Queer Werewolves Destroy Capitalism

by MJ Lyons

  “That should hold it,” Tommy says, going back to his clothes, not an ounce of modesty as he struts around naked, still dripping with his own fluids. “My client tells me the Science Authority found this little baby in some ruins on Daphnis-7. Self-replicating micro-robotics. Some perv with a thing for tentacles would pay a fortune for this, just think of the marketing.”

  I shoot him a disgusted look as I use some scraps of my bodysuit to wipe myself up a little and cover myself. I can tell he’s enjoying the sight of me naked and caked in his cum . . . once again . . . “And how in the hell did you get access to it?”

  “You saw some of my . . . memories?” he gives me a knowing look. “The big hairy motherfucker who used me to trash his office? Still have some bruises from that one. Science Authority security. I bribed him to look the other way while I snuck in to the xeno lab with false credentials.”

  I scoff, pulling a shred of bodysuit around my waist in a crude loincloth, barely covering my junk. “The Authority would have noticed any credits coming in after a theft.”

  Tommy wiggles his ass at me as he steps into his pants. “I didn’t bribe him with money.”

  I sigh. “Tommy, you know I can’t let you get away with that specimen. This being might be sentient, it’s not some sex toy.”

  Tommy Zhang, shirtless and smeared in his own issue, walks right up to me and pulls me into a tight, grinding kiss, squeezing my ass hard enough with his free hand to leave a print. After a moment he pulls away, smiling. I’m almost melting, ready for round two.

  “Oh Hyacinthe, you’ll have to catch me first,” he says apologetically, before pushing me backwards, his leg tripping me. I fall backwards and the alien being catches me, cushioning my fall, tendrils running over my body without hesitation.

  I watch as he scrambles up to the edge of the gully and then turns around, taking out a device and snapping a picture of my fresh predicament before giving a wave and disappearing into the underbrush.

  “Hy,” VIA’s voice chimes in my ear, “after extensive observation I believe I can now extricate you remotely without hurting you or the alien being. Would you like me to begin the process?”

  I sigh as the now familiar feeling of the obsidian tendril starts to stroke my clit, “Get the Crocus ready, VIA, and just give me a few minutes. Then we’ll go after that bastard.”

  I should have already learned my lesson. When Tommy Zhang fucks you over, he does it in every way possible

  Heir

  In my village, the elders tell a story of what was and what is to come.

  Long ago, the people of the Warlord Lands emerged from the depths of hell and invaded the Kingdom of the Sacred Mountains. They wore armour imbued with the spirits of evil demons and wielded sorcerous weapons that rained death down on our ancestors, but the first queen of the Sacred Mountains found a shrine to a mountain god. After prayer and meditation, the mountain god gifted her with mighty weapons that allowed us to hold off the people of the Warlord Lands once, and again, and again.

  The elders tell of the birth of two men, great heroes and uniters, who will bring a lasting peace between our two lands. These men will rise from the realm of the water goddess and will harness the power of the Ancients.

  I had stopped for something to eat, and meditated on the elders’ story while studying a ruin, the remnants of tower that must once have reached towards the kingdom of the sky goddess, but had long since toppled and become overgrown with vegetation. Stalks of their mythical building material still reached upward like colossal, skeletal fingers, tainted with decay like all wonders of their civilization that had long since collapsed under the weight of their incredible powers. We were taught not to dwell on these fragments of the Ancients’ empire that lingered. The elders believed that as hubris and unrestrained power angered the gods and brought the downfall of the Ancients, so too would delving into their knowledge.

  A light, sun-dappled mist fell over the mountainside as I hoisted my quiver over my shoulder, the familiar grip of Cheonjiwang, my magic bow, in my palm. I was following the trail of broken branches down the mountain, closing in on my quarry. The armour of the Warlords may be near impenetrable, but it was slow and clumsy on mountainsides, and easy to track.

