Mysteries of the Sand

Very interesting. Yes, I didn't have to wonder anymore as to what sort of creature could barge through a city's steel gates and leave them a mangled wreck.

The sun bleached bones of a ferocious looking monster lay before me in the sand. I'd never have believed anything like this creature was possible and yet the evidence was before me.

It was also hard to believe the evidence of what lay before me apart from the bones. I'd been on the run for three solid days from the women of the fallen city, until at last they had given up the chase.

At the last they really hadn't given up. They'd made the mistake of reducing their huntresses down to just three and I had spared them no mercy.

I'd waited till they had nowhere to run and yet been hopelessly out of dart range of hitting me and I had dispatched them with exactly three arrows. Never in my life had I imagined myself capable of killing a woman, but these women were different.

They were as much a monster as the beast before me had been in its life. It lay long dead now before me even as the blood of the three women soaked into the sand behind me.

My surroundings were incredulous to me to behold. Before me of all things lay a great expanse of sand with no living thing to be seen. How did a desert occur on the footsteps of a wet tropical jungle?

The answer eluded me and yet the reality stared me right in the face. The only available answer was that it simply did.

I turned my back to the desert and all the hidden mysteries that it might hold and began to make my way back the way I had come. I passed the three bodies of my enemies along the way and retrieving my arrows I then moved on.

A resolution had come to fruition within my mind. Just as such a city destroying monster behind me had needed to be slain so did those currently living among the ruins feeding off the security of grandeur's past.

There's was a fallen way and I intended to see it ended so that one day should my son come this way he would not come to a grisly end having been led away by his lusts as I had almost been. I had never been hunted so before, but now it was my turn to play the hunter.

I had not come across a living soul or sign of one in all their pursuit of me in the many miles that I had traversed and all that said to me was that these female warriors had killed almost everyone in the local area or driven them off. I had come across the evidence of several villages the closer I had gotten to the desert, but all of them had been vacant of life.

All of them had the bones of men lying in the streets. All the houses not burnt to the ground had born the white painted handprints of a woman's hand. The signature apparently of these killers held up within a forgotten fortress situated in a valley of beatific horrors.

No, I had found a calling at long last. Like my brothers, I would fight for justice and in this forsaken area of this great land justice was long overdue.

I traveled back through the foothills that lay before the outskirts of the jungle and passed once more through a ransacked village that appeared to have been lived in sometime within the past five years, but no longer.

The bones of the dead men in the streets were taller and slightly more robust in form than my own frame and idly I wondered of their origin as wells as that of the design of the village's architecture. It was nothing like those of my native friends or that of Ar'mora.

What mysteries did this land yet hold? More prevailing than any mystery of this lonely, forgotten village though I wanted to discover the mystery of my girl.

What had made her save me and why was she so different from the others? I didn't know, but soon I would.

