. “Still sharp.”
“How many strokes would you need to hack through it?”
“Depends on how thick it is.”
“I don’t think it’s thick at all.”
He pulls me behind him, then starts hacking at the wall like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
I stand by the opposite wall, admiring the muscles in his back and arms as he really goes to town on the alien material. I don’t think any Earth man could ever grow muscles like that. What would it be like to cling to those hard ropes of sheer power while underneath him and he was pounding into me?
I shake my head to clear it from erotic daydreams. Some of that not-water must still be coursing through my veins, and it makes me think things that I would normally censor.
Tiny little pieces of the wall are ripped off with every stroke, like a hailstorm. I pick up a piece and examine it, but it looks like nothing I’ve seen before.
Brax’tan keeps going until there’s a hole in the wall the size of a dinner plate.
He bends down and peers into it. “Ah.”
“May I see?”
He pulls back so I can look into the hole, standing on tiptoes.
“Ah,” I agree with his assessment. “It might be worth our while to get in there. You want to keep chopping?”
He keeps working systematically, and the material he cuts off piles up in a little heap at his feet.
I finally feel clear-headed enough to ponder the recent events. Here I am inside Bune, much further in than I ever thought I’d get. Even if we don’t get further in, it’s all extremely valuable intel for any attack the girls and I might carry out on this place.
Okay, fine. That was the easy part. Now, what about this caveman?
He claimed to know more about Bune than I do. Which would be a fair assumption if he thought that I was a random alien chick who’d just gotten here. In reality, I knew more than he did, and together we’ve found out much more. Not much of it can make sense to him. It’s starting to make a little more sense to me.
What do I want out of this?
More information.
Fine, I’ll get that. What else?
Brax’tan as an ally for our tribe.
Well, maybe. What else?
Brax’tan calmly hacks his way through the wall, while his back and legs flex dangerously with every movement.
Brax’tan as… something more?
I’ve known him for less than a day. And I’ve been starved for male attention for a long freaking time. Partly by my own choice, it’s true. I always had standards that were way too high. Except this guy exceeds them like crazy without even trying, and it’s just intoxicating to finally be in this position. The way he held my when I lost my marbles back there… so strong, and expecting nothing in return.
In college, lots of the guys look good. Some of them even have some muscles. Then most of them turn into supplicating simps at the first sign of interest from a girl, as if they give up every semblance of having an actual spine at the first whiff of a chance at sex. And if you don’t hit the sack immediately, they turn nasty. Yeah, I was never a fan of self-styled ‘nice guys’. They usually turn out to be the least nice guys around, expecting their common courtesy to be rewarded by intercourse.
This guy put himself in the path of a dragon’s fire to shield me from it. Thinking it was real, knowing it would at least burn him very badly. And this was after he licked me to a world-shaking orgasm. He expected nothing in return for any of those things. Still doesn’t.
He’s seen me at my very worst, being a total slut and begging for his dick. Weeping uncontrollably in his arms. And still he seems to respect me just fine.
I’ve never been in love before. But now it feels like it could happen. He’s overwhelming me with everything he is.
He stands back and examines his sword. “I think we can try now.”
I look through the now much larger hole, but then Brax’tan holds me back.
“I’ll go first. I have the weapon.”
“So do I.” I hold up the crossbow.
He doesn’t even look at it, just gently threads his huge body through the tight opening with jagged edges, sword fir
st.
Yeah, there’s that, too. He’ll always go first into unknown areas. In this case, I think feminism can take a backseat to just surviving.
I follow him, and then we stand there looking.
It’s a large, round hall. The ceiling is a hundred feet up. We’re on a catwalk-like thing that goes around the outer wall. It’s six feet wide and there’s no railing to prevent us from falling. The walls appear to be gigantic floor-to-ceiling windows with a great view of a landscape in all directions. In the middle of the immense space is a crystal column that goes from the floor to the ceiling and widens on the way up.
Below us, there’s a lush garden with yellow paths and turquoise pools and alien plants that I don’t think come from Xren. It’s a multilayered garden with many levels, disappearing down in the depths for hundreds of feet. I can’t see the floor.
It looks really nice. I’m pretty sure no dinosaur has ever been in here.
The air is cool, pleasant and fresh.
“Freaking hanging gardens,” I mutter and squeeze my crossbow.
“More screens?” Brax’tan asks and points out the ‘window’ that he just hacked a hole in. On this side, it’s still displaying a bright landscape, except for a dark patch which is the hole we came out of. Against the myriad of colors all around it, it looks like a dead pixel on a computer display.
“More screens,” I confirm. “Screens that I suspect Sony or Samsung would kill to gain access to. That image is incredibly sharp.”
The caveman looks around, stunned at the size and splendor of the room. “It’s a place fit for the Ancestors.”
“It is,” I agree. “To bad it’s owned by such scum!” I yell the last word, suddenly angry that whoever controls Bune seems to live in ostentatious luxury like this, while we girls have to fight for our survival every day. I have a feeling the owner of Bune can hear me, and I’m absolutely fine with that.
Outside the windows, an alien sun is setting in a brilliantly orange sky. The sun is white and small, much smaller than the Sun looks from Earth or Xren’s sun looks from Xren. It’s a coastline. On one side there’s a red ocean, and on the other there’s blue land, stretching to distant mountains. The air is extremely clear, and I feel like I can see for miles.