  It had been four days since I had left my village, and a single day since I had picked up the trail of two people of the Warlord Lands. They traveled through the neutral lands, as close to the border as they could without chancing an encounter with scouts of the Sacred Mountains.

  Despite centuries of devastation from Warlord invasions, these lands were fertile and rich with game. I loved the lush green of the mountains, the heady smell of wet earth and healthy decomposition. I’d passed a few small farms and villages during my travels, but gave them a wide berth. Peasants in the neutral land were known for their indifference towards those who ruled them—their hatred of those who would bring war to their lands again. It was better I avoided unwanted attention anyways; I was undoubtedly being pursued, and if I was caught it likely meant my death.

  As the sun began to dance over the top of the mountain to the west I finally lost the trail at a shallow stream, so I stopped to fill my waterskin and say a quick prayer to the goddess of this mountain’s waters, to thank her for the sustenance and aid me in my journey. As I was leaning over the water to splash my face, I noticed the mud was stirred further on, and continued down the river, ribbons of silt whipped about by the gentle current. This water had been disturbed, and recently. The people of the Warlord Lands often attempted this tactic to throw off Sacred Mountain trackers, but their armour left deep treads. I smiled to myself—I was close; I would find the two wanderers by sundown.

  I crept steadily through the underbrush, following the stream as it flowed slowly down the mountainside, into a large pond. That’s when I saw him.

  He was naked, waded into the water up to his waist. He had the pale, snow-white skin of people of the Warlord lands, broad through the shoulders and chest, and a peppering of coarse dark hair on his chest, trailing down into the water. A suit of demon-possessed armour emblazoned with the red stars of the Warlords stood nearby, watching over him, although I couldn’t see the second armoured warrior.

  Until it came crashing out of the forest behind me.

  I rolled out of the way of the warrior’s charge—thankfully it had no weapon in hand, but that didn’t make it any less deadly. I was not so lucky as it swung its great metal gauntlet around, which caught me in the side of the head, sending me sprawling. My head spun as I clawed in the dirt for Cheonjiwang, but I felt the cold metal gauntlet wrap around my neck, lifting me, choking, into the air. I reached for the dagger on my hip, but the other arm swatted it out of my grasp. I felt the world going black when I heard a deep voice nearby speak an incantation to the demon armour.

  I was dropped to the earth, coughing for breath. I swore curses at the man who stood over me. He was naked, dripping wet and smirking.

  “My, my,” he purred in his barbaric northern accent. “It seems I’ve caught a little prince. Whatever am I going to do with him?”

  “Go to hell, demon-worshipping heathen,” I coughed out. He laughed and held out his arm, then pulled me up into a kiss, his huge arms wrapping around me.

  “I hope you weren’t followed, you idiot,” I whispered, grinning as he plied my face with tender kisses. “I’ve been tailing you for days. A boar is more graceful.”

  “Officially, I’m on a scouting mission,” Ji-min replied, taking me by the hand and leading me to where the other suit of armour watched on. “They know I like to wander. They won’t miss me for a couple more days. Come, you need a wash. A boar smells more fragrant.”

  I felt uneasy under the burning red eyes of the demon armour as he led me down toward the water. The other looked on from the side of the water, the glowing embers in the helmet following me. “Who’s inside them?”

  “They’re . . . moving on their own at the moment, under my command,” he a
nswered. I shivered at the statement. The massive, plated suits were intimidating enough, but to think a demon from the time of the Ancients allowed them to walk and fight . . .

  Ji-min’s possessed armour watched as he worked at the clasps of my scale coat, while the other prowled the perimeter of the water, just out of sight. He placed the golden-bronze scale armour to the side and began to unbutton my padded coat beneath. As it fell to the ground I was left in little more than a robe and my baggy breeches. His callused hands worked beneath the thin folds of cloth and found the tie for the breeches.

  “I’ve been thinking about the night we met,” he murmured into my ear as the cool, early night air fell over my naked body. I looked down and I could tell he was. His kiss brought me back to the day, though I had thought on it often.

