How To Survive Ch. 01

A long time ago in my even more awkward youth I had another account on literotica where I posted all of one story. Out of curiosity I returned to it and found it was received far warmer than I remembered, and it made me curious about what could have been, had I kept writing. Am I back? I'd like to be but no promises.

This story is mildly inspired by Bowoodstock's Kita'thalla, but aside from a similar setting it's a beast all it's own.

1. Melodrama

"But I won't cry for yesterday

There's an ordinary world

somehow I have to find

And as I try to make my way

To the ordinary world

I will learn to survive"

Starlight and wildfire. Vivid warmth defying the cold world. It felt right. It felt like floating in a secluded pond, gently rocked by the stout hips of the man between her thighs.

He smelled like fresh soil in sunlight, like dry grass and sweat. The dense pelt slid and shifted beneath the fingers as she dug into his back and lilium, desperately trying to keep their bodies flush together.

The soft brush on his hard body drove her wild as his pelvis connected with her's. Every thrust interrupted a breath that became a whimper or stuttering moan. Her eyes wandered with the loll of her head. She saw the stars and wondered, briefly, if they were watching as she spread her legs for him. She laughed aloud at the thought.

The rutting slowed and he turned to look at her, quizzically. High on sex with those huge honest eyes peering from that furred, angular face, she laughed even harder. With half his face ruffled and stained, and those paddle ears standing up and attentive, he looked ludicrous.

"Did I touch your shoulder again?"

Their first time together they had discovered even lightly touching Zhe beneath her arms crashed her into peals of laughter.

"No. You look like a pup in a water bowl."

She released his back to pet his cheek and he nuzzled into her knuckles. Without the grip on his back she felt heavier. He loved it. He loved the way she towered above him, and the way she spread out beneath him. He loved holding her up and feel her weight shift in his arms. It felt as if she melted.

She hated when he called her a Goddess, so he didn't. He didn't tell her how he ached to see her, how abnormally beautiful she was even with the grey adhesive patch along her cheek. How it thrilled him that he had to stand away from her to look her in the eye, and how he had to strain his neck and toes just to kiss the bottom of her chest. How he felt perverse from the pleasure he took in hugging her strong leg to his body, and the elation he felt when she pressed his head to her thigh. How he felt he didn't deserve her but would give his all to earn her.

She'd hate him saying any of that, so he didn't. Instead he licked the sweat from her palm and made her squeal.

"You animal!"

It only egged him on to lick her belly in big, fast laps that had her shaking so hard from laughter her whole body rocked. He loved to make her laugh.

Her fingers melted into his neck and turned into claws, pulling the smitten loma away from her to look her in the eye, tongue still hanging from his facetious grin.

With his pronounced jaws open wide and pseudo-simian teeth glinting in the fire light, part of her couldn't help but be reminded of a dog panting for breath, but the image was chased away by the wholly human smile stretching his angular lips and puffing up his cheeks beneath those warm emerald eyes. Hard little stones with earthy shades of grey, green and yellow blazing through half-closed eyelids as if she was his entire world.

She pulled him back again and shifted her legs to hoist herself up above him. Before he knew it he toppled backwards into the ground as she settled above him. His giant ears came up in surprise, just managing to not be crushed under his back. They stood erect and stiff, two wide and curved blades intently studying her. He imagined he could hear her mane rustle as she descended to look into his eyes. Her back coiled, her hands grabbing his pectorals, her musing eyes staring him down, she looked like a predator ready to strike. His member twitched inside her.

He looked at her with awe and wonder. His face, an angular protrusion with a sharp chin and angular cheek bones defied the effeminate place rabbits had taken in human culture. A wide, low-set forehead swooped back across his scalp, which together with the bridge of his nose and cheeks gave him the appearance of an arrow. This threatening visage was off-set by his eyes. Eyes grey as a cliff face, sealed in a pristine crystal sphere, but the most expressive eyes she had ever seen. His fur, short and soft as down feathers eased or hardened vividly with his expressions and every time she knew it was honest. It had scared her, it had warmed her, and right now it dulled over with a dumb euphoria as she straddled his splayed thigh and took him for her own.

