The Great Cat Bows
Tilly and Arken have escaped back to Arken's home, but the night isn't over for any of them as Jurva, now more animal than man, pursues them seeking revenge.
The Great Cat Bows
A Short Story
Part of Rise of the Mother of Dragons
By: Heart Dragon
The ribbons of light flickered and died as the source of the Ra that had driven the ceremony fled, one chasing the other through the tents and out over the hill. Jurva felt stronger than he ever had, energized, filled with light. He was a hunter and prey lay scattered all around him. He could smell the sweat and sex of their coupling, a hundred different prey, and some hunters as strong, or stronger, than himself. His mate lay beneath him growling and hissing in displeasure as he drew himself out of her, both of them unfulfilled. The need to plant his seed inside her was strong, but something else was growing, thrusting back his instinctual need to mate, to pass on his strength and his seed.
Jurva clutched his head. He wasn't the beast. He didn't want to be thrusting his body inside the writing biting thing beneath him, whatever it was. He stumbled backward, away from the beast. It roared in fury and leapt at him.
He knew if he wasn't her mate he was just another invader of her territory, no matter that she yet had no territory, he was a danger. He grasped her arm and slid around, avoiding her reaching arms, the fingers tipped by razor claws, his own claws cutting skin and flesh. Blood flowed over his hand, paws, something in between. He tossed her, harder perhaps than he had intended, and she flew into the side of the brazier. He could see her more clearly now, outlined by the burning light of the dragon stones, though the ribbons had gone, and he was horrified. Her face was elongated, a half-muzzle, and covered with short dark fur. Her teeth had gone sharp, her lips thin, and her nose had shrunk to fit the muzzle. It was pink and black. Her eyes were yellow. It was all he really saw before she burst into blue flame, like rice paper, and was gone. It was a blessing.
He roared in pain and fury. He knew how he looked. He was no different from the creature he had just put out of her misery. His inner desire to live fought for a moment with his desire simply to follow the mate he'd put to the fire, but life won out. He could live and force them to turn him back to a man. He knew they had been responsible. They had stood, unchanged among all those here who were, glowing with hundreds, perhaps thousands of those ribbons of light, and they had only kissed, but it had done so much more to him, and to others he had known. He had seen his sister split out of her dress, a bear, and mounted by another who bellowed his pleasure as he thrust into her.
Jurva gave chase. He would force them to change him back. Force them or repay them. Both seemed equally desirable.
Tilly reached the doors her sides heaving for breath and tight with a searing pain in the muscles there. Her feet hurt from running in the new boots, which were scored by stones that had been hidden in the tall grass. She didn't mind. She didn't even notice. Her mind was overwhelmed with everything she remembered from the pavilion. Beasts that had been people rutting madly with one another, some even with those not of the same species. She remembered seeing a lion mounting a strange creature with only the rear of a female lion. Its head and forequarters that been that of an eagle, including wings, and it had the tail of some segmented creature that dripped a red smoking liquid from a barbed tip. She remembered it moaning in a human voice from a beak that was not at all human anymore as its lover thrust in climax and its tail stabbed down into him. The lion had convulsed and sprayed white across his mate's rear legs, but she had roared in pleasure anyway.
She turned, wide eyed, as the sound of booted feet approached. She stumbled back against the doors wishing that she were home as Arken stopped before her holding his own side and looking pale. Sweat poured down his forehead and his eyes looked almost dim.
"I have caught you Little Lamb." He said, breathing hard between each word. "Run no more from me."
She burst into tears.
A look of concern broke across his face and she could truly see how fatigued he was. It just made her sob louder.
He stepped forward and drew her into a hug, wrapping her up in his arms and holding her close to him until she could feel the beating of his heart. The doors behind her had opened and it was deep night in the room beyond, the white marble floor and fountain reflecting the silver moonlight coming through the windows all around. He picked her up, draping her legs over his arm, and carried her across into his place, his boots clicking on the marble floor, his arms shivering weakly beneath her as the doors began to swing closed.
