by Loki Renard
“I hate you,” she growled, wiping his cum from her lips.
“Keep saying that and you may yet convince yourself that you still believe it,” he smiled at her. “You are already beginning to like me, pet. It galls you that someone who treats you this way could also have a place in your affections, but it does not stop it from happening.”
He was such an arrogant asshole. His ego truly knew no bounds.
“In your cage, pet,” he said. “And I will bring you food.”
*
After bringing her something to eat, Vyktor left for several hours. Once again, Aria was left to her own devices to try to process what had happened to her. She’d challenged him to make him take her, and he had not hesitated to do so. She would have to be more careful about what she said to him. He didn’t have the same socialization that human men did. He didn’t know or likely care that he wasn’t supposed to do what he had done. He had taken her at her word, and for once in her life, Aria had gotten precisely what she had asked for.
It was easy to forget sometimes that these creatures were not human. Even with his strange eyes and the scaling on his body, his easy albeit accented command of the language made him feel familiar to her. She nibbled on the food he had brought her—a bowl of dry cereal. The dragons must have looted a supermarket at some point and followed the directions on the box. She didn’t know what they were eating, though there were complaints from farmers that cattle and sheep were being taken in the night.
The notion of escape returned to her, but again she could not fathom how she was going to escape down a mountain with only a blanket for cover. There was no way she was getting out without a full set of clothing, most of it insulated. And even then, her odds of survival were low. Vyktor didn’t seem to have any plans to kill or harm her, so the best choice—even if she’d had one, which she didn’t—was to stay put. Stay put, eat her dry cereal, drink the melted snow water and try to think about a way to convince the dragon to return her of his own accord.
When he returned he carefully locked the door of his room, and then opened her cage, allowing her to come out. She didn’t move from where she was sitting. The blankets were the only form of modesty she had, and she was not going to give them up easily.
“What do you want?” She asked the question with more than a touch of attitude, lifting her chin in a cocky pose that was supposed to tell him that she didn’t care what he did to her.
His response made her mouth drop open.
Vyktor stood over her at the cage door, looking all the taller as his golden eyes gazed down at her. “I want you to tell me what life as a human is like.”
“If you assholes stopped burning everything, you’d find out quickly enough,” she said when she had recovered from the shock of a question unrelated to his ongoing erotic mastery of her.
“It is regrettable that so much violence has taken place…”
“So stop it already!”
“That is difficult, given the extreme hostility we have been met with.”
“You lizards came here and started attacking us first,” Aria pointed out.
“No.”
“What? Don’t lie to me, I know exactly what happened. We all do. We saw the portal open. We lost a man in there! And then you all came flooding out…”
Vyktor’s brows dipped for a moment. “Do you really think it was that simple? Do you think we were all milling on the other side waiting for humans to let us in so we could destroy your world? Are humans truly so self-centered that they believe all of life revolves specifically around them?”
Aria got the distinct feeling that she was missing something, though she didn’t know what. He seemed almost insulted by her accusations of dragon aggression, which meant that he was either dangerously deluded or he knew something she didn’t.
“Humans respond to aggression with aggression,” she said. “We didn’t start this war. Well, not on purpose.”
“When the portal was opened, it caught us by surprise,” Vyktor explained with a tone Aria could only describe as patient. He was talking to her as if she was perhaps too dense to understand what seemed to him to be very obvious. “It caused a great deal of damage in the process. The human side of the rift is located in the middle of a desert. On the dragon side, a great chasm suddenly opened in the middle of one of our largest colonies. It took many lives.”
“Oh,” Aria said, feeling compelled to apologize, but thinking that it would not come across as sincere. “I didn’t know that, I am sorry.”
“You mentioned losing a man,” Vyktor continued. “He came tearing through the city and crashed into one of our greatest monuments. He survived the immediate impact, but fell ill hours later and passed within a day. There was nothing we could do for him, though we tried.”
“I didn’t know that,” Aria repeated herself, hating how weak the words were.
“No,” Vyktor said. “You did not, because from the beginning, the human response has been to fly your creations of aggression wherever you please, ignoring the sovereign territory of others, and once there, shoot first and never stop to question anything. So when you begin to hate us, remember, pet. We did not come to you. It was a human action which joined our worlds. It was a human action which led to the first death in this war.”
“It wasn’t my idea to turn the stupid station on,” Aria said, feeling a little defensive.
“No, but it was your idea to try to kill me in the air yesterday. It was you who came screaming toward me in your flimsy little contraption with your exploding missiles.”
She cringed a little inwardly. He’d saved her even though she’d done everything she could to kill him. But he’d had a reason to do that. He’d wanted a human to take and to train. She had been an easy target thanks to the Tornado’s malfunction.
“You would do well to look ashamed,” he growled at her. “When we looked at your planet and tried to understand what had happened, we soon discovered that although you humans resemble our flightless form in many ways, you are utterly different. You have a history, a long history of destroying the worlds of others. The forests and oceans were two worlds apart from people and they have both been decimated. We looked at what you had done to your world, and we knew what would happen to ours. General Eldor came here to destroy humanity. I came with him in the hopes of tempering his blood lust.”
