He stretches his other hand towards me, intending to grab me by the neck. I block with my left forearm and upper cut with my right. He’s tall so it takes some effort, but I reach his chin with my fist.
When his head whips back, I feel like I’m alive. I also feel grateful for my fur lined gloves because otherwise I might have broken a fist. Jaxal luckily had me practice on wooden boards until my hands bled. He said their skin would be stronger, tougher. That they’d be hard to kill. And I’m ready.
I grab the leader’s arm and wrench her out of his grip. “We have to fight him together!” I shout to her without waiting for her answer.
I turn back to the male and watch pink mud spray across his stupid lit up face when I hit him again and then a third time, and then another. Frustrated, he swipes both claws for me, catching my forearms and tearing through the leather covering them.
Nicking me, he doesn’t wound me or slow me down. There’s too much mud between us, and I’m wearing too many clothes and him, almost nearly as many. His hides look thinner, more agile, but are no less tough when I try to gouge them with my nails. Fleetingly, I long for claws. The fact that they have them puts me at a severe disadvantage.
The fight lasts ages. I’m alone. The other females don’t help. I hope that they’re running away but somewhere in the fray, I catch a glimpse of them. They’re just standing like twin pillars in the mud wearing mud on their cheeks and white on their foreheads.
“For fuck’s sake!” I shout, “Do something! Anything! Move!”
I don’t have time to watch and see if they scattered, but turn and punch the male again. This time when his head flings back and he manages to right himself, he’s got copper blood smeared across his mouth and nose and a forehead that’s red and angry. He cocks a hand, I block, but then his other makes contact.
I knew it would hurt. Jaxal hit me a thousand times in preparation for this moment. It wasn’t preparation enough. It hurts. His fists are made of marble and I feel my whole body take the hit all at once.
Suddenly the females are shrieking. I can feel someone’s hands on the front of my suit, pulling me out of the mud, but I lift my feet to my chest and kick with my whole being. An uff puffs out of the male and I start to backstroke as fast as I can across the mud. He grabs my ankle. I kick with my foot, feeling as my heel makes a lucky connection with his throat. He curses. I curse louder. He curses again. I’m still cursing.
Then both our cursing and our fighting is punctuated by a roar that stalls us too. The sound lights up the white sky, effulgent and deafening. It’s louder this time, closer. I glance up towards the perimeter of the mire and as soon as my vision settles, I see something that numbs my withered core.
Like a treeline sprouted in the beat of a breath, there are at least eight males standing there, shrouded in shadow. The one I’d been fighting moves swiftly ahead of me, wielding a swatch of fabric from my hood like a sword. He stands in front of me, blocking my body with his own, and shouts something to the rest that my translator doesn’t catch.
“Oki phondaeron!”
Hisses sputter through the males, and even the females behind me gasp and whisper. But then there’s a silence. The fog stirs. The men glance around between one another and I can see foreheads flashing in nature-defying colors, and I can hear meaty fists pounding against plated chests, and I can feel masculine energy whipping through the air like a tornado, that riotous undercurrent.
But then my heart catches and the fog clears just enough for me to be able to see a male even larger than the rest, more terrifying, more imposing, more severe. He steps forward, slashing a line through the amassed crowd that does nothing but part to make way for him. A few of the males actually scatter until only three remain.
“Taka’ana,” comes the booming, terrible bass, the one that seems to let loose something inside of me as I drink in all of his form. Alien and huge and imposing and decidedly male, I know that my first thoughts of him should be of hate, and yet, only one thought comes to me.
He’s purple.
He’s not red, which means I was wrong about something — many things — that the females said. The male they spoke of before — the one who says I’m his mate, the one who told them stories about me — isn’t the one who broke my soul.
Instead the male they spoke of has arrived before me now in all of his glory and as he looks at me with matte black eyes that angle towards his hairline, the world goes quiet. He’s not the red one. He’s not red. He has black hair instead of white. A single white streak runs through it right at the front in the middle. It makes him look like a blade, a knife that will cut me through to the bone, if only he could reach me. But he won’t. I won’t let him.
I break his gaze and turn back to the mud, ferociously charging through it now. I can see the other side. From there, I’ll make it to the tundra. From there, I’ll be able to make a stand. My final stand. He may not be red but he’s still an alien and what I said was true. No alien will take me alive, no matter if they’re pink or green or red or blue. Or purple.
“Oki phondaeron Xiveri. Taka’ana!” His roar chases me and the ground seems to shake on a cause of it. Or maybe it’s just me. A strange vibration sizzles through the air, electrifying it, and a pulse beats in my chest that I swear hadn’t been there before.
I reach the other side of the mire and as I pull myself free of the pink, I think about the words he said and what they could possibly mean as the translation turns over in my mind. “With this challenge, I claim my Xiveri.”
Fuck it. Now it’s time to run. I take off into the tundra, into the cold white.
3
Okkari
Where is she? I am savage in my need now that the battle is ended. The males who vied for my human lost. I took the plates of the one who refused to yield. He crumbled before me. By my bloodright. By the right of Xana.
The rest competed over the remaining females and at my last count nine pairs were made. It has never happened before in a Mountain Run. There are always many females too feeble to fight or run or too afraid, or males that are bested by other warriors and left too injured to proceed. Too often, the Xaneru within awakens for no one.
I wonder if it was not because of the decoys that my human gave to the others that on this solar so many pairings were created — that even one Xiveri mating revealed itself between Tre’Okkari and Vren’Hurr. I came upon them in the act of their first coupling, distracted by the scent of my own female’s clothing in Vren’Hurr’s possession. I know it was she who gave them. The only she in existence. Who else would have had such cunning but the same carnivorous human who defied our Raku and helped to withhold the Rakukanna from her mate?
Pride surges in my breast, only heightening the desperation of my Xanaxana, which could not be less at rest. I am a calm, calculating male. I am a male who abides by order and tradition. I am a male who needs not seek understanding for in my thirteen rotations, I have seen and experienced more than the elders. I have fought battles. I have shed blood. I have commanded a nation. I have guided our current Raku and his Raku before him.
But now as the fiery winds become threatening, battering me as I charge across the snow, I understand something new. Something more. Everything that scripts have ever told me of the Xanaxana and its power were weak analogies for what I feel burning in my chest. It has demands. They will be sated. I do not care if I have to tear the mountain down stone by stone.