Jurva stopped for a moment sniffing the air, the grass, the trail. He could smell the sweat of the male one, nothing human that, and strong, or should have been. His senses told him to take the thing quickly or become its prey. He would. He shuffled a few more loping steps further and scented again pinpointing the direction they had gone. He could see the ruins ahead, though just barely. If his eyes had been totally human still he could not have. An outline of light up there was slowly disappearing. They were escaping, and he knew if the doors closed that he would not find them again, not in this life.
He pounded forward, instinctually falling to all fours, his speed increasing significantly, though he was still more human than beast. His muscles bunched and strained and the grass laid flat beneath the wind of his passing as his paw hands beat the earth in time with the pounding of his heart and the beat of his anger. The gap of light grew thinner and he could see that it was moonlight, though not from this place, from somewhere else beyond the doors.
The gap grew smaller, perhaps too small for him to pass, but he was so close now and he could see the boy, whatever he really was, carrying the girl in his arms. Red rage beat against his skull and he didn't stop. He sprang through the gap, now too narrow, and scraped his sides bloody against the wood, but he passed through. In another leap, this one on just his two feet, he bounded to within arm's reach of the pair and smashed the boy with both fists closed together into a hammer of bone and sinew.
Arven collapsed like a ragdoll. The blow shouldn't have even hurt him, but it did. Pain shot across his head and his vision went blurry, then black. He slid to a stop a few feet away unconscious.
Tilly had fallen, her head cracked hard against the floor and her vision blurred for a moment then came back into focus in time to see the teeth descending towards her throat. She got her arm up just in time to block it, fear tearing through her as painfully as if the teeth had done the tearing. The teeth that should have sunk into her tender flesh scraped against her skin as if it was made of stone or metal. It hurt, but not as much as it should have done. The teeth left red welts behind on the skin, but they didn't bleed.
The creature she recognized as Jurva, as she had seen him before fleeing the pavilion, drew back and grabbed her arms in his hands prying them away from her throat. He would dive in for the kill then, she knew.
His teeth hurt. He wouldn't try to tear her that way again. She was strong. Her smell was a mix of everything and nothing. It was ancient and intoxicating in his nose. The rage drained away to be replaced by a mindless need that he had not satisfied with his mate at the ritual, but here was a better mate beneath him. He could feel her heat, her strength. She wriggled beneath him, trying to escape, and he growled threateningly. She stilled. He was satisfied.
The second skin she wore tore under his claws like loam on a forest floor, giving way easily. She cried out in fear, which only drove him to greater desire. He wriggled his hips, forcing her legs apart beneath him. She tried to pull her hands free and pain wrenched down her arms as his claws scraped across her skin. It wasn't broken only scratched, but the pain was enough to stop her trying again. She screamed in his face, a scream of defiance, as he thrust himself forward positioning his maleness, now hard and thick, against the tender flesh between her legs. There was no hardness here, no resistance like stone, only the softness of silk and the warmth of life.
She began to sob as he thrust himself into her body. She was so young, so tight; not really big enough to let him slid home easily. He pulled back and let pre-cum splash over her mound then jerked forward again, this time sliding deeper inside her feeling the warm silk of her wrap around him, her flesh pulsing against his trying to force him out. He threw back his head and roared, a feral bestial sound, as he forced himself hilt deep.
Tilly felt ripped open. Hot pain pulsed between her legs and in her belly where her muscles seized again and again in painful knots trying to force out the too large thing inside her body. She could feel blood running down her thighs and butt, pooling beneath her on the stone. Tears streamed down her face and she sobbed, though not in fear. She cried for the thing that reared above her that had once been a man she had known, if only for a brief time, and the knowledge that somehow she'd done this to him. She raised a hand and caressed his almost human cheek.