  For centuries we fought the people of the Warlord Lands on the territory between our two kingdoms. For centuries, Warlord soldiers would butcher our peasants on incursions beyond our borders only to be pushed back by our scouts, more knowledgeable of the terrain. Their Ancient knowledge of demon-possessed armour made a single Warlord warrior stronger than a dozen soldiers of the Sacred Mountains, but mountainside combat was harsh, treacherous. To take our towns they first had to climb, and we grieved them every inch.

  Until finally, under my mother, a peace was reached. The Warlord was an old man, he had lost all his male children in battles, and seemed tired of death, and so was more receptive to a treaty, however it galled his warmongering people. It was a tenuous peace, and not without bloodshed. We would find villages near the border fire-torn, death walking the street, unsanctioned forays from the north. Our scouts would slip past their military checkpoints and assassinate entire families in retaliation. Far from ending the hostilities, we seemed closer to bubbling over into an all out war that would annihilate the two old kingdoms.

  My mother offered to meet for peace talks. Her concession for bringing a hundred Sacred Mountain warriors, my brother and I included, was that we would meet on Warlord land, a mountain known even before the empire of the Ancients as “the place where a Spirit dwells.” Holy land for us, uninhabited and non-strategic land for them.

  Only a day’s journey over the border, the mountains of their lands were familiar to us. Likewise, the people of the Warlord lands—although their blood had been mixed with northern invaders long ago—bore little difference from our people. They were our brothers and sisters, my mother told our people.

  They were scandalized to find that women numbered equally among our warriors, while we were scandalized to find that within their suits of demon-possessed armour were mostly green boys, shades of the battle-hardened, bloodthirsty monsters we had come to expect. The Warlord was so ancient he could barely even walk outside of his suit of red-starred, infernal, enchanted armour. As he approached my mother to shake hands the Warlord stumbled and fell to his knees, groaning in pain. I flinched as a nauseating silence fell over the assembly. Anyone else probably would have rushed to help him back to his feet, but my mother merely studied him and said, as if speaking to an old friend, “Get up, old man.”

  The Warlord swore at her, got up, and they walked side by side into the central tent to work out terms.

  That evening we shared rice-wine from our village, while the Warlord’s camp had caught an aurochs in the woods and charred it halfway to hell. There was a festival-like spirit to the evening as we shared drink and food. My mother and the Warlord seemed satisfied with the agreement, although both agreed a marriage would have better cemented the peace, but he had no living children, let alone daughters, and she had only sons. The Warlord was giving up a significant amount of disputed, fertile border land if we shared a small portion of the produce and livestock. In return the Warlord’s people would be allowed passage on our land to survey a number of Ancients’ sites for the artifacts they were so obsessed with. The Warlord got into his cups and toasted my mother with a ribald song familiar to the veteran soldiers. She smiled politely and raised her cup in kind.

  Not all were happy with the arrangement. The few surviving veteran warriors of the Warlord grumbled that farmers were invading their land and they weren’t even putting up a fight, while several Sacred Mountains chiefs rankled at the idea of these murdering barbarians crossing over their land, and to pillage the cursed sites of the Ancients, no less. My younger brother, Dae-jung, was chief amongst these critics, fancying himself a great hero of the people.

  “Don’t you see, Hyun? They’ll use whatever they find in our lands against us,” he muttered to me after Mother and the Warlord had announced the terms, to runners who would carry their orders forth into our lands. “And we’ll be feeding them while they do it. Mother has lost her mind!”

  I was not so naïve as to accept the Warlord’s offer at face value. They valued the knowledge of the Ancients, yes, but that knowledge was usually the lost empire’s unholy ingenuity in arcane weaponry. However, and I stated so to Dae-Jung, both our peoples had bled enough through the ages of war.

  “Who’s to say it will end here?” he responded. It was not lost on my mother nor I when he failed to appear at the feast that evening, and it turned out he had taken a dozen warriors back to our village in advance.