When he put it that way, Aria began to understand the reason for the ferocity the dragons had shown. If they believed they were fighting an unrelenting force, it made sense that they had attacked so vigorously.
“Not everybody supports that kind of behavior,” she argued. “The pilot who flew into the portal was ordered to do so. He didn’t have a choice, no more than I had when I shot missiles at you.”
“He volunteered,” Vyktor said. “We discovered that much while we were trying to save his life. He was eager to explore a new world, so he said. Little did he realize that, much like every ‘new’ world you have ever found, it is much older than you think and it belonged to something else first.”
Aria was starting to feel guilty. Not for her own actions, but for the actions of her species present and past. Then she remembered that feeling guilty for things everyone else had done was stupid and shook her head at him.
“So you’re not totally unjustified,” she said. “But…”
“There are no buts. Is it fair that this falls so heavily on your shoulders? That you should be made an example for the sins of your kind? Perhaps not. But fate is not known for its fairness, pet. And many have suffered a great deal more than you ever will in my care.”
Somehow he was making her feel spoiled for objecting to being caged and treated as a pet. And somehow it was almost working.
“We are not the only ones who have committed atrocities,” she said. “What is happening now is…”
“Inexcusable and entirely unnecessary,” Vyktor said. “The killing must end. Which is why I intend to show the generals that with proper handling, humans are no
t the threats they seem to be. You are a runaway species who are yet to be properly disciplined, that is all.”
Aria wanted to hate him. Wanted to tell him that he was wrong. Wanted to say that her side had done nothing wrong, but the truth was more complex than that, and there could be no doubt that it was humanity who had opened the portal between the worlds, and it was a human who had breached the border with a weapon of war, engaged with an unknown enemy, and plunged the world into chaos.
“And that discipline comes in the form of your cock in my mouth?” She asked the question with a little smile, trying to break the internal tension she felt sitting at Vyktor’s feet.
“That’s something you understand at the very core of you,” he replied. “It touches you more deeply than anything else could. You have already been trained by your military, conditioned to think and behave in certain ways. I will train you much more deeply, pet. I will train the very heart of you. Come here,” he ordered. “I want you on the bed.”
Aria found herself rising from the blankets and doing as she was told. She wasn’t entirely sure why she was doing as he told her. Nothing had really changed since their discussion, but there was a part of her that seemed to yearn to surrender to him. It was a part she had not felt very often in her life.
How on earth did he understand humans so well? In such a short time?
“How do you know so much? And how do you speak our language?”
“You have a very simple script language,” he said. “It is not difficult for a dragon to understand. Understanding your written word and speech is the same to us as understanding a dog wagging its tail is to you.”
“Oh.” Aria scrunched her face up, feeling vaguely insulted. “Well.”
“Don’t take that as an insult, pet,” he said. “You are what you are, and we have been impressed with how much you have achieved as a species with such simple tools to work with.”
“So glad we’ve impressed you,” Aria said, sounding snotty even to herself.
“It’s going to take some time for you to get comfortable with the fact that you are no longer top of the food chain,” he observed. “Arrogance is built into the human condition as far as I can tell.”
“It’s not arrogance to not enjoy being told that you’re as simple as a dog.”
“I didn’t say you were as simple as a dog. I said your language is clear to us. Come here. We have talked enough.” He crooked his finger at her, then pointed at the bed, keeping his communication simple, she noticed.
Aria left the cage and moved toward the bed, half afraid that she was about to feel Vyktor’s hand across her ass again. She was almost shocked when she made it to the bed without one of the hard slaps from his palm searing its way across her unprotected cheeks.
In spite of her vulnerable nudity, she was beginning to feel a certain level of comfort with this man. No. Creature. His near constant nakedness made hers less odd. She almost wondered if she would feel strange wearing clothes… then she quickly dismissed the notion.
“Am I going to get something to wear?”
“Why do you need clothing? That does seem to be a very strange human habit.”
“We don’t have any protective coats, or layers of sufficient fat. We get cold,” she explained. “And when we get cold, we get sick.”
“But it is not cold in here, is it?”
“No,” Aria admitted. “But it’s still not… hygienic to wander around without clothes. Dirt sticks to our skin and gets into places it shouldn’t. I need clothes. And I need a bath.”
That was true. She had spent a hard eight hours in a flight suit, done battle with a dragon, and been captured and claimed by him. It was all dirty work, and she was coated in what felt like a thin film of sweat and muck.
“Clothes and a bath,” Vyktor nodded. “Not an entirely unreasonable request, I suppose.”
“Is there a bath here?”
“We have created a communal bath,” Vyktor mused. “It is large enough to swim in. That should suit your purpose.”
“Not a communal one!” Aria was quick. “It’s not a pool I need to swim in, it’s a bath… you know, a small area of water, enough to sit in and soap myself in and then get rid of the dirty water when it is done?”
“I see,” Vyktor said. “Wait here, pet.”
