FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

--1

Unhappiness was a gross understatement for Ember. Under slave-driving hands of his taskmasters, he had erected a number of huts after a crash course in the use of their tools and techniques. With failures punished by a smart whipping of the backside and fewer rations, the young gray wolf fast became a passable carpenter.

In the groves and fields where his hooved masters collected their livelihoods, Ember worked his padded fingers down to the bone plucking weeds and digging furrows for seeds with his bare palms. They had crude shovels for the does and mares but not the slave.

Though the calender season was autumn, summer lingered and the sun beat down on Ember in its fiery wrath. There was rarely a time when his tongue didn't sag out of his maw and much of his fur had shed out of necessity to leave only the thinnest of summer coats. Ember had never worked so hard in all his life and he longed for the spy games and constant shade of scouting.

When the endless days tapered off and he was marched back to his cage - which had been upgraded from a lie-down pen to a bamboo cell with enough room to sit up - the ordeal often continued regardless, for in the twilight hours, the bucks and stallions grew especially restless. Mating season was in full swing but the many does and mares were not yet receptive. Those bucks and studs needed an outlet. Ember's hapless muzzle and taut behind were the next best thing to a breeding partner.

Some evenings and nights when testosterone ran high, they'd go at him in rounds. Whether both bucks, both stallions or mixed pairings thereof, they always came two at a time, one in his mouth and the other under his tail. They were not entirely inconsiderate when they made use of his rear, however, in that they used mashed fruit or just drool to lubricate themselves. The sugars in the fruit did occasionally give the wolf rashes and other ills, and neither did it abate the savage stretch their enormous penises inflicted on him, but it was a small comfort which he realized he was lucky to have as a slave.

This gratefulness was not to say that Ember had come to accept his life. Every night as he chewed his salad dinners of leafy greens, berries, and assorted beans, Ember plotted. The backbreaking labor was exhausting but it was making him strong. Under his thin fur, a once perfectly athletic body was becoming toned. He could still never defy the bucks or stallions. Perhaps he could handle a doe in a straight fight, but a mare could break him in half, them being frightful amazons. What Ember could do was lift the slatted lid of his pen with some effort.

--2

Even at the dead of night, the village of the herbivores never slept. Guards roamed with fearsome bolas, bludgeons and spears. Young lovers not necessarily ready to breed courted. Ember himself was largely overlooked, his presence less novelty and more reality after a few weeks.

Drawing on his past life as a scout, Ember monitored the guards with careful, sleepless eyes. Tonight would be the night. He couldn't stand the labor, the rape, and the stir-craziness any longer.

The clearest path out of the village and toward his home village was the most obstructed. Two mighty stags lurked with their weapons clutched tirelessly. Ostensibly they were posted to keep intruders out; but they just as well kept Ember in. That route wouldn't work but Ember saw another.

A young stud and mare passed behind Ember's pen hand in hand and paying him no mind, instead sharing amorous looks as they walked. Only when they were out of view did Ember try to steel his frayed nerves. The wolf bit his lip, bent over, and stood up slowly until his shoulders hit the slatted pen roof. It slowly rose with his push and it slid back and down towards the ground.

Freedom. Ember clambered out of the pen and landed in padded silence on the dirt outside. The air tasted no different, but to him it was strangely delicious. Freedom.

In a low crouch, the naked young scout looked to his left and right in a long sweep. The guards with their backs turned at the gate were no concern to him just yet. A path emerged in his mind behind the huts he had helped build. This route skirted the fruit grove and cut right into the forest. Ticks and burrs awaited him but anything was better than this life he'd fallen into. A dull throb from somewhere in his rear reaffirmed his desire. Ember started for the huts.

Once in the shadows behind the huts, Ember exchanged his sprint for skulking. His paw pads made little sound on the plush grass and dirt but he couldn't bring himself to chance it. He dashed only between the huts and paused behind the third with a quizzical tilt of his head, for through the wooden interlace of the slat wall Ember heard such snorts as the ones his hooved tormentors emitted when they chose to rape him. Scraping, clattering wood was chaff he couldn't figure out. Rather than dwell on the noises, he pressed on.

Into the fruit grove and fully exposed, Ember halted to get his bearings. A fast lunge put him back in the thickets and he scurried along, sometimes crawling like a snake through the brush.

A commotion at the village stopped him cold. Brutal and noisy cries in the leaf-eater tongue sent a chill through his body. The words were as alien as ever but he knew well enough what they meant.

Ember double-timed through the brush. Sticks and ivies took their toll on his hastiness by slashing his flesh and ripping clumps of fur from his tail but the wolf was too afraid to feel the pain yet.

Frightfully parallel to Ember's forested route came a search party of bucks and stallions through the grove. They barked urgent commands to one another, jabbing into likely hiding spots with the butts of their weapons.

It had been Ember's hope to take to the walked path once he was out of all but the margins of the herbivore village. Instead the guards and warriors thundered down the path in search of him and thus narrowed his choice of routes down to an agonizing crawl in the thickest woods.

Had the herbivores been more attuned to smelling blood as Ember and his kind were, they might have found their slave much sooner, so thought Ember whom was indeed very bloody and suffering the sting of his wounds. What Ember didn't quite realize was that the guards weren't new to spilling or smelling blood. Skirmishes with the carnivores were common enough for the hoofed warriors to know what they were smelling for. Mingling among the herbivores and hiding in the forest may have helped Ember for a time, but the scent of the bloody captive occurred to one among the search party.