He lay there for a brief moment, reveling inside her, when her hand came up and touched his face. Jurva found himself once more. Everything he was suddenly returned and he saw what he had done, what he was doing, and tried to pull away, horrified. Instead of coming out of her he felt his manhood lock inside her, stiff short spines at the base of his cock dug into her flesh inside causing her to cry out in pain and sending him into the spasms of an orgasm.
"I'm sorry," he moaned in ecstasy and shame as his cum washed into her in great spurts that made him want to push deeper, though there was no deeper to go. She filled in an instant and his seed began to flow out of her, forced out between even their tight joining because there was no place within her for it to go. The pressure on her insides released his spines from her flesh and he popped out of her, still twitching and spraying seed across her thigh and stomach. He collapsed on the stone weeping at what he'd done.
Tilly got shakily to her feet. The flower between her legs felt like raw meat beaten with a tenderizing hammer and thin runnels of blood mixed with white semen ran down her legs. She limped to where Arken lay. He breathed steadily and didn't have any wounds that she could see, though she wasn't sure she'd be able to see any with him still trapped in his human illusion. When she reached down and touched him the illusion disappeared and he was a dragon again. He lay half curled on his back with his wings tightly folded against his sides and his long neck stretched out. She knelt beside him and pulled his head into her lap, stroking his long silky ears and feeling his warm breath on her stomach.
"You're hurt." He said, only half conscious, and barely more than a whisper.
She hushed him. "Not bad. Just a few scratches." She whispered into his ear. "Sleep. I don't know what happened, but it has left you very weak."
"I could heal if you lay with me." He mumbled.
She felt the throbbing pain both inside and out and still considered it but knew she couldn't.
"I cannot. I am sorry." She whispered, settling his head back on the stone. "Sleep."
It wasn't that she didn't want too, or even that it would hurt, probably very badly, but that should she help him heal now he would be strong again, ready to do murder to the man who now lay curled into a ball among a puddle of her blood and his seed, weeping, his body trembling with the force of his sobs.
She went to him and joined him, curling herself up against his back and wrapping her arms around his sides to touch his stomach and press her face against his back. She could feel fur beneath his tunic and his tail unconsciously curled around her butt and lay against her back, a warm length. He had sobbed himself to sleep, retreating into a world where he might be able to forget what he had done, and she joined him there, her body still energized despite her hurts, but her mind weary.
She faced the great white beast, noble and proud, and it knelt before her in homage.
"How may I serve thee oh queen of the world, last of the dragons?" The beast asked in a voice that seemed to slip and slid through her mind, hiding in shadowed recessed and leaping in delight at thoughts that were prey.
The creature didn't speak, not like she spoke, though she'd experienced something like this before, with Arken. It was sending, though some type that was wild and nearly uncontrolled.
"I am not a dragon." She said, but even as she said it she realized that she was wrong. In this place she was. Her body shone with golden scales that glowed like sunlight even though there was only stars and darkness above. She spread her wings. They ached for the sky in a way she couldn't describe, but she declined the invitation they offered and folded them primly back against her body.
The white tiger laughed aloud, a coughing growl that seemed both threatening and delighted at the same time. "Not a dragon indeed." He padded across the rock ledge, he hadn't stood on any rock ledge a moment ago, in fact there had been no surroundings save that blackness and twinkling stars until the moment she realized that there wasn't.
They stood at the foot of a great mountain range carved in deep channels by moving ice over centuries. She could almost remember those glaciers, their blue and white craggy surfaces shifting slowly across the land as the air warmed and they broke apart in huge pieces, sliding apart and digging the land into the hills and valleys she was seeing now. Tall sweet grass swayed in the breeze that moved over and around the hills. The white tiger looked around.
"A fine place." He said, stretching out in the sun.
Tilly shook her great head and fluttered her wings in agitation. "It's just a dream." She said.
"A dream?" He looked up at the sky and down at the earth. "Perhaps, but not all dream."
She snorted in agitation. "You speak in riddles."
He shook his head and laughed again. "Isn't that the way of dreams?"