  But Dae-Jung’s departure was a revelation for the next morning, for I found myself beside Ji-min, one of the Warlord’s honour guard, at the high table that evening, and I was distracted from political matters.

  I found the young warrior surprisingly bright and pleasant, not the crude, uncivilized bore I had expected of a Warlord’s soldier. He pressed me with questions about my people. Was it true we worshipped a mountain god? Well, yes, of course, though not just one mountain god, but the god of each of the sacred mountains, and the goddess of the sky and the goddess of the waters, and minor gods and spirits in everything all around us.

  Was it true we used magic weapons, enchanted by the Ancients? No, our weapons were blessed by the mountain god who gifted them to the first queen. My bow, Cheonjiwang, had been passed down from generation to generation, enchanting each arrow that flew from its string to strike our enemies.

  He leaned in close and whispered, “Some of the older warriors say your men lie with men, and your women lie with women.”

  I couldn’t help but notice our knees touched beneath the table, and cocked an eyebrow at the furtive statement, “Of course.”

  He seemed taken aback. “Have you?”

  I told him I only joined with men, and he was speechless a moment. “Aren’t your people worried you’ll never produce a child? An heir?”

  I hadn’t given it much thought. I was still young, barely a man grown. My mother was healthy and my village strong. I told him from my understanding, producing a child wasn’t difficult, even some of our men could if they desired to when the gods blessed their sacred transformation, although I was not one of them. It was the rearing that proved a challenge. He rested his elbows on the table, hands propping up his head, looking glum. “I’ve been promised to a girl since my eighth year.”

  I rested my hands on my knees, and let my little finger brush across his knee. He sat up straight and our eyes met, but he didn’t pull away.

  The realm of the water goddess was from whence all life had come, and so it seemed right that our first joining was by the side of a stream on that warm summer night, a safe distance away from camp. I pressed my body against his and showed him how love between two men could be like a gentle rain or a surging ocean. Ji-min hoped that his compatriots back at camp wouldn’t hear us and come find him being bested by a Sacred Mountain farm boy in swordplay.

  After, we washed one another, then exerted ourselves, then washed again, then laid on the bank of the stream and spoke long into the night. Ji-min approved of the peace accord, but didn’t think it would last. Many of the Warlord’s warriors were waiting for their leader to die, out of honour, or respect, or cowardice, before a power struggle would ensue. If this didn’t kill his people, whoever emerged as the victor would throw the power
of the Warlord Lands against the people of the Sacred Mountains, and they simply didn’t have enough people to survive another war. They would be lucky to survive another generation with what they did have. Their isolation had cursed their bloodlines. Worse yet, one General popular among the warriors described a weapon of the Ancients that could set fire to the southern lands. He seemed to believe that victory over a land of death and ashes was better than the defeat of peace.

  Ji-min knew of a weapon as well; or a tool, a power at the very heart of the Ancients’ lost empire he and a Warlord scholar had learned of in the Warlord’s little-used archives. He explained it to me, and I could barely comprehend what he suggested. The feat he described was impossible, and to travel to the very heart of the Ancient empire . . . but I was reminded of the elders’ story, so I agreed that I would find him on a mountain northwest of my village, near the border, if the peace seemed threatened in a year’s time.

  And so we found ourselves sleeping in each other’s arms that night a year on. The embers of war smouldered at our backs, and the unknown power of the Ancients rose, shadowed, before us.

  Over the next two days we kept to the highlands as best we could. The closer we got to the coast the more flooded the lower lands, especially from the heavy summer rains. So too did we find more evidence of the Ancients, not just their impossible, broken spires, but the remnants of humble dwellings, small metal structures Ji-min explained once carried them about their world, chunks of great skybound roads that once skeined through the empire.

  Scouts learn a great deal about one another on forays into the mountains, who is brave and who is craven, who is resourceful or inept. We learn of the trustworthy and those who are not. So too did Ji-min and I learn a great deal of one another, for while we were lovers of two nights we were still new to each other.