Berserker god

CHAPTER SIX

Suvi

I’d long given up on fighting the alien monster’s hold on me. It was too big, too strong, and wasting my energy was pointless. Instead, as it dragged me into the river and held me on its shoulder, staring intently into the distance, I stilled. I carefully placed my palms flat against the muscled expanse between the creature’s wings, lifting my head and staring through the curtain of my hair to get my bearings.

This landscape was nothing like where we’d just been. There was no sign of the caves or the valley we’d come from. No sign of the ship, either. The sandy soil was a golden beige instead of blue. And all the water. We’d relied completely on our ship’s water supplies because there’d barely been any on the surface of the cave planet, let alone massive rivers like this. We knew from surveys and scans that the entire cave planet had been like that – mostly dry, with the only life forms being fungi and forms of bacteria. I gasped when, straight ahead, some sort of water fowl took off from a nearby bank, wings unfolding in a glittering array.

This isn’t the same planet.

I gulped when that instinctive realization hit me. My rational mind tried to fight against it. I hadn’t made it to the ship, so how the hell could I have ended up on another world entirely? I gritted my teeth, forcing myself to relive the moment when the winged alien had cracked the sky like the shell of an egg and pulled me through it. It hadn’t felt like much of anything at all. It had been like stepping through a door.

But somehow, on the other side, we’d ended up in another sky.

And now, we were standing in a freezing fucking river.

Luckily the thing holding me was so tall that neither my feet at his front nor my head at his back were in the water. But even so, my boots and the cuffs of my pants were soaked from when the alien had first marched me into the water. And it was cold. I shivered, curling my hands into fists against the scales of the alien’s back as I continued to crane my neck this way and that. Why it had carried me into this water only to hold me and stand there and stare at nothing, I had no fucking idea. For the moment, it didn’t seem keen on hurting me, at least. I’ll have to get away from it the first chance that I have.

But then what? My heart sank. I didn’t recognize anything around me. For the briefest flicker of a moment, I thought we might have been on Earth. But that water bird was massive, with four spindly legs, unlike anything I’d ever seen or heard of on Earth. And the reeds and rushes were strange, too. They had fluffy tufts, reminiscent of something from Earth. But in those tufts at the top were hard, gleaming threads of what almost looked like metal. Like copper had been spun alongside something as soft as cotton.

We were not on Earth.

Maybe I was dreaming.

Maybe I was dead.

No.

My resolve hardened. There was no point in giving up and pretending this all wasn’t real. I had to function under the assumption that my senses were feeding me accurate information. I had to assume that this was actually happening, no matter how little sense it all made.

And I had to survive it.

Almost as if reacting to my i

It did neither. It remained still and breathing harshly for a long moment before trudging back onto the riverbank. My hair swung with its movements. Blood pounded in my head as I shivered again, more violently this time.

I didn’t think the air was that cold, but the water had been, and the iciness clinging to my boots and legs was sapping the heat out of the rest of my body. When the alien had suddenly started and whirled, more water had splashed up the backs of my legs. Only my tank top and bra had come away from the river unscathed, but they were damp with cooled sweat from my earlier run.

Heat radiated off of the alien’s body, but I tried to ignore it. I rejected the instinct to burrow against its back and started twisting in its grip once more. Surprisingly, its huge fingers settled around my waist and it set me on my feet. Between what felt like an entire body’s worth of blood dumping out of my head, and the frantic, freezing, locking up of my muscles, I didn’t stay on my feet for long. My knees buckled.

I never hit the ground.

The alien’s claws shot out, grasping the front of my tank top. But the fabric was too thin, and its claws too sharp. With a horrifying sound, the garment tore as the weight of my body pulled backwards against it. The alien’s wings curved forward, curling around both of us, creating a strange sort of hammock of flesh that I fell into with an oof. The alien cradled me – it seemed such a strange word to use for a creature so huge and brutal, but cradling truly is what it did – before it slowly lowered to its knees, adjusted the position of its wings, then deposited me on the ground.

It stared down at the ruined tank top in its claws then looked back at me. Instinctively I slapped my arms over myself. I still had my bra at least, but that didn’t feel like nearly enough under the one-eyed gaze of the hulking creature before me. There was an exacting sort of intensity in the single golden orb of its eye. A hard and burning question in the gaze. Like it was looking at me, into me, and wordlessly asking who I was and what I was doing there even though it had been the one who’d brought me in the first place.