He left her outside her cage, unattended in his room while he went to make the preparations for her bath. Standing in the dragon’s lair, a small smile crept over Aria’s lips. She hadn’t planned that, but it couldn’t have gone more perfectly if she had.
She immediately began rummaging through the dragon’s possessions. Small niches had been carved into the wall like shelves, and there were pieces of what looked like very thick paper rolled up on them. They might be military intelligence.
She unrolled one of the papers and frowned. English might be simple to the dragons, but whatever script they used was not simple to her. The marks were thick, bold, and angular, but they meant nothing to her. Disappointed, Aria slipped the paper back where she’d found it. This was an unparalleled opportunity to collect intelligence about the dragons, but she wasn’t going to learn anything from reading. She was going to have to question Vyktor skillfully enough that he didn’t realize what she was doing.
It was a couple of hours at least until Vyktor returned. Aria wondered if he had forgotten about her entirely. She had been through most of the objects in the room by then, finding little that she understood enough to know if they were of value or not. She was almost pleased to see the dragon when he returned, his naked form looking pumped, as if he had been engaged in hard labor. One of his hands was clutched behind his back, giving him a look of formality.
“What, did you have to build the bath with your bare hands?”
“Claws,” he smiled. “Much easier.”
Aria didn’t know if he was serious or not. It didn’t really matter.
“I have had your bath prepared, pet,” he said. “But before we go, come here.”
She approached him curiously and stood before him. If she was going to get information out of him, she would have to be a little bit compliant. Vyktor gently swept her hair behind her shoulders and from behind his back he produced something silver, studded with gold and amethyst crystals. It wasn’t quite a necklace. It was too thick and too short for that. When he looped it around her neck and fastened it at her nape, she realized that what it actually was a collar. A very beautiful one, likely worth in the tens of thousands given the gorgeous cut of the purple gems.
Aria wanted to be outraged, but it was rather difficult given that he had just hung a greater value of riches around her neck than she would ever have earned in years.
“What is this?” She fingered it gently, already half-knowing the answer.
“Eldor wishes you to be under effective control when you are outside my chambers,” he said, producing a chain, similarly studded and made of silvery links with gold inlay and amethyst gems set into the very center of the links. It was utterly stunning, and Aria stared at it with wide eyes as he clipped it to the collar around her neck. He had her on a leash now. She was literally being treated as his pet, but instead of it feeling humiliating and awful, it felt as though she were highly valued and spoiled.
“That is a hell of a magic trick,” she said. “Are you pulling these out of your ass? Do dragons poop jewelry?”
“I made these last night, after I settled you into your bed,” Vyktor said, apparently taking her question of high value defecation seriously. “I enjoy jewel crafting, and you are quite an inspiration.”
Aria tried not to feel too pleased about the dragon’s gift. It wasn’t a gift anyway. These silver, gold, and purple chains were no less shackles than the heavy iron ones that had been closed around her wrists and ankles in the beginning. She inwardly lectured herself not to be taken in by the shiny trinkets, but it was difficult. Even when Vyktor wrapped the other end of her leash about his hand and drew her gently forward, she gave in to the pressure eas
ily, following him outside his rooms and into the halls of the dragon’s nest.
Everywhere she looked, the walls had been carved with ornate patterns and designs. It reminded her somewhat of the way ancient Egyptians had made the walls highly decorative, with inscriptions and carvings depicting dragons becoming men and vice versa, great representations of dragon eyes, fire being breathed over the surface of small worlds…
“Come along, pet,” he murmured, urging her forward.
“I didn’t see these before,” she said. “Why didn’t I see these?”
“You were exhausted and half asleep,” Vyktor replied, slowing to allow her to take the carvings in. “These are but a simple ornamentation. They help us feel a little more at home.”
“They’re amazing,” Aria said, running her finger over the image of a large dragon that was depicted arching its head back, flames issuing from its mouth. There was a ferocity and a majesty to the image that touched her somewhere deep in her heart. She felt a little twinge of the same feeling that had once spurred her to explore the portal storm and to seek its center—a yearning that made little sense and yet was powerful nonetheless. “If these are simple, your homes must be beautiful.”
“They are more focused on aesthetic qualities than most human dwellings we have seen,” Vyktor agreed. “So many of you live in little wooden boxes exposed to the elements. Very strange.”
“Most people don’t have the money or the time to decorate their houses like this,” Aria said. “Most people are very busy and count themselves lucky to have the wooden box.”
“People do not have time to build their houses? If you do not have time to build your house, what do you have time for?”
“Most people don’t build their houses,” Aria said. “They are bought and sold many times. Houses are very expensive.”
“Is it a lack of materials? You seem to have enough wood and stone…”
“It’s a lack of…” Aria pursed her lips as she thought. What was it a lack of, exactly? “People don’t have the skills to build houses. We specialize in our jobs. I flew planes. Other people might program computers, or look after others with medicine, or prepare food. It takes years to learn those skills and there’s no time for house building. So builders have to build them—and the land they’re on is very expensive, especially in big cities.”