He thrilled as she stared him down, not a finger's width between their nostrils. He tried to kiss her but her hand on his chest held him down to the soil. For a second her eyes were closed but then opened - two polished marbles of the darkest bark, inviting him into their warmth. Home is what he saw in those eyes, but the face surrounding them spoke of burning fire, predation and glee.

"You want to play dirty?"

She moved as if to kiss him and he tried to catch it but she didn't let him. Again he tried, again she held him. Frustrated, he steadied his feet, ball and heel to the ground and thrust upwards into her glory. Again she denied him, as she ground her hips into his, her full weight down on his middle. It took his breath away to want to fuck her so badly and yet be refused. He could throw her off but he wouldn't, the game they played was far too fun.

"Let me."

Again she rose till she towered above him. She reached so far she was part of the sky to him. Her pale, languid form and the billowing red mane moved with the rhythm of her hips as she took him inside. Goose skin bloomed across her back, shivers ran through her legs and she sighed every time he entered her.

His hands - soft pads, rough texture, strands of hair tickling her midriff - held on to her hips, feebly urging her to receive more of him. Her blazing hands burned in the fur of his stomach, pressing down upon the rippling abdomen, keeping him down as she set their pace.

Again she looked at the sky and imagined eyes on her. She imagined them studying her intimately, noting every crook of her limbs and ripple in her skin as she fucked this animal before them. She imagined them listening to her voice, the way it broke under her breath and the small sounds she'd let slip. The chanting as she burned with him inside her, herding the sun towards the horizon.

---

The illicit coupling continued into the night. Having flattened every straw of grass in their small camp with their rolling bodies, the lovers called out their release and sank into one another's arms. Basking in the heat of the moment, unwilling to let it end, Zhe reached for the survivor's blanket and wrapped the both of them up inside it. Exhausted and elated they curled their limbs together and let sleep take them.

They lay down aloof and safe in their isolation. They had fled the petty butchery with noone the wiser, and the future lay ahead of them. For all their struggles, all the horror and suffering, now their lives would truly begin. Zhe felt the need to cry from joy, but forced the tears back, not willing to worry Kuhan. She just held him tighter, and thought about the future ahead of them.

She expected to fall asleep cradled by the exotic man in her arms, but with her focus so tuned to him she became aware of a growing unease. He grew heavy in her arms, ears slowly standing straight and peering into the dark, listening. At first she didn't understand what was happening, but as he slowly lifted his head from her shoulders and turned to stare into the grass, she felt it too.

He was the first to move, jumping from her arms towards his discarded scutate, but crashed to the ground before he could reach it. Two feathered needles stuck from his side. Zhe had barely moved for her sword when two needles imbedded themselves in her arm, and she watched the limb droop in front of her eyes. Tearing the needles out didn't help, the numbness washed up her arm, and she collapsed into the bent grass.

The world spun around her and a terrifying weakness overcame her. Perfectly awake, her body weighed more than the world itself, and it only grew heavier. She could barely breathe. Is this what gravity was like on Earth?

In the corner of her eye the grass shifted, and she struggled to turn her gaze. Her eyes stung like sand had worked itself into the sockets and she could just barely turn to catch the thing glaring at her through the grass. The face was monstrous. Black lips stretched to reveal yellow teeth. Black fur was splintered in sharp cracks by it's disgusted expression. It's yellow eyes seemed to glow in the fire light, and reflected such hatred, it made Ahora whimper in terror. Was it a muor? She'd only seen loma paintings of them, and thought the wide-eyed twisted grimaces had been childish exaggerations. The face in the grass was a monstrous reality. Only when it fully stepped into the firelight could she make out it's distinct leporid features.

Where Kuhan was a tightly woven wire of muscles across his naked frame, this one was a small boulder in a suffocating bogey mail. The loma as she knew them were angular and thin pseudo-human lagomorphs, subject to an evolution humanity didn't entirely understand. The hulking thing bearing down on her barely reminded of the lean man she was just embracing a moment ago, and the intentionally bulky armour could only do so much.