“What do you want?” I rasped through chattering teeth. The creature towered over me, unblinking as it stared. Its wings were still mostly around me, like a verdant canopy, blocking out the river and stars and sky until all that was left was that hard, alien body and strange, dragonish face. Something flickered in the eye, in the expression, and it opened its fanged mouth, once again stringing together sounds that really did seem like words. Whatever it said was ended, once again, with the uttering of aerra bai.

It had to be language. Especially considering the repetition of aerra bai. Whatever its motives, it seemed to be an intelligent creature.

Intelligent and powerful beyond belief.

It didn’t say anything else, instead once again looking down at my shredded tank top. Its scaly brows lowered, and it turned its attention to my torso. I shrieked when, in an instant, both my wrists had been grasped in its one huge hand and torn upwards and away from my body. The alien held my hands over my head with one hand and, after dropping my tank top, used the other to poke and prod along my neck and shoulders, as if testing the solidity of my skin.

Fear pooled in my belly, and I stopped breathing when it brushed a knuckled between my breasts and down to my abdomen. It said something then, some sort of a deep grunt that I had no way of interpreting, before letting my hands go. I hugged myself and tried to scoot backwards and away from it, only for my back to hit the wings that still cocooned me.

“What do you want?” I asked again, this time in a whisper. It cocked its head. As it did so, its long black hair shifted, framing its strange, snouted face and tumbling in tangles over its broad shoulders and hardened pectoral muscles.

Once again, it spoke, and once again I had no idea what the fuck it was saying.

More and more, though, it felt wrong to think of the alien as an it. It had language. It walked upright like a human. And there was a deep, wild, inescapable intelligence in the harsh probing of its single golden eye. I sucked in a shaky breath, my gaze trailing over the brutal angles of its snout and thick neck, down over the scale-covered pectorals and rippling abdominal muscles. The alien wore no clothing, and there were no discernable genitalia between its bulging thighs. Maybe it was stupid to try to categorize this creature. Maybe it was foolish of my frantic human brain to search for a scrap of familiar context where none existed. But even so, I couldn’t help the sudden and instinctive conclusion resounding through my body like a gong.

Male.

He felt distinctly male to me. And until proven otherwise, that’s how I’d think of him.

It was so, so warm in the folded shelter of his wings. Heat poured off of him, sweet and disarming, like dark syrup. It rolled over my shivering form as I hugged myself tightly. When he didn’t say or do anything else, I let my eyes drift over the glowing points of light twinkling all over his body, lighting up his scales like golden constellations. His scales were gem-like and so reflective that they multiplied the effect of the lights in the growing darkness, turning his body, from neck to tail, into a multi-faceted wonder.

If he hadn’t been so terrifying, I would have almost called him beautiful.

He had none of the lights on his face, but there was a distinct and solitary glow in his remaining eye—a fiery amber that got brighter, nearly white in the middle, instead of darker like a human’s pupil. I gaped when I realized that he had a thick fringe of sooty eyelashes above that eye, dusted gold with light from below. The lashes and the long black hair felt so non-reptilian, so at odds with his scales and wings and tail. Even the scales along his brow bone were darker, simulating eyebrows.

The sum of all the parts was... utter confusion.

I had no idea what to make of him or what to do about him besides the instinct bleating at the back of my head to get as far away from him as possible. But that instinct was at odds with my body’s need to remain coiled inside the walls of heat his wings and chest had created. I tried to reconcile the two panicking messages – the messages telling me to stay warm and to run – and soothed myself, telling myself that I would figure out how to get away the moment fleeing from him was safer than being warmed by him.

I almost wanted to laugh bitterly. I wanted to punch him, or maybe the ground. Wanted to rage against the fact that this was what my life had become – that I’d been reduced to stacking my physical needs upon each other in order of importance, hoping the entire tower didn’t crumble. That I’d become so calculating in regards to my own survival, prioritizing one bodily instinct over another. Staying warm came out on top. For the moment. But that would shift the second I needed it to.

The Scilla madeirensis can grow among hostile volcanic rock. The Sideroxylon spinosum has roots that go deep enough to find water in the driest climates, producing rich argan oil. The Cyrtanthus ventricosus only flowers after wildfire, bright blooms against ash, earning its name the fire lily...

The survival instinct was everywhere. Even in plants.

It was in me, too.

And wasn’t that what Elvi had told me at the end? When she’d been in the hospital? She’d made me promise not to miss her. She’d made me promise to be brave and to live. Because that was the most important thing.