I slipped back into the jungle and strangely, I felt like I was home again.

~~~~~~~

Dayha

Dayha tried to keep her breathing under control, but it was hard. The Hunter was near.

The man she had saved had come back, but why?

He had killed all who had slipped into the jungle to kill him or at the very least the women had chosen not to return to the citadel. Now those who remained had confined themselves to the city ruins as a precaution of this man's ability and elusiveness that far exceeded the abilities of the farmers that they were used to slaying.

Dayha peered about, but saw no one. Perhaps she had been wrong and he was not nearby, ready to stick one of those long arrows of his through her.

Truly, he was a warrior as much as she was and yet perhaps he was stronger. Stronger in the flesh of course, but also more disturbingly in the spirit as well.

There had been something very different about him not common to the clueless strangers that roamed into the land of the women unmindfully. She had never seen a man attempt to resist his own lust so much.

In fact, he was the only such man she'd ever seen do so. Men in general were only too eager to join themselves to her sisters at the first.

That changed, though when they found themselves chained and forcibly aroused repeatedly through a particular concoction of herbs and manual stimulation until the women had their fill of the men's shafts and the life-giving seed that they offered. Then the men were often slayed by their captors in the slow painful process of one cut at a time into their flesh.

Like bloodsucking leaches her sisters would feast upon the men's blood and become insaned by it even more so than the orgasms they received by the repeated raping of the men's shafts, while they laid chained and helpless to resist against the forcible use of their bodies. To her sisters men were nothing more than something to be used and abused and then finally feasted upon.

It was a paradox of brutality that held back to the days when it had been the other way within this valley. Long ago the men of her people had tired of the use of their women and had turned to each other in order to find amusement and pleasure.

They had wasted away in their rotting love for their brothers and had despitefully used the women as slaves to do all the work. Then a time had come when all the men had died virtually overnight from some disease that had come upon them no doubt sent by the Great Creator for their unholy lust and use of each other.

The women, however had been left solely alone and untouched by the disease. Without the men trained in the art of war the city had fallen to monsters and the women had hid out in the citadel.

Slowly the plan had emerged along with their newfound freedom to never again be subject to a man's authority and so it had been now for hundreds of years. In the end, however Dayha could only see too clearly the similarity of how the women had become like their long-lost whoring men.

Truly the actions of her sisters were as detestable, if not more so, than the actions of the men of the past had been. She was not sure why she was different, but from her earliest days she had never understood the innate hatred her sisters had for men.

Perhaps things had gone wrong long ago, but that was in the past. She'd often journeyed to the villages by the great desert when they had been alive with people and she had seen with her own eyes as the men and women of the Sand People had coexisted with each other for the most part in blissful harmony.

The children of the Sand People both boys and girls had been happy. They'd been happy up until her clan had come through in the dark of the night and killed almost everyone.

What few women and girls who had been permitted to live had astoundingly chosen to die with their husbands and fathers rather than join the ranks of the Sister Clan. That had been the moment for Dayha that the change had come in full and from that day forward, she had done what she could to make up for the sins of her sisters carried out against all creation it seemed.

The latest act of which had been to set free the man who now hunted them with the intent of bringing them to extinction. Maybe it was time for that.

So very many had died and died needlessly because of her sisters' lust for power and blood. If it was to be, though she wished that she might yet escape the judgment from heaven that had fallen upon them for that was what it seemed like to not only her but to the others of the clan as well.

If she was not to be permitted to live at least she hoped that the lives she had managed to save from her sisters would be spared. They couldn't make it on their own yet and for their sake, she hoped the hunter would let her live a little while longer.

She moved out from her hiding spot, then with the bag of provisions held over one shoulder. She moved as stealthily as possible along the nondescript path she tread upon, but the feeling of being hunted returned.

At any moment she expected one of the hunter's long arrows to rip through her, but it didn't happen. Why she wasn't sure and yet gratefully she moved on, knowing that she would have to throw him off her trail somehow or the lives of the children might be lost.

Would he kill them too? Surely not, but she didn't know.

She hoped not as they were to her as if her own flesh and blood. She stopped and looked back the trail she had just come along almost expecting to see him standing there.

He wasn't, but she felt him just the same. Why did he hold back from killing her when he hadn't spared to loose a killing arrow yet?

Was he beholden to her because of what she'd done?

Her face blushed slightly at the memory of her boldness. She'd never done what she'd done to him to a man before and the remembered sight and feel of his thick shaft and the taste of his seed in her mouth came readily to mind.

The other men through the years had never even thought to run when offered the chance, as they'd never picked up on the danger that they were in or the way that her sisters were but toying with them before they moved in for the kill. The hunter had though.

It had been clearly apparent to her that he hadn't stood much of a chance in his post aroused state of being able to run as fast as he would need to in order to escape her sisters. It had made sense to do what she had done and it had worked.

He had run nonstop for three entire days, until most of the clan had given up and returned to grumpily torture the men that were of his party that were still chained and kept in captivity. Their pleasure in ending the lives of the men had been arrested, though as two women in as many seconds had found themselves pierced through the neck with arrows as they had been in the very act of drinking the blood of the men they had finally let die after days of bloody carnal torture.

The clan had angrily taken to the jungle to hunt down the upstart of a man who thought of himself so highly as to take on the whole clan single-handedly. They hadn't found him though, and seven women had not returned from the jungle that night.

A total of eight more had followed in the course of another week. The Hunter had spared no mercy upon the sisters of her clan and yet he seemed to be doing so now.

He was a consummate warrior and she had felt the strength of him in her mouth and she wasn't surprised at all that he had managed to accomplish so much against the others of the clan as he had, when no man before had even come close to besting her sisters in either hunting or outright warfare.

The strength of the man's spirit she had sensed aside, he had been quite large actually just in the flesh and if the other women had seen his staff, they would've pushed her to the side and taking their own fill of it. As it was she'd shocked them by what she'd done.

Her actions to them had come across crudely as one sister had expressed it, "Dayha is finally getting a taste of it she is! Man seed today and his sweet and salty blood tomorrow!"

That was not the way of it at all though. Although she wouldn't deny that tasting of the warrior's seed again wasn't something she would mind doing.

Quickly she turned away from her back trail and hurried on. Truly, she was insane to carry on with such a notion of tasting the Hunter's seed again, but the evolving truth remained that he had not killed her yet.

Perhaps he too wanted more of her. Even so, he would likely kill her after he'd had his fill of her.

It had always been the way of her sisters so why should it be any different, in regards to him, if she ended up being at his mercy. No, she didn't have long to live one way or the other, but perhaps she could at least get food delivered a few more times to the children before they would have to fend for their own.