Isu looks at me with his dark eyes and his long fangs, and snorts. “I suppose.”
I keep eating, because that’s what my instincts and hunger tell me to do. I am more of an animal than ever, now that I am free of the farm. I have seen more brutality, experienced more pain, I have consumed and I worry that I may still be consumed myself, either by the leviathan wyrm, or by something else that considers me tasty.
“This animal,” I say, gesturing to the beast that lies in some remaining form on the ground. “What is it?”
“A smaller version of the large wyrm. Different species. Similar makeup. These beasts are capable of tunneling through animal flesh the way the big wyrm tunnels through the world.”
I almost choke. “The wyrm tunnels through the world?”
“These tunnels and burrows were made by the wyrm itself,” he explains. “As it grew through each of its stages, it ate tunnels and burrowed into the earth, all the way to the very core where the rock is liquid and all is flame. That is why the earth shakes sometimes.”
“So…” I swallow. “So the thing we saw, that is… eating this planet?”
“By slow degrees, yes,” Isu says.
“And what happens when it eats it all?”
“The wyrm has been eating for a very long time. It may eat for thousands of years before the planet is digested.”
“So… you don’t know?”
“Eat your food,” he says grimly. I can tell he is still angry at me for leaving his nice safe burrow, but what is the point when the world is being consumed anyway? Why pretend to be safe when at any moment a massive, scaled, tooth-ridden beast might swallow you whole?
I finish what he gave me and I sit in silence. I am guessing he will take me back to the burrow and punish me there. I have avoided the worst of Isu’s wrath because I have mostly been obedient. But I am obedient no longer. I cannot even pretend that it was a mistake that led me to leave the burrow. It was nothing but pure defiance, and we both know it.
“Bend over,” he growls when we are done eating. “Spread your cheeks.”
We have done many things before. He has taken my mouth, and he has made ample use of my sex. Now he seems to have another goal. I do as I am told, knowing that it will be all the worse for me if I seek to defy him.
He watches me with those deep dark eyes, and I feel flashes of pure embarrassment passing through me. I have been bad. I am being punished. I was punished sometimes on the farm, but there was never any charge to it. This is different. Here, I expose the most delicate parts of myself to the alien who has made himself my master.
He says very little, but I feel the heat of his finger dabbing against my anus. This is not the first time I have ever felt him touch me there. It is the first time I’ve felt him do it with disciplinary intensity.
“You were a very bad girl,” he lectures. “And now you’re going to pay the price.”
I hear him suck his finger, then press it to my bottom. The muscle there is tight, but he is more insistent than it is, and soon he is inside my most shameful hole, making slow, twisting motions with his hot digit. I don’t think this is meant to be physically punishing. He is holding back from hurting me. But I feel superheated waves of shame rushing over me, back and forth over my sweaty body as he makes use of only that particular hole.
“I’m sorry!” I moan the words over and over, every thrust bringing a new apology.
He pins me to the dusty ground, one big hand on the back of my neck, the other at my hips, hitching them up so he can slide deep inside my most shameful hole over and over again.
I would take his leather over this. He could slap me until my bottom burned hotter than the depths of the burrows where the rocks are liquid with heat. But he wants this instead. Somehow, he knows what this does to me; he understands my humanity, and how to exploit it.
“You need to learn to obey,” he growls, every thrust matched with a word.
Obeying him is not as easy as he thinks. I have my own instincts to obey. I have needs. Sunlight is one of them. Outside is another. I need to be able to roam, and though I regret running into whatever that thing was, I’m not sorry. At least, not any sorrier than he is making me.
“When we return to the burrow, you will not leave my sight,” he growls. “You will be chained in place and you will earn your freedom one act of obedience at a time, understand me?”