by Edward Lang
“LELIA?!” I cried out.
Suddenly her head turned, and two emerald eyes peered up at me, brimming with tears.
She burst into sobs and hooked her arms around my neck as I pulled her close to me.
My heart was thudding in my chest, more out of fear than anything –
But I hadn’t lost her.
She was okay.
And I had never felt happier or more alive.
“Jack,” she sobbed.
“Shhhhh,” I whispered as I cradled her and rocked her. “It’s okay, it’s okay…”
In all the commotion, we had forgotten why the skiris had come after us in the first place.
We were suddenly reminded when a feminine voice spoke up hesitantly behind us.
“…Lelia?”
Lelia and I turned to see the figure in furs stumbling towards us through the snow.
“…Oona ka lassa… vo naroot Lelia?” the figure asked in a tremulous voice.
“Oona!” Lelia cried out, and leapt up and stumbled through the snow.
The two women raced towards each other. They met halfway, embracing and sobbing and laughing all at the same time.
While they were having their moment, I looked down at the monstrous corpse lying in the snow just a few feet away, its matted white fur soaked and spattered with blood.
The skiris was even more terrifying close up. It was massive… probably 800 pounds at the very least. Its face looked like an extremely realistic Halloween mask, or some special effects prop by Hollywood wizards. It was hard to believe it was actually a real thing… yet there it was.
It was like seeing the Abominable Snowman for the first time and realizing, Holy shit, the legends were right all along…
I pulled out the arrows from the skiris – the ones that hadn’t broken, anyway. I’d heard that Native Americans always retrieved their arrows after a battle, and I could believe it. When it can take you an hour to make something, you don’t just leave it behind.
Unfortunately, most of the arrowheads pulled loose and remained embedded in the monster’s body, but we had a reserve of extras. We could replace them easily enough.
Behind me, the two women were chattering away happily in their native tongue. By this point they had removed their fur balaclavas, and I could see the new woman’s face.
She looked very much the same as Lelia in a general sense – blue skin, white hair, pointy ears – but in the specifics, she was quite obviously different.
She had a more rounded, heart-shaped face, for one. Her features were rounder, her nose more of a cute button than Lelia’s slender one. Her lips weren’t as full and sensual as Lelia’s. And she had blue eyes, not emerald green.
But she had a gigantic, warm-hearted smile, and her eyes sparkled as she spoke.
“Jack, this Oona!” Lelia called out. “She thought I was dead! That is why she is so happy to see me! She says the tribe is near us!”
I trundled over through the snow and raised my right hand in greeting as I lowered my gaiter with my left, exposing the lower half of my face.
“Hi, I’m Jack,” I said, before I remembered that this new woman had no idea what I was saying.
My actions and words had a seriously unexpected effect, though.
Oona cried out in terror and stumbled backwards.
“What?” I asked Lelia in surprise. “What’d I do?”
Lelia grabbed Oona’s hand and started talking rapidly in her own language. She sounded like she was alternately trying to comfort Oona and figure out what was wrong.
But Oona wouldn’t be comforted. She wailed and shook her head in terror.
And she babbled incessantly. I didn’t understand 99% of it, obviously, but I caught three words over and over again: skiris, vaklik, and rakala.
Damn – were their people’s legends really that terrifying? Lelia had acted weird when she found out about the avalanche, but not this weird.
And how the hell did this woman know I’d died somewhere else and come back to life?
Lelia looked at her with wide eyes, then tried to quiet her friend in a calm tone of voice. Again, I heard her saying vaklik several times.
When it finally appeared that Oona was no longer going to bolt into the forest, Lelia turned back towards me.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “Is she afraid of me because I’m a vaklik?”
Lelia looked dazed and seriously spooked as she answered. “Not because you are a vaklik… but because you look like another rakala she saw.”
“Another one? I thought you said you’d never seen one before me.”
“I haven’t… but Oona has seen one since I left.”
My stomach did a backflip in my gut.
I immediately thought of Katie, and wondered if maybe it was possible she could have come here after she died, too.
“Was it a woman?” I asked.
“No. A man.”
“Why was she so scared?”
“Because,” Lelia said quietly, “the other rakala is ruler of the skiris now… and he sent the skiris to kill Oona and the other women in my tribe.”
20
I stared at Lelia in shock. “Was he white? Like me?”
Lelia nodded.
“And he was human? I mean – he looked like me?”
Lelia nodded again.
“She’s sure?”
“She is sure,” Lelia murmured.
This was fucking crazy.
There was somebody else on this planet who was like me… and he’d somehow conquered a bunch of abominable snowmen and made them into a small army.
What the fuck?
I was seized by two opposing emotions:
The desire to protect Lelia and her friends from this asshole…
…and the need to find him and ask him a thousand questions.
How had he gotten here?
Had he died like me and come back?
Was it an avalanche that did him in, or something else?
Did he have any idea where were where, or how it happened?
And why was he doing conquistador-type shit with the skiris?