One ugly, sharp word alerted much of the party to Ember's presence and they converged on his hiding spot with terrible efficiency. There was no subtlety, no stealth, and no hope when Ember lunged up through the brush and ivy. Bushwhacking was hard enough with a spear or a bone knife but barreling through the greenery with his naked arms gave Ember new appreciation for his old weapons. Adrenaline and the rush of the hunt could only stave off pain for so long and Ember's flesh was raw and bloody. Each snapping twig scraped through his thin fur just as every greener branch and strand of vine flogged him.

Ember could hear the warriors behind him, stags and stallions rushing in his wake, the sounds of their hooves coalescing into thunderous cacophony. This wasn't how it was supposed to be, Ember thought. He and a few other wolves and maybe a dog or a fox chasing down a beast for meat, yipping and yapping and savoring the hunt as their throwback cousins undoubtedly would - that was how it should have been. Being run ragged and whipped senseless by the forest itself was so far-removed from the old hunts that Ember couldn't even appreciate the irony of the situation.

The taut young wolf crashed through one last wall of dead branches and then hurled himself into a shallow gully He tumbled into the shallow water, crashed his knee into a rock and curled onto his side where he hissed, grit his teeth and fought silently with tears.

Here, over here, I can see the slave! the stag in front called to his fellow warriors. They stepped into the gully a hundred feet downstream from Ember. The splashes of their hooves took on an urgent fervor as they spotted him in the moonlight, and so did Ember glance back to see their beady eyes and deadly weapons. The speed with which they bore down on him promised a brutal death, not recovery back to the village, and so Ember willed himself to his legs. The knee he had bloodied against the rock trembled and screamed with pain as his weight fell on it but the wolf still ran down the gully, panting and chattering to himself in terror.

The gap closed fast for Ember's search party was certainly not gimped by wounds, and the chase exhilarated them. Ember glanced over his shoulder when the splashes were just on his heels. A leering black stallion lunged with a meaty hand for Ember's snout but the wolf ducked forward with a burst of speed granted by fear. Next the horse went for Ember's tail on the rebound, but he only yanked a clump of easily-shed fur away from it and staggered sideways, losing some ground.

Veins full of adrenaline again, Ember bounded down the gully Though his throat was on fire, his lungs fit to burst, and his body whipped raw, he felt queer hope that he would see his village again. It had to be nearby, he knew this gully, its waters kept his village from going thirsty. But in relief came complacency with the thought that soon his own warriors would drive off the attackers and his wounds would be tended by the lovely wolf bitch whom he'd been courting for mating season, and so the adrenaline wore thin. The sickening pain in his knee was an unbearable screed in his brain again and he anticlimactically staggered against the bank of the gully where he landed in a panting and openly sobbing heap.

Ember's sprint had put some distance between himself and the search party but he had never left their sights. He watched with despair and terror as they closed in, waving war clubs and dangling bolas, each creature hungry for the killing blow in his eyes. These were precious seconds left to live, Ember thought, as he closed his eyes and trembled.

One warrior pulled ahead of the pack. Long stripey, mottled legs like tree trunks gave him the advantage of stride but raw, horrifying size made him too terrifying to dare defy. Great black hooves built to crush and kill shook the earth beneath Ember and punted rocks and wet sand out of the ravine bed, splashing and pelting the quavering scout. He reached Ember first and his dense club waved as if weightless in his big, black mitt. It was with his free hand that he reached down, however, scruffing Ember and spurring fresh shrieks and yelps. There Ember dangled in the grip of the horse-beast, a colossus the size of which Ember innately respected.

Ember had seen so many horses including some of the striped ones, yet those were always smaller and leaner things. This thing was a beast, dwarfing the next-tallest stallion and stag as they caught up and gathered around breathlessly. Massive, mohawked, mottled and striped and sporting lush skirts of fur on his wrists and ankles, the colossus was not a creature Ember could quantify even if his head hadn't sung with pain. He dressed down in a loincloth of hide as his every other herbivore did, and so did he wear a necklace of felled carnivore teeth. Shiny stones adorned his decorations, too, and so he appeared as important as he did enormous.

White, gleaming teeth showed in some monstrous facsimile of a grin on the black snout of the colossus. Ugly words passed around the group before coming around to the striped monster. Ember knew not what he said, but to his companions the words were: A very quick meat-eater! Much faster than I expected. We'll honor his wounds and ours.

Naked and bloody was Ember hanging slack in the grip of two stags. A calloused mitt under either armpit carried him and his toes rarely touched the forest floor. For all the aches and pains, Ember was relieved for the warriors to take such care in carrying him; and suddenly he realized that it wasn't their place to punish, only to reacquire. His own tribe was not so honorable when it came to running prey down.

That the warriors were not about to savagely beat Ember had a calming effect on him and by the time the group had reached the fruit and berry grove from where all the pandemonium had begun, his guard was down. He raised it again when the stags set him on his wobbly, bruised legs and helped him to sit in the dirt of the grove.

All around Ember sat the stallions and stags. They bared weeping slashes on their muscular bodies earned chasing Ember down, these wounds not unlike the marks the scout had earned himself. No wound was more off-putting than the gash on Ember's knee, however, and the wolf found himself favoring the leg and wincing when he shifted on it.

The wolf looked from one warrior to another, taking stock of them. He humored the idea of running again, but he knew his battered leg couldn't do it. Soon a ritual of the warriors would begin with Ember's participation forced. After this, the dullness of the cage would be like nirvana to the scout.