She grunted in ill humor. "What do you want then?" She asked, her irritation growing.
"Me?" He got to his feet. "It was you who brought me here. I was perfectly happy right where I was. Where you put me."
"More riddles!" Tilly growled in irritation.
"Not from me." He said, his tail lashing. "You brought me here, called me. What do you command?"
"I don't understand." She said, now confused.
"It is I who am confused. You gave all us spirits of the land bodies, but you forced me out of the one I chose. Now you call me here. Why; if not to command me?"
The truth was beginning to dawn on her, though she didn't understand how it had happened, she and Arken had inadvertently been part of something ancient and powerful. It had consequences that she might never fully comprehend.
"Then leave the man you inhabit. Choose another." Tilly said.
The tiger shook his head. "That's not possible. We are a part of him. The spirit of all tigers are in him, though he didn't complete the transformation to tiger himself. He will never be completely human again."
Tilly growled, this time threateningly. "I don't believe that. There has to be something."
The tiger returned the growl, crouching as if ready to spring on prey.
"If you cannot leave him, then you will not fight him. You will let him remain as human as he is able." Tilly said.
"I'll give him a fair fight. That's all I can promise." The tiger said, kneeling, knowing that he had no chance against a feral dragon, not even in the spirit realm where he was powerful. "If he lets go, fails to fight back, then his existence will cease and we will take him. That is our nature and you cannot command that."
Tilly's heart thumped in her chest and her eyes hazed with anger. She was the queen? She was the one who'd called them, let them lay claim to those people, and now here was one daring to challenge her command? It was unthinkable. She knew that the thoughts came out of the dream of what she was supposed to be and not from herself, but they fueled the anger and self-loathing she was already feeling.
Her chest tightened and she roared, leaping forward spreading her wings high over her to reflect the sunlight in golden rays all around her. The tiger tried to leap out of the way but Tilly was quicker and much larger. One paw slammed the tiger sideways, knocking it prone, then the other pressed against its warm furred side, pinning it against the rock.
"Then I will bind you." She leaned her head forward and met eyes with the great tiger. "I will bind you all." She breathed out, letting everything go in a slow breath through her nose. Streams of steam flowed from her nostrils and curled into the tiger's. The mist glowed with power and the tiger struggled for a moment, then gave up and breathed in the power. Its eyes glowed blue and green, the mixed colors she'd seen in the eyes of Jurva as he'd bent over her, more beast than man.
She woke with a start. Sunlight, silvery and warm washed across the white stone floors of the room from the high windows and glowed off the scales of the sleeping dragon curled up near the center of the room. The man beside her was warmer than any normal man, as if burning up with fever, but he wasn't sweating or even stirring in his sleep. She stood, her skin stretching and shrieking where blood and other things had dried on her as she slept. More pulled at tender flesh battered and torn as she took a step towards the warm pool where she could wash away the filth if not the indignity.
When Arken woke he found Tilly soaking in the warm waters of the pool. He felt better than he had in a hundred years, though he remembered only a little that had happened in the few hours before he had slept. He climbed the stairs and slipped into the water. He swam silently, barely cutting the surface, and wound around her in the water.
"How do you feel Little Lamb?" he asked softly, raising his head just above the surface, his eyes glittering softly.
She shook her head. "I don't know." She shifted, unconsciously flinching away where he touched her.
His eyes filled with concern. "Little Lamb? What is wrong?"
She began to cry, the tears running down her cheeks to drip into the water. She lowered her eyes so he couldn't see her shame. She hadn't wanted to be raped, but she also didn't want to lay blame anywhere but with herself. She hadn't asked for it, but it had been her fault. She had created, however unconsciously, the circumstances that had led to it. She couldn't meet his eyes. She didn't even want him to know what had happened, though she knew she couldn't keep it from him. Even she could smell the blood and semen still in the air.
"I do not mind if you laid with him." Arken said, though she could hear differently in his voice, he did mind, though he thought he had no right.