“Did you tell her I’m not like that other guy?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Tell her I’m not going to hurt her.”
“I did.”
“Doesn’t she believe you?”
“She thinks you have… I do not know the word… it means to make someone do something you want them to do…”
“I never forced you to do anything,” I protested.
“Not force,” Lelia said. “With special ways of doing things.”
“Oh… you mean ‘magic’?”
“What is magic?”
“It’s a way of doing things with secret powers.”
“Secret powers, yes,” Lelia nodded. “She thinks you magic me.”
“It’s ‘use magic on me,’” I said. “Or I enchanted you.”
“Enchanted?”
“To use magic on someone.”
“She thinks you enchanted me.”
“Magic is bullshit, though,” I said. “It doesn’t exist.”
Though they didn’t have bulls on this planet, Lelia had heard me use ‘bullshit’ often enough to know exactly what it meant.
The beginnings of a smile appeared on Lelia’s lips. “She thinks you enchanted me with your cock.”
“Wha– oh,” I said, suddenly a bit embarrassed.
And happy, too.
Hearing a chick say you enchanted her with your cock is a pretty big ego boost.
Dick-notized her, I guess you could say.
But I still protested.
“I didn’t do that.”
Lelia broke out into a full-on smirk. “Maybe a little.”
My cheeks flushed even hotter as I grinned. She grinned back.
Then I grew serious. “Well, tell her I’m not a bad guy.”
“I did.”
I sighed. “Well, is she going to run away screaming from me again
?”
Lelia said something to Oona in her language.
Oona looked at me fearfully, then said something back.
“She says she will not run… if you do not try to use your cock on her.”
“I’m not going to do that!” I yelped.
No wonder Oona was afraid of me, if she thought I was going to rape her.
Lelia frowned in confusion. “Why not?”
“What?! I’m not going to force her to – to make her – ”
“No, not force,” Lelia interrupted. “Use cock magic to enchant her.”
I just stood there staring at her like an idiot. “…what?”
“She does not want you to use cock magic on her to enchant her, like you did me.”
“Uh… okay…?”
Lelia said something to Oona, and Oona answered reluctantly.
“Alright, she will not run,” Lelia said.
“Uh… Lelia?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you say, ‘why not’ about the… uh, the cock magic?”
“You do not find Oona pretty?” Lelia asked.
This was a trap.
It had to be a trap.
“Well, I mean, sure, she’s pretty – but not as beautiful as you.”
“Thank you,” Lelia said with a big smile – and then frowned. “But you do not think she is pretty enough to use your cock on her?”
What the HELL?
“I thought you and I were… you know,” I said.
Lelia frowned. “No. I do not know.”
“I thought it was just you and me. That we love each other, and you would only want you and me to have sex.”
Lelia looked shocked. “I did not say that!”
Whoa…
“You can use your cock on Oona,” Lelia said. “I would like her to enjoy your cock. But she is afraid of it because she thinks you will use cock magic on her like you did on me.”
Okay, this is just too fuckin’ weird for me right now…
“Can we just concentrate on getting away from the skiris right now?” I asked, gesturing at the monster lying dead in the snow.
“Oh, yes,” Lelia said, glancing at the skiris and reassessing our priorities.
“Is your tribe nearby?”
“Yes… although Oona is afraid to take us there.”
“Why?”
Lelia pointed at my crotch. “She is afraid you will use cock magic on – ”
“OKAY, got it,” I interrupted. “Can you tell her I won’t do that, and that she needs to take us to your tribe so we can leave before another skiris shows up?”
Lelia said something to Oona.
Oona regarded me suspiciously… then answered.
“She says yes, she will take us,” Lelia said happily.
“Good, let’s go, then.”
Lelia and I retied our snowshoes with new bindings, and set off through the woods with Oona.
I would have made snowshoes for Oona, but it would have taken time – time we didn’t have at the moment.
Not that she would have even agreed to wear them. She looked askance at the shoes at the beginning – although her attitude settled into something closer to wonder as we stayed on top of the snow and didn’t struggle nearly as much as she did. She really had to put forth a lot of effort to plow through the snowdrifts as we traveled down the mountain through the forest.
At one point Oona said something to Lelia.
“Can we stop, Jack?” Lelia asked.
“Sure.”
During our break, Oona stared and prodded at Lelia’s snowshoes, asked a few questions in her native tongue, and looked at me with more wonder and fear.
I guess she thought the snowshoes were part of my ‘cock magic’ or something.
If only women on Earth were that easy to impress.
21
We traveled with Oona through the woods and down the mountain. Along the way, Lelia asked her questions and then filled me in.
It seemed that Oona had been doing much the same job that Lelia had been tasked with: going out and finding a new source of food. Apparently the tribe had run into problems finding enough to eat.
Why?
Because the skiris were taking up resources, too – and more and more of them.
