Chapter Text
Cory Kàfkore sat in the dark at the bottom of a mine. He had no idea how long it had been since the xenos arrived. All he knew was that they had, and that in his fear he had run. Against all odds, his overweight, out of shape body had carried him through a five mile trek across the arid wastes of Penthe to the one place the animal part of his mind told him he might be safe.
He also knew that he was running low on resources. Food, water, communicator battery? All were running out despite his best efforts.
Cory choked down another bite of the nearly tasteless food bars he had stolen on his way out of the job he had abandoned, wondering if they might just be synthcubes in a coat of artificial chocolate. He had barely started to wash it down with a similarly pilfered bottle of water when he heard it.
Music.
Or at least it felt like music rather than being anything that it felt like he could actually hear. A phantom sensation tickling just outside his conscious periphery. And then, he heard footsteps.
Part of him tensed in fear. He had been found. The xenos - the subjects of the inane and, to that point, annoying government broadcasts that seemingly played on loop - had found his hiding spot and were going to eat him or put a worm in his head or send him to a real, working mine!
Another part tensed in a different fear: A fear that it was other humans who would tell him that he was being an idiot. That he was trespassing and he couldn’t pay the fines because he had run out on his job so he was going to prison. He almost preferred the thought of the xenos compared to the fear of dealing with other people.
The inky black darkness slowly shifted, but not slowly enough for Cory to squint against the sudden light. With light came footsteps, each crunch of dirt and rock in time with that soundless music as if it were just another instrument in a growing string-and-percussion symphony. Cory froze as the steps grew nearer.
A wide beam of light traced on the floor of the mine, visible through the gap under the mining rig Cory had taken refuge behind as it swept back and forth. The light traced his footprints and Cory damned himself for having not covered his tracks, but it was far too late to do anything about it now. Not when four giant paws like a dog - or a wolf, Cory feared - loped into view, standing right above the tracks he had left.
Perhaps wolf had been closer to the mark, Cory thought as a huge, lupine head craned down from above the forelegs. Dust stirred up as the wolf sniffed Cory’s footprints. The wolf’s head suddenly snapped in Cory’s direction and it glared at him with three glowing purple eyes.
Fight. Flight. Freeze. Fawn. Cory knew that these were the basic biological responses to stress. Cory was apt to freezing, but some deep, primal fearful part of Cory told him to run. It screamed at him from the back of his mind and when he didn’t, that part took over. His body moved on its own, throwing itself up from the ground and scraping him between the craggy mine wall and the metal of the rig.
He barely made it to the mouth of a passage deeper into the mine, the great wolf’s paws loudly galloping behind him in the near-darkness, when something flowed around Cory from all sides. A flurry of streaming green vines and brambles were little more than a blur in the wide beam of the flashlight cast from the floor behind him.
Cory came to a stop as fast as he could, arms raised in front of him like a shield. It wasn’t until they caught the light that he noticed the flowing thorns had caught him on the way past. Tiny droplets of blood bubbled to the surface, dotting the light white streaks where his skin had been scraped. The pain throbbed in the background -- he was too focused on the writhing mass of rosebush in front of him shaping itself back into a wolf.
It loped toward him, hunched under the low ceiling of the passage, bearing impossible rows of thorny fangs at him. Cory stepped back, then stepped back again. The giant green wolf matched him step for step until they were far enough out of the low passage for the wolf to rear back, its back bending in an unnatural wave as it stood on two paws, smirking down at Cory.
He froze all over again, torn between fear and the inescapable thought that the bipedal wolf looked concerningly similar to the anthropomorphic animals in his vast collection of spicy digital art. It became instantly clear that the wolf was a woman, or at least feminine, from her shape alone. Powerful digitigrade legs led to shapely hips. A thorny belly and waist sat below what definitely looked like breasts, and atop it all sat the head of a wolf stitched together from tightly-woven leaves.
Cory could barely draw a breath as he stared into all three of her eyes, surrounded by four blooming roses at the points of woody horns. One set curled around her cheeks, the other flanked the third eye in the middle of her forehead.
He was prey caught in the gaze of this great and terrible predator, and his body, realizing that flight was no longer an option, that flight had never been an option, began to freeze in earnest.
The wolf leaned down and reached out for him with a paw. His freezing turned to fawning as the paw carded through his shaggy, disheveled hair, and Cory found himself unable to suppress a soft, animalistic whimper from escaping his lips. His heart raced as the wolf seemed to recognize something in his unbidden cry and grinned. His shoulders buckled under the second pet from the paw and something in that silent sound surrounding him felt pleased.
He didn’t know why, but he liked it. He wanted more of it. So, despite his trembling, wobbling knees, Cory remained still as she pet him again and raised her great paw. A sharp, dripping claw extended from each of her toes. His body tensed on its own as her paw drew near, but he made no move to resist as she sank the dripping thorns into the back of his shoulders and pressed down. He hissed at the sharp bites piercing his skin through his shirt, breath shaking out of him.
She pressed harder and Cory’s knees buckled, dropping him to kneel before the she-wolf. The wolf smiled down at him and, despite the mounting fear, Cory couldn’t help but smile back. But she pushed further and didn’t stop until Cory was left kneeling before her, face ground into the dusty floor of the mine. He writhed into the dirt, barely restraining a groan as that pleased silent song rang through him again.
A chilling feeling spread out slowly from each point where she jabbed him, down his spine and into his arms and legs. Even further, up into his neck. Icewater ran through his veins and sapped the will to do anything at all away.
The cold trickled deeper into Cory’s mind, his head began to ache like the worst brain freeze he had ever experienced in his life. And then, everything went dark.