Zhe had read about the bogey mail. Steel scalemails beneath black pelts proudly taken from muor, sown into a shapeless cloud of fur that melted wearer into the dark. Designed to be a horrifyingly effective night-time camouflage and armour, it turned it's wearer into a nondistinct shadow among the trees but allowed them First and second blood in an ambush. She'd studied the aftermath of loma ambushes wearing these armours, and the carnage they'd leave behind.

It pounced. Her heart beat and then seized, deprived of oxygen from lungs that barely worked. Her vision blackened at the edge of unconsciousness, and then returned to crushing pain. A grip made of fur and claws squeezed her jowls so hard it brought tears to her eyes. She could barely make out it's face. Just two burning stars shining in a twitching darkness.

Zhe whimpered, barely able to breathe through the tight grip and completely helpless to move as it bared her neck.

"Lam'al'ha'ntala."

At First she wasn't sure where the voice came from, but as the burning salt ran down her face her vision cleared briefly and let her take the creature in. It was a loma, same as Kuhan, but where he was a warm earthy brown this one was black as soot with massive, yellow eyes shining in the fire light. The face was softer than Kuhan's - a female? - but buried in an expression of unbridled anger. It's snout was wrinkled, it's pseudo simian teeth bared, it's eyebrows swept low, and it stared at her with twitching, unblinking eyes. It looked feral!

"Lam...al...ha'ntala!"

Desperately Zhe tried to beg. Her lungs burned with the effort and her throat strained to utter a single word, and all that came out was a shrill lisp. The loma exploded in a guttural scream and threw Zhe back on the ground. Paralysed all she could see was the disproportionate feet rapidly stomping back and forth as the loma violently screamed at her in it's native lapine. Shrill, caustic syllables she couldn't understand, but just left her confused and terrified.

Who was this loma? What was she doing here and what did she plan to do to them? The limbs stopped, twisted and again the fac simile hand pinched her mouth, forcing her to look into the Loma's burning eyes.

"Listen. I want you to understand this."

The voice was hard and spoke slowly, as if it had difficulty pronouncing every syllible. The lips stretched and shifted over the pronounced jaw as it struggled to unclench, and the long tongue rippled with the words. Terrified, Zhe took in what it had to say.

"You don't get to run away. You don't get to take what you want and then leave at a whim. You don't get to stick us and leave us to bleed and then sprint off into the sunset, we are not your things!"

As it talked the lips spread with every word, baring the clenched molars and sharp incisors. It's eyes grew manic, wide and shining. It was if it's face was a mask pulled tight by invisible hands, deforming under it's utter fury. But then something happened. The muscles slackened, as if too tired to hold the expression, the once rabid eyes grew desperate and Zhe could see them grow glossy, like she was about to cry.

"All of you, every silt-born one of you are going to pay. For everything. I should open your liver and let the soil have you right now, fuck you do I want to. It would only be right. But I guess you didn't make me as depraved as yourself."

It spoke the last sentence calmly, forcing any misery away from her voice. She relaxed, blinked the anguish from her eyes and ignored the tears drying into her fur.

"I will wrangle Kuhan back to and starve you out of him until he regains his senses."

Zhe was in free fall. The ground vanished from under her and she plead with all the strength she had for the loma to leave Kuhan alone. It only amounted to a punctured whimper.

"And you will be here, cold and alone,abandoned and forgotten. As you always should have been."

The words cut like a knife through the air, slashing at the crippled woman as the loma let her drop with a thud to the ground. At the angle she landed Zhe could see everything. The loma turned it's arm and from a pouch near it's wrist it manifested a pair of long, thin needles crowned with an array of downy feathers by it's end.

"Goodbye, 'Goddess.'"

With a flick of it's arm the darts embedded themselves in Zhe's body. She couldn't feel where, but knew they were there, slowly deadening her nerves and slipping her further into a coma. At first it was warm and then cold as her body dissolved into nothing.

The loma gave her one last look, turned and walked to carry Kuhan back to the war and away from her. She thought she could feel her heart being torn out of her chest, for it all to end like this after everything they'd been through.

The world exploded in light and thunder and the loma screamed as Zhe fell unconscious.

---

The ground hurt against her chin. With Kuhan, Zhe had rolled off the sleeping mat many times and at first she assumed it happened again. Lifting herself she immediately crumbled in pain. Unthinking she moved to pull her legs up and protect herself from further harm, and every battered nerve lit up, like needles roughly shoved through her skin.