During her foraging trip, Oona had journeyed far from the tribe’s current location. During that time, she had run across a group of skiris – and the human who was ordering them around. She hadn’t understood anything the human had said – but she’d understood enough to tell that the human was bossing the skiris around.
Oona had been discovered, and the human vaklik had sent one of the skiris after her. The chase had lasted more than an hour, with the skiris nearly catching up to her –
Until Oona had run across us.
I wondered what would happen when the dead skiris was missed. Would the human send a search party after it?
Would he find our tracks and follow us to the tribe?
I couldn’t worry about that now, though. We had enough troubles as it was just getting to their location.
The trip was a long hike of seven hours. During Hour Two, I asked Lelia how far it was to the tribe, according to Oona.
“Far,” Lelia informed me after talking to her friend. “We spend night, maybe, get there tomorrow.”
“Because it’s so far?”
“No.” Lelia looked pityingly at her friend, then back at me. “Because Oona is slower than us.”
I realized that either Oona was going to die of exhaustion trying to keep up with me and Lelia, or we were going to have to spend the night to get back to the tribe. Which I did not want to have to do unless absolutely necessary – not with the possibility of another skiris on our tail.
So I sat down and did an absolutely shit job of crafting another pair of snowshoes as fast as possible.
But at the end, I had something Oona could wear.
I guess it was a measure of her exhaustion that she barely put up a protest when I had Lelia strap the shoes to her feet.
If the choice was trudging endlessly through three feet of snow, or succumbing to cock magic, she’d take the cock magic.
Once she got the hang of walking on the snowshoes, though, she was enthralled. She loved them.
Score one for cock magic.
We completed the rest of the hike in one day, all the way down into the lowest depths of the valley.
Like I said, it took us seven hours – so roughly seven miles. By the end of it, we were all worn out.
But we didn’t have to spend the night out in the open with abominable snowmen potentially tracking us down.
Best of all, the tribe was much closer than I’d anticipated. I had been mentally prepping myself for weeks of travel – and here it had only taken three days. Instead of a worst-case scenario, we’d lucked into a best-case scenario.
It was an even luckier break running into Oona, or we might have kept going north instead of east. Hell, we might have even run into the human and his skiris army.
At any rate, we reached the tribe’s camp just as the sun was setting behind the mountains. Shadows had nearly taken over the depths of the forest.
As soon as we drew near, a woman in head-to-toe furs stepped out from behind a tree. She was carrying a spear, though she wasn’t clutching it threateningly.
Instead, she stood there for a moment in shock – then dropped the spear and ran over to Lelia and hugged her tight, babbling emotionally in their shared language.
Lelia laughed, hugged her back, and said something in return. As a result, the sentry reached out a hand and touched Oona on the shoulder tenderly. Maybe Lelia had spoken about Oona nearly being killed by a skiris, and how she deserved recognition for how brave she’d been.
All I knew is that the three women seemed to be very close and quite fond of each other.
Then the sentry turned to me.
She stared at me openly. I could see her eyes through the slit in her fur balaclava.
; Once again, I recognized ‘vaklik’ in the question she asked Lelia.
Lelia answered, and the woman seemed satisfied… though she didn’t make any friendly gestures towards me. She very obviously kept her distance.
“This is Hala,” Lelia said.
I put up a hand in the air as a greeting. “Jack.”
Hala just looked uncertainly between me and Lelia, then turned away and headed deeper into the woods. We followed her.
We reached a small clearing where a fire burned in a pit in the ground. Around the fire sat two other women warming themselves by the flames. These women weren’t wearing masks, and I could clearly see their faces. They both had blue skin and white hair, just like Oona and Lelia. They were both quite cute, though Lelia had them beat.
As soon as they looked up, Hala said something, and I caught Lelia’s name amidst the foreign phrases.
The two women cried out and raced over to hug Lelia.
“Jack, these are Teeka and Mazaria,” Lelia announced.
I was just about to say something when another woman stepped out from the trees carrying a spear. Apparently she’d been on sentry duty like Hala.
She was taller than all the other women, but because of her wrappings, I couldn’t see her face. She had a distinctly different bearing – a commanding presence. There was a dignity to her. She didn’t rush over like the others had.
All the other women stepped out of the way. Then the tall woman came striding over to Lelia, her arms open wide, and Lelia hugged her tight. They said nothing, but their embrace was full of emotion, like two people who had thought they would never see each other again.
When the woman stepped back, she put her hands on Lelia’s cheeks and gazed at her fondly, overcome with emotion.
Lelia said something, and the tall woman touched Oona tenderly.
Then she turned to me and undid her balaclava wrappings, exposing her face.
She was quite beautiful, but in a different way from Lelia. She was thinner and more willowy than the other women, and at least five inches taller than them. In fact, she was only a few inches shorter than me. If Lelia was a Playboy Playmate, then this woman was a fashion model from a runway in Paris.
There was also a sternness to her that Lelia didn’t possess. She had the look of a leader – someone who bore the responsibility for others, and felt the weight of that on her shoulders.