Chapter 2:
His dark hair hung in his face. His eyes, also dark, bored into hers as his body positioned itself over hers. Lornia’s legs parted. Her fingers moved along supple skin, satin over steely muscles. The feel of that skin under her fingertips made a hard gasp escape from her throat. Her hips bucked upward as his fingers slid between her legs, stroking her wet sex with an expertise that sent shivers racing all along her spine and made dewy perspiration come up all over her body.
Her full lips met his. His mouth tasted of water—fresh and clean water—and the starchy vegetables that were so large a part of her diet. The heat of his body soaked into hers, sending more sensation along her nerve endings as his hand continued to move between her legs, his thumb finding the high-standing ridge of flesh right at the top of her wet mound and stroking it in slow and hard circles that made fluids gather and pour from her core.
Those fluids drenched her inner folds and ran down her ass crack, pooling onto the covers below her body. Her heels dug into the mattress and covers, her body twisting as she struggled to get closer to the source of that exquisite torment.
His tongue stroked hers and pleasure coursed through her body, making a low moan, muffled by his lips, come up and echo around the large and high chamber in which she had lived in for so long.
“Yes,” she whispered into his heated mouth. “Please yes.”
His hard rod pressed against her opening. Her fluids drenched that silken skin at the head of his thick and throbbing member and Lornia’s legs spread wider. Her nipples went stiff and high, pointing toward the ceiling as her back arched and her hips did too. One single inch of his thick rod slid inside her walls, parting her sheath and making her want him more than ever.
More oils slid from within her. His hips, lean and well-toned, moved and then he was in her, hot, hard and so very long and thick that she could feel herself stretching to take him in and cradle him within her snug and slippery walls.
They moved together. Her nails, short and square, left vivid scratches along the flesh of his back. His teeth tugged at her bottom lip, and her cries grew longer and louder with every thrust and withdrawal of his member.
She moaned out, “I’m coming! I’m coming!”
His eyes, dark and fathomless, drilled an intense gaze into hers again as sensation broke and left her gasping. Her body began to spasm, her inner walls folding in on his dick and then releasing that hot member with every wave of her orgasm. He said, “I’m coming. Soon. We are all coming soon. Wake up, Lornia.”
What?
Lornia sat up, her blonde hair hanging in tangled strands around her face and her mouth dry and sour. Her heartbeat far too fast.
The dream—had it been a dream?—shattered all around her. She sat up in her bed, her eyes searching the darkness and her ears straining for a sound.
As always, there was nothing but the sound of the wind battering at the crumbling walls and broken windows, the scurry of mice feet and the low whine of machinery that was wearing out and breaking down a little more with every passing year.
Wishful thinking then. She was used to that. Far too many years of silence made sure of that. Her heart ached. Her fingers curled as she placed her feet on the floor and stood, her breath coming in hard gasps as tears threatened. It was funny how all of her emotions had become magnified with each passing year and consciousness.
She slid through the room, her hair waving down to her slender waist and her slim pale feet silent on the cold stones of the floor. She didn’t bother closing the door to her chamber anymore; why would she? Lornia was the sole survivor of the Speakers, the race that had created that space between the universes and just beyond the sealed doors to both the universes that it stood between. There was nobody else there and nobody to breach her privacy.
The corridors hummed with the tuneless whine that always pervaded the fortress. The machines that had once powered it had mostly broken down and died over the centuries. The walls had fallen. The prison that had been meant to keep the weapon, the machine that could change the very shape of the entire universes around it, was too old to remain there where it stood but there was nobody to make the necessary repairs.
Lornia paused, her golden eyes huge and lambent despite the darkness. Why bother? None had come though she had been sure that they would. Why not let the machine die? Why not let the gears grind down and the door close forever? The weapon was old now, worn away by too many years of ceaseless waiting and lack of care. What difference did the fate of two universes make if the secret of the door and those who’d sheltered with the fortress between them had been lost and forgotten?
That was what worried her the most: what frightened her the most.
What if it had been forgotten?