The night previous came back to her.

Kuhan!

Blaring sunlight met her. The tall grass dulled the horrid glare somewhat, but not enough for her still drug-addled mind. She'd lived through the night. How?

Again she tried rising up and this time she was ready for the pain. Slowly she steadied herself on one arm and ignored the needles shooting through it. Her stomach pleaded with her for mercy as she turned her frame to look over her shoulder. Kuhan was still, exactly as he fell yesterday.

"Chushan!"

She slurred her speech but didn't care. She staggered, moving in quick, jittering motions as she crawled her way to him as fast as she could. She all but fell on him and pressed herself to him, needing to know he was still alive. His breath was slow and relaxed, as if he was only sleeping. It was enough to make her laugh, if not for the pain it caused.

Someone cleared their throat. She whipped around and immediately yelped when her belly ripped open for lack of blood sugar.

"Dep-Tac Intelligence Administrator Zhe Fang? You're a very awkward person to find."

It was a man. Another human. He was clad in light pioneer armour - a grey and brown patterned uniform strapped with dulled iron plates along the arms and legs. Straps laden with pouches and cartridges held a small armoury to his back, with the handle of a sword, an unstrung bow, and a bouquet of arrow tails peeking above his shoulders. But the most striking aspect of him was the Magnus O-35 surge carbine he held aimed at her and Kuhan.

His posture was lazy and he wasn't looking down the iron sights, but this close the 35mm ferromagnetic flechettes could cut them in half all the same. Whatever was left of the poison in her system burned as every nerve in her body screamed for her to run and stay stock still at the same time.

"Buck's fine. I think it just takes longer for him to flush the poison since he's smaller than you. Lucky I stepped in when I did. Sorry I didn't get to her earlier, the little cunny really did a number on you."

Between the state of Kuhan, the pain, the strange man and the gun Fang hadn't noticed the other loma. She was lying unconscious on the ground by his feet, arms and feet bound with plastic fibre ropes.

"She's tasting her own medicine. Plus a light scuffle, she won't be a problem."

She looked back at the man. His face was blunt and angular with light skin and green eyes, and looked as if he hadn't slept for days.

"Now, to business. Dep-Tac I.A. Zhe Fang, I've been deputised to conduct a citizen's arrest upon locating you, as well as an initial interrogation. Approximately five months ago you were captured at an ambush during a field investigation in a recently captured loma warren. Presence was lost and it was assumed you were held underground or the circuitry forcefully removed from you."

He spoke fast and deliberately, like reiterating a script.

"Approximately...five days ago now your presence came back at the same time as an explosion at the omega 3 warren, southwest of Origo central. It was assumed you'd return via the nearest perimeter guard route, but instead you continued west, into the Vallis."

Loma called it the Crossing. A natural division between the Marineris mountains, away from Roma-Leghum to Vilosukar, the sun of the sea. A trade city open to immigrants from every parallel, where Zhe and Kuhan could be free.

"Regardless of intent, Deptac wants me to return you for debriefing and summary action. At this point in time..."

He looked around the camp site, at the two still drugged loma dozing around them, and then back to Zhe.

"The evidence is overwhelming, but for the record, do you intend to desert your post and abandon the war effort?"

At first she wasn't sure how to respond. It took her a moment to even understand the question. She was caught, he knew exactly what all of this was. He'd arrived at the last second to save them and even if the scene spoke volumes he must have caught something of what happened first hand. Actually, what had he said? "Sorry I didn't get to her earlier." The last of the poison evaporated with her boiling blood as her mind awoke to realise he must have been there the whole time. If he'd rushed forth the loma would have heard them, meaning he was observing them at the very least since the loma attacked them. And how much longer before then?

"Fuck you."

The words slipped out of her mouth before she knew they were there. This piece of shit had spied on her in flagrante delicto, allowed her to be assaulted, risked her life, and now he deigned to sit there and expect her to answer to him?

"Fuck! You!"

He looked at her the way commanders and adjutants would at briefings and lectures. Bored and indifferent.

"I'm going to need you to be more eloquent."

"Who the hell do you think you are, gutter dog!?"