The Mephit's Tales

By day they took shelter, hiding away from the merciless sun under thin canvas, the day’s heat kept at bay by a single enchanted stone, a shard of the frozen south. It was by night that they travelled, boots scuffing over dusty stone. What course they followed, Darrin did not know, but his guide never faltered. From time to time the fennec would pause, pushing back her cowl and gazing up at the stars before drawing it back over her ears and continuing; other times, many hours and many turns would go by without a moment’s hesitation. At some of these turning points Darrin could see something that might qualify as a landmark – a distinctive peak or a kink in a ridgeline, or some such thing. At others, all around looked the same. But Shari was confident, and in four years of journeying, in the rocky wastes and elsewhere, she had never led him astray. It was no great thing to put trust in her now.

(more…)

Dren rested easily – no terrors haunting his dreams – and, watching him, Jisarr was struck by a thought. Hadn’t the man been unable to find any sleep, restful or otherwise, when he’d first come here? To be sure, he’d rested easily enough after some release from his spell-driven lust, but that had been when he was greatly short on it.

Now he could slip into a midday doze without issue, and stayed that way as Jisarr shifted around to tidy the place somewhat. Progress?

Dren wasn’t entirely still, but the movements he made were the gentle ones that anyone might while they slept. Certainly Jisarr had seen jerkier motions in his own consorts. Even if it was obvious within an hour that lust was colouring Dren’s dreams, it seemed to be a soft sort of desire, not the burning, pent-up need he’d had when Jisarr had first met him here.

(more…)

John had thought he’d missed Kelly, while the cougar was out west on site, as much as she’d missed him. When he’d picked her up at the airport, he’d seen a twin to his own longing in her wide, intent eyes; in the way her hands had slid over him when they embraced, so like his own roving touch, he’d felt it. Neither of them had really wanted to go to a picnic on a cloudy, windy day like this, and it wasn’t because of the weather – the otter hardly felt it through his fur – or because Kelly’s coworkers were unpleasant people. No, they’d just had other things they’d both wished could be higher priority.

Maybe she’d missed him a little more after all, or maybe she was just more adventurous. But when he first caught a whiff of masculine arousal, he pushed down his own desire, saving it for later, when he could give her a proper welcome home.

(more…)

It was not, by most standards, a perfect day for a picnic. It was rather on the windy side, and cool when clouds blocked the sun as they frequently did. But company picnics were ponderous things to schedule, and it had been decided to go ahead and have the picnic anyway. After all, so long as the clouds stayed light and didn’t bring rain with them, it wasn’t a bad day for a picnic.

In fact, Kelly found that there were some advantages to it. Namely, when the sun went behind a cloud and the wind picked up, it was a prime excuse for the cougar to cuddle in against John under the blanket they shared, and the otter was quite happy to gather her in close. If this hadn’t been her first chance to see him since her departure on a two-week trip for that same company, she’d actually have thought it was a pretty good day for a picnic after all.

(more…)

“Are you still up here?”

Jarik sent an apologetic smile over his shoulder. “Sorry, Dak,” the cheetah said, ears tilting back. He’d promised the otter some playtime on this run, compensation for the man otherwise having next to nothing to do for the previous five days, and he was growing distinctly aware that he hadn’t delivered for another two days. “The new boat’s got a big tank. It’ll need at least four more passes with the scoops to fill up.”

“I thought you said you could do those in your sleep.” Dak’s smile as he clung to Jarik’s flight seat was a little bit stiff; he was trying to put on a show of good humour, obviously, but the idleness was getting to him.

Damn it.

(more…)

The skunk leaned back in his chair, rubbing his temples. The screen in front of him remained stubbornly lit, glimmering with names, dates, and times; beside it, sunlight streamed in the window, a few mirthful voices drifting along with it.

Just the watch schedule left, Valan reflected. Normally not much trouble, but with all the forms he’d filled out already his eyes were starting to cross. If he didn’t get it done fast, he just might wind up putting the same soldier on watch at two different posts at the same time, or something similarly ludicrous.

Just this one thing, and he could get a brief start on his leave before the next watch rolled around and interrupted it. And while three days to sit around at the site of their most recent posting didn’t sound like much, it went a long way when that posting was at a subtropical paradise.

(more…)

From the coast, it had looked like just another stretch of shoreline – unbroken save by the mouth of a minor river, emerging from the dense trees. Follow that “river” inward, though, past the dense undergrowth and vicious thorn bushes, and one came here: to a minor paradise, a sparkling lagoon nestled in a cleft in the hills, screened and half-shaded by the canopy of leaves, with one stretch of white sand laid bare to the noontime sun.

“This is my haven,” said Tasven’s companion. “No other two-legged being has seen it in five years. Do you like it?”

(more…)

“Wait, does it truly feel unpleasant?”

The speaker sat back on his heels, eyes widening in surprise – and, given that “it” was something he’d just been asking for, a touch of remorse.  It was a thing he’d thought so basic, so elementary, that the notion of someone disliking it hadn’t crossed his mind – but that was no excuse. With a lover, any lover, assumptions were never wise.