It had been so long! So many centuries, all of them passing slowly and inexorably. Death had come and taken all that she had known and loved and left her with nothing but loneliness and the terrifying certainty that she’d exist forever there, trapped in the nowhere and yet everywhere because there was not one being left in the universes who remembered that legend and who might come to open that door so she could slip through and back into life again.
Life.
She missed it so much!
She paused, a tall and attenuated being whose silver hair hung to her ankles and whose face was made up of clever angles that gave her high, pronounced cheekbones and a wide mouth. Her eyes were slightly too large for the oval shape of her face, and her ears were small, well-made, and very close to her head. Her legs and arms were long, and her waist tiny. Her breasts were small and firm despite the centuries and the long and narrow feet stilled on the stone floor had a set of pulsing blue veins running along the tops of those pale feet, veins that had knotted slightly over the years but not yet bulged.
Life.
That thought caught her and held her in place. The sound of voices and laughter. Passion. Food. The sight of stars and the feel of wind in her hair. The sight of others, and all the passion they brought with them. She’d give almost anything to have that again!
Would she ever have that again?
“I’d rather die than remain here as I have for so very long. Why can’t I just find the courage to find a way to turn it all off and let Tralam fall?”
Her voice sent the little mice that had nestled into a corner into flight. Lornia watched them go. Where they’d come from was no mystery. The science makers had thought to use their ancient ancestors for experiments, but that horrible accident had freed them and the other creatures as well. Some of those creatures had been deadly, and a battle had ensued. Many, both creature and sentient being, had died before they—she and the ones who’d survived the beast’s initial onslaught—had finally won, but not without sacrificing much in the way of the fortress’ defenses and supplies.
There’d been nothing to do but to go to the cryo-chambers and hope the centuries-long sleep would allow them to live again once they woke.
Only four of the two dozen who’d survived the beast wars had woken though.
Franchine had killed the rest.
Lornia’s lips thinned down as she headed for the room where the machinery labored on. Franchine. That arrogant and determined being who’d done his experiments in secret and without conscience.
He’d mutated the creatures, which was why they had attacked in the first place, and been so hard to kill as well.
Franchine, who had been willing to risk everything—even his life and the lives of all those behind the Speaker’s door and inside Tralam—to try to find immortality.
In the end, he had.
But it had cost nearly every life there—even his.
Lornia had woken to find Franchine not just ancient, but insane. He’d been dying even as she had woken. He’d somehow managed to pretend to be going into cryo, but he had arisen from that frozen bed and began his experiments all over again, that time using his own people for his unwilling subjects. How hard they had suffered, Lornia did not want to know. The bones, the desiccated remains, had told the story enough—and she had wanted to see or hear no more.
She’d been lucky. Franchine had somehow discovered that taking his fellow dwellers out of cryo to experiment upon them only ensured their deaths. He’d found a serum and used it on the ones who had remained, and on himself.
That serum had kept him alive for centuries while he did his best to perfect it. When she had woken, it was to find that she alone had survived his experiments and that she had been altered in ways that were irreversible and terrible.
The machinery room door had once been closely guarded. Now it stood open. She entered it slowly. The machine that kept Tralam from falling into the nothingness sat in the center of the room, all its aging tech lining the walls of the room and everything blinking and beeping and whirring away as the machine struggled not to die too.
Lornia went to it. She lifted her hands and settled them upon the face of the panel. The panel lit up. Her heart ached.
If the machine died—she died.
Maybe it would be better to let that happen.
“They’re coming.”
That voice spoke up inside her head again, and her teeth gritted. Was it possible or had she too gone mad from the long isolation and loneliness?
The machine groaned and labored; the lights blinked and winked out. Darkness blurred her vision. Lornia felt the floor falling out from under her feet. Panic hit her hard.
Franchine had done this, made her part and parcel of the machine, and she hated him for it. Hated him for all of it.
But mostly, she hated herself for being too afraid of death to let it all, herself included, just end.
The machine groaned. A stinking burning smell rolled up. Her nose wrinkled in disgust. More panic hit. Life or death. Everything. Always, and she was always and forever stuck, unable to choose death and without any hope of ever having life again.