Tessoul
I’d been coming to this spot for years now; I crept up to the foot of the mountains where the grass met the snowy base of a towering heap of rock and earth. Drawn by something, and now I knew exactly what it was. The Kilari were here, waiting to kill us all. And my love wouldn’t give it a second thought.
This would be the last time I came here, I thought. I was determined to end it this time, to make sure nothing bad came from this. I didn’t want what happened to the Vithohn to happen to the humans. They didn’t deserve that—not again.
"I'm afraid."
It was her.
She spoke the words and came up behind me. Her voice was as familiar to me as my own. She moved her hands over her heart. “To love you," she clarified. "I'm afraid."
"To trust me," I corrected.
"Yes," she said quietly, brushing my face with hers. "I'm sorry."
"All is forgiven," I said, resigned to my fate then, even despite her sadness. "Is this visit social in nature, or all business?"
"Maybe both," she said, scratching her arm and having a flush of red come across her face. "You don't want me here?"
"I'm confused by you," I said.
"I suppose you have every reason to be mad. But I can't stop thinking about you, and I'm... I'm ready now."
I smirked, despite myself. "Is that right?"
"Would you like me to tell you again how sorry I am, Tessoul?" She teased and grabbed my hands. "Because we have bigger things to deal with right now."
"I've been coming out to this spot, drawn here by some purpose. I'm lost as to what that is now, so I find my thoughts drifting over to you and our first battle. How fierce you were with me. How badly I wanted you. Being inside you was..."
"Primordial?" she said lowly.
"No, just the opposite," I replied and grabbed her face in my hands; shielding her face from the winter storm. "It was the first time I realized why the Kilari were so aggressive toward the humans. Why we were doing this."
"Why?"
"To gain sanity," I said. "We'll do anything to get the females. There's something inside of us that knows that once we have you, we'll have control of ourselves. We want to escape this, and now we need you more than ever.”
"I know," she said with a thick swallow.
"Did you mean what you said?" I asked, heart suddenly pounding.
"About?"
"You love me," I said.
She twirled her lip in the corner of her mouth and smiled before pulling me into a deep, tight kiss.
I couldn’t take it anymore, and I had to have her then. I tugged on her pants, and she eagerly pulled them down, revealing herself to me.
“Fight over?” she teased, and I kissed her again, licking against her neck and sucking it as I lifted her up, pulling myself out to enter her.
She used my shoulders as leverage, and I lowered her onto me. I kissed her, encouraging her to wrap her arms around my neck.
Our mouths met and her tongue worked its way past my teeth as I thrust into her and felt the familiar feel of her body. It was too cold to get her completely naked, but I could still remember the way her breasts rippled and bounced as I worked my way into her.
She reached up to my ear, breaking our kiss, and elicited beautiful moans and breaths into my ear and whispered, “Don’t stop.”
Her voice was nearly enough to send me overboard. I grabbed her by the backside and slid her up and down, holding her as tightly as possible.
Going so long without her touch was infuriating; it was like I was missing something somehow—like a piece of me was gone.
Feeling her body back against mine and marveling at how she writhed against me in perfect union felt almost too good to describe.
I heard a crowd of Vithohn approach; I could sense them.
Without warning, I lowered Sidney off of me and watched as a crowd of Vithohn approached us and attacked us at will. “Stop!” I yelled, but they were far from reason by now. They were on a mission, and the mission was to have Sidney.
I watched as they got hard, coming for her, ready to take her from me. I grabbed Sidney, and we ran.
I was ready to follow the calling then. I closed my eyes and let the pull drag me to it until we were far from my people: until the pull was too powerful for them to follow. A deep cave in the far north end of the mountain: a shallow inlet that glowed and hummed with the call of the Kilari.
“How did they know we were here?” Sidney asked in a panic, following my lead and crawling down into the cave.
I jumped down behind her and looked up at the circle of sky visible from within.
“They followed the calling,” I said and shrugged. “Maybe Baxley told them. I don’t know.”
“Uh, Tessoul?”
I followed Sidney’s beautiful voice and turned, regarding the cave with horror and shock. It was filled with eggs: large eggs set on pedestals. I could tell they weren’t anywhere near hatching, save for four that were clearly broken.
A lilted breath swallowed down my throat, and the cave began to hum.
“When I say so, you run,” I said to Sidney, and she gave me a dutiful nod.
Suddenly a group of the Kilari were among us, just as I remembered. We both scrambled around the creatures, and I tried my best not to let her hand slip from mine, desperate to keep her with me as long as possible. The Kilari grabbed Sidney's arm and pulled her tightly into the packed sand bed below us.
I turned to grab her out of the sinking hole and fell backward as a Kilari leaped forward and tackled me, sinking its dark teeth into my side and sending my body careening with warm, sharp pain. I gripped its jaw as tightly as I could and held its head back, snapping it completely and whipping the creature to the ground, running for Sidney once more.
I gripped Sidney's arms and began to pull her from the sinkhole, feeling the weight of my wound steal my strength from me. I was suddenly met with towering Kilari, hissing at me, their teeth stained with green globs of mucus being drooled and spewed everywhere. For every tooth it had, it had three eyes that, much like the mouth, produced a green colored liquid. The eight tails smacked against the sand causing the ground to shake, and each time they would do so I would be sent careening back to the ground.
Sidney pulled me up, and we raced for the way out: a small beam of light still falling through the pit's rocks. She dug at the hole until she could pull herself through. Spinning around, she reached her hand down into the pit for me.
I grabbed her hand and kissed it, feeling farther and farther away from her now.
"Run," I said.
"No," she begged. "I know what you're going to do, and just no."
"Go," I said.
"Look, we are so lucky to have you stand behind us and be willing to be sacrificed to make this grand gesture. But... please... I'd really prefer if you didn't," she cried, tears streaming down her face as I held her there, our eyes flicking back and forth from one another in a tense gaze.
“Get the girls,” I pleaded right back. “Take them to my people. It’s the only way we can fix this. Tell them what happened here.”
She shook her head, red curls falling in front of her face.
"I believe in a world better than this, for you." I swallowed hard and kissed her. "But sometimes there is no choice but to fight."
She swallowed then and kissed my hand, shaking her head.
"Sidney," I said with a choke. "Thank you."
I left her then, afraid that if I didn't, I could never let her go. There was one thing I could do to stop this, I thought: a bolt of electricity that would occur if I self-detonated my force field.
Two Kilari bellowed, once again causing Earth to shake. They tossed their combined two-thousand-pound bodies at me, slamming me into the wall.
I deployed my shield and felt the weight of a Kilari above me. I opened eyes for what felt like ten minutes after and looked up at the Kilari blinking its many eyes back at me. I closed my eyes and hit the button, timing it right for when the creatures came at me.
In a sliver of my eyelids, I could see a glimpse of something bright that left me deafened. It lit up as it sprayed a thin blue light that soon covered the area of the base, little beads of light forcing themselves forward. When the beam hit the Kilari, they disintegrated, bellowing a horrifying scream.
Then it all went black.