He did mind. It was so obvious that the two had laid together but he didn't want to open a rift between them. He hadn't any right to lay claims on her. He'd thought they had a connection, but perhaps that had only been his loneliness, the hundreds of years he'd gone without affection. Now she couldn't stand for him to touch her. She'd realized how unnatural their union had been that first night, now that she'd laid with a human man. She flinched from his touch.
"I will let you both return to his lands. You will be happy there. He is noble and surely very wealthy." Arken said, his voice rough with pain.
Tilly shook her head and threw her arms around his neck, pressing his head to her stomach. He raised his head up in surprise but she didn't let go and he raised her half-way out of the water. She sobbed against his smooth scales, her tears running down and dripping onto his head.
"Little Lamb;" he started, but she broke in.
"No. Please don't send me away." She clung to him like he was the only think keeping her from drowning. "I didn't want it, but it was my fault. I'm so sorry."
He lowered his head back until she was again standing on bottom. She didn't release his head and he didn't try to pull away.
"I wouldn't send you away. I thought you would want to go." He said sadly nuzzling into her soft warm stomach. "You don't want to be around me anymore. I understand."
"You're wrong. You're so wrong." She whispered.
"Tell me what's really wrong then. I know something is." He said.
She held onto him for several minutes in silence building her courage and failing to begin more than once before finally starting. She whispered everything into his ear, holding onto his head tightly, knowing she couldn't stop him if he went mad as she expected, but ready to try.
His anger flared and banked as she explained through the rape and into the dream she'd experienced. When the explanation was finished he settled back into the water comfortably and let her hold his head gently.
"It wasn't your fault." He said, "and it wasn't his either."
She shook her head but he wouldn't let her begin.
"I didn't even know what would happen in that ceremony. How could you expect to have known, or been able to stop it?" He raised his head and met her eyes. "Don't dare blame yourself for what others do or don't do. If you want to blame anyone you should blame me."
"I don't blame you." She rubbed his ears. "I guess I can't blame anyone. It just happened. Like a natural disaster."
"Are you still hurt? Do you want me to send him home?" He asked.
She shook her head. "I don't think we can send him home. Not now."
Arken slid out of the water and moved over to the prone form, still unconscious. Tilly tensed as he opened his jaws, growing larger as he did, and picked up the man's form in his jaws, being careful not to bite. She relaxed as he moved back to the pool and dropped him in unceremoniously. She might not want him dead, but she hadn't yet completely forgiven him despite what she'd said to Arken.
Jurva splashed and spluttered, struggling to get his feet under him in the water. After a few moments of complete confusion he managed it and stood, water dripping from his feline ears into his eyes. He shook his head, spraying water in a wide circle around him.
He looked around wildly until his eyes fell on Tilly, though he missed the form of Arken hovering high above him.
"Oh god." He said, clutching his head as memories flooded him. "Oh what did I do?" He slid back into the water, his knees giving out on him. As he slid down he got a look above him and screamed. The shock was enough to send him spluttering and struggling again to get his feet under him, trying to flee from the enormous monster.
The girl was barely three quarters his height but she seemed so much larger as she hauled him up out of the water. He clutched hold of her and felt a jolt spike through him.
"Command me mistress." He said, though he had no idea why. He knew he would have knelt before her if it weren't for the water, but he'd had no conscious intention of doing either.
"That's proper." Arken said, his voice a great booming from above them. "Get him out of the pool before he despoils it."
"Arken," Tilly said, her tone chastising.
He snorted but turned and moved away from the pool, giving the man room to leave the water without being too threatening. Tilly helped Jurva stumble his way out of the pool, but as soon as they were on the steps he pulled away and knelt before her, bowing his head.
He didn't know what forced him to do it and he hated it. He was sorry for what he'd done, but he wasn't human anymore either. Wouldn't they have to pay for what they had done to him, what they had done to all those in the pavilion last night. He bowed his head.
"What would you have of me mistress?" he asked.