(more…)

“Master Saeed?”

It was far from the first time he’d heard those two words together; indeed, over the past few weeks, he rather thought he’d got used to them – at least so far as the combination no longer sounding bizarre and foreign. Yet this time, they gripped his attention more than usual. Not by volume – or, at least, not by great volume; that they were spoken so softly was, in fact, part of what seized his attention. He hadn’t heard them said so hesitantly since the first few days.

Nor had he ever heard them used here.

(more…)

Saeed looked over to his robe, draped some time ago over the back of a chair in his workroom. In moments like this, a little dignity could be a precious thing.

But he abandoned the notion after only a moment’s thought. Dignity was all very well, but he was sodden with his lover’s seed. Even if the robe managed to obscure all of it, which was unlikely given how much of the stuff had landed on his neck and chin, the smell of sex permeated each breath he took and couldn’t fail to fill the whole room.

Besides, if he put the robe on without first taking a bath, it would need such a thorough laundering that there might not be much fabric left, afterwards.

So be it; the sabrecat would trust to the dignity of his own person and demeanour, and dare anyone else to comment on his state.

(more…)

Everyone knew there were no unicorns.

And they were right. Saeed knew that as well as anyone else, and not in the lazy, “everyone knows” sense. The sabrecat had travelled the land for three whole years, searching for some true signs amidst the folklore and assumptions. Because what everyone knew was not always right. Everyone knew there never had been unicorns either, that they were nothing but a tall tale, and there they’d be wrong.

Even among the most unlikely legends, there was just too much in common for it to be pure talk or even exaggeration. Missing, or largely so, was the immense variety of rumour and retelling. Oh, the exact powers of, say, powdered unicorn horn were far from agreed upon – but there were too many things that all the old accounts he found did agree on for him to dismiss them altogether. Too many common accounts of what various parts or extracts from the creatures did, and, perhaps more compelling, of what they did not.

(more…)

The beat was heavy and pervasive, impossible to ignore. It drove into Arverik’s skull, imposing its order on his breath, his heartbeat, even shaping the rhythms of his very thoughts. This was not a place where anyone with his sense of hearing could concentrate.

But the Tavar wasn’t here to concentrate, he was here to immerse himself in experience. And these humans really knew how to make music.

He leaned back against the bar and surveyed the crowd. Humans made up most of it, of course – this world had been theirs first, and even if it wasn’t their home, the Tavarri hadn’t descended in force; blending had been steady, but slow, in the years since contact. And this venue was built to human rather than Tavarri tastes. But there were some Tavarri sprinkled among them, too – and such a variety of them. Arverik had spent his early years in the Shukarat clan fortress, indeed, within its rarefied central spires. Everyone there had been close kin to the clan; most had been members of the core lineage.

In this one room, with maybe a dozen other Tavarri, he saw more colours and patterns than in all his childhood. It made having yellow eyes instead of green seem rather less significant, and that was another part of why he liked it here.

Seeing them all move together – Tavarri and their smaller, furless, tailless neighbours – was another part of it, of course. What the humans accomplished with mild intoxication, the Tavarri did just by forgoing ear protection: a bit of disconnection from the world, a dizzy whirl that let bodies bump against each other as they danced, and an easy camaraderie in which nobody minded that contact.

Still, he could only take so much of it at a time, and besides, he was getting hungry. He wove his way to the stairs.

(more…)

I wasn’t expecting to see anyone there. I hadn’t come by the point since I started at university, but I was feeling moody, feeling a need to reconnect with where I’d been. So I left my bike parked and hiked up the trail with a lunch bag, expecting to spend a bit of quiet time there.

I wasn’t expecting to see him there – and by the surprise on his face when he looked over and saw me, neither was he. “Cale!” The otter scrambled up to his feet, crossed the modest distance at a dead run, and threw his arms around as he collided with me.

What else could I do? I hugged him back, hard, as though it could make up for the time we’d been apart. (more…)

The key turned smoothly in the lock; the door swung silently open.

The big, brown-haired man made his way in, moving slowly and stiffly, absently reaching back to push the door shut and turn the bolt. It was hard to believe this place was his, and yet here he was.

(more…)

“Does it ever seem to you,” Nathan sighed, “that our lives are just a little bit… bland?”

“What?” Melanie blinked at him. “Bland? Nathan, you can fly at will and freeze someone in ice by looking at them. Tim can stop time. I can jury-rig anything I can imagine and some things I didn’t. We spend our days stopping people who can start fires with a stare, walk through the walls of bank vaults, break into houses through the phone lines, and who knows what else. And you think our lives our bland? My God, do you even listen to yourself?”

“Okay, okay.” Nathan held up his hands. “Bad choice of word. But think about it, Mel. Back when Lady M was still in charge, she’d take us all over the world, we’d see and do everything. We’d put a stop to people raising actual zombies with a wave of their hands, not just turning computers into zombie boxes with a touch. We’d save cities, and all at once, not just one convenience store at a time. Everything she did was larger than life, and the same was true of the ones she set out to stop.”

(more…)