Achaemenid Empire

He threw the three severed heads to the floor before us, either as a warning or a challenge, which it was I couldn't know. Perhaps both? I now saw the mace he hefted in his other fist. Its brutal spikes were unwashed, and black with dried blood.

I snatched a cloth from where it was slung as a screen beside the bed, and flung it across my girl, covering her nakedness. And then I turned to our intruder, not bothering to cover my own nakedness.

He took three steps into the yurt and puffed his chest out, the lamellar barding clacking against one another with the effort. He was a formidable size, his arms and chest and legs massive and ripped. I saw scars scoring his flesh, battle wounds that testified to his skill and his survival. And in his eyes I saw a raging fire that could not be quelled. He was no man to reason with, if he chose it to be that way.

He pointed at my girl.

"The slave bitch," he bellowed. "The one called Jyoti. She is not your property."

"I am no mans property, any longer," I heard her say behind me.

"You heard her," I smiled at the intruder. "You'll be leaving here empty-handed."

"Hardly," snarled the man, his curled moustache arching with the venom of his reproach. "I am a Rataishtar of Saka, a warrior! I was a mercenary for Xerxes the Great, and my commander Artabanus is the very man who has marked this woman! You have seen it, the branding."

I didn't say anything. I kept my eyes on him, watching the fires in his own gather heat. He wasn't finished with his tirade, however.

"It reads: 'I am Xerxes, the Great King, the King of Kings, the king of all countries and many men, the king in this great earth far and wide. The one who bears this witness is the property of the King of Kings.'"

I must have looked unimpressed by all this, for he roared at me. And as he roared, he stepped forward, raising his great fist in the air, and the mace went wide, swinging in a deadly arc around his head and brought in a fatal swing towards me. But I danced out of the way easily, and the spiked ball thumped into the earth where I had stood only a second before.

But he was quick, this Rataishtar, and experienced. Even as the mace had missed its mark, the man was already turning and falling into the swing, so that he spun across the weapon and delivered a forceful elbow across the temple. I was thrown from my feet, landing on the carpets beside the bed.

The intruder laughed, and hefted the mace again. I shuffled forward, scooting my legs between his as he advanced, and I flung myself into a spin from up off the ground, hooking my arms and legs around the Rataishtar's calves and twisting his knees inwards. I heard a snap and the man went down.

He hit the floor hard, and the mace was buried into his shoulder, driving the metal plates of his barding into his flesh. He gave a sharp intake of breath from the pain, and began to lumber back onto his feet.

Jyoti – her name now regrettably revealed to me by this oaf of Artabanus' command – glared at the brute as he rose to his full height. She let the cloth slip from her body, and her beautiful breasts were exposed.

The trick worked, if but for a moment. No man could resist the urge to but take a breath's moment to appraise such tits, and it was all the time that I needed. I rose up like a nightmare behind the Rataishtar, my eyes completely black and my maw a ragged assembly of fangs, and I buried my fingers into the back of his neck, worming them around his spine, and thus yanking his vertebrae from its moorings and into the open air, I rendered him immobile.

The Saka warrior fell to the ground like a useless thing. His eyes looked up at me, but how I couldn't tell. Fearfully? With wonder? I had heard that they believed human blood had mystical powers, and that gold for them was a symbol of eternal life. So I would show him this, and let him witness that instead of his great and dead Xerxes!

I drove my fists into his belly, puncturing the skin and spilling his blood. A deep gurgle came from his throat, and I suspect it would have been a howl of such agony, if he' had spine and vocals chords left to assist in venting it, that it would have shamed all his people to hear it. I pulled from him his intestines and draped them over my shoulders, and cupping my hands together, I dipped once more into that cavernous wound and drank deep mouthfuls of his blood.

His eyes rolled back and he was gone.

I sat back on my haunches, my shoulders back, my stomach stretched and blood running down over my abs. The entrails fell from my shoulders and onto the floor with a heavy wet sound.

My girl, Jyoti, sat upon the bed completely naked, staring at me in horror.

"I guess there's a marked difference between tearing some guard's heads off and this."

She simply raised her eyebrows in response.

I could hear some rapid Indo-Iranian being spoken outside the tent. More Rataishtars, and by the little I understood of their language they believed their fellow warrior – corpse on the ground before me – was in here killing me and raping my girl, and they expected him to be done very soon.

"He has more men outside," I explained to Jyoti. "The Parthian's will all be dead by now, and his men will enter here to make themselves at home soon."

She stared at the flap of the tent's entrance, and considered something. Finally her shoulders dropped and she looked back at me. The look of horror was gone from her beautiful dark eyes. But she still seemed wary of me, and who could blame her?

"We need to go now," I said.

We quickly got dressed, the Rataishtars blood soaking into my garments. Judging by the voices outside, the Saka warriors were on all sides of the yurt. I told Jyoti my concerns, that there were many men out there and this would be a tough fight.

She knelt down beside the slain warrior, and dipped her fingertips into a pool of his blood. I thought for a moment she was going to taste of his essence, but she simply put her fingers to her nose and inhaled the scent of his blood. I saw a spark of blue in behind the lashes of her half-lidded eyes. Then she stood her full height, and approached the door of the yurt. I made to stop her, but she held up a hand to resist me, and so I let her go and followed closely behind.

We walked out into the night air, into the slaughter that the Saka had made of the Parthian camp. The men were all dead, throats cut or hearts speared. It must have been an ambush and not a raid, because I'd heard nothing during our love-making. The women and children had not been spared a quick death, but seeing them suffering the brutalities of the Rataishtars lusts', it was not hard to know they wished that they had.

Seeing this dreadful tableau sparked something in Jyoti. A blue fire burst from her, seemed to stream like water from her, and when it had started, even she seemed unable to stop its flow. It poured into the night air, lighting up the horrors before us, and in the face of this revelation the Saka ceased their terrible administrations and fell back. Some unsheathed their swords, or readied their quivers, and others fell to their knees, faces pressed to the sand, in supplication of the miraculous.

But this wasn't a mercy that Jyoti produced. This was a fire, and a fire must devour. It sourced out the men that took arms or lay prostrate, and it enveloped them, like a lover at first, and then more brutally as it grew confident in its mission. The fire clung to the Saka, became less ethereal and more tangible, a living flame that would not be extinguished no matter how they rolled about in the sand or poured water on themselves.

Jyoti watched, unsympathetic, as the Rataishtars screamed and tore their clothing off in a bid to be rid of the cobalt flames. And then, as her exhalations finished their duties, and began to be snuffed out by their own will, Jyoti grew relaxed and even weak, and I saw her knees buckle and rushed forward to catch her in my arms. She clutched at me, for fear of falling backwards, and then she looked at me and there was resistance. I held her, quietly, and let her decide if in my arms was somewhere she wanted to be. She searched my face, stared into my eyes, and finally she gave a tiny nod.

I hefted her into my arms fully, carrying her as I did at the beginning of the night, when we fled Alexander's captured city. The blood of my slain warrior was still slick against my chest and my arms, and it seeped onto the clothing Jyoti wore. I hated that. I didn't want this blood, to which she had shown such revulsion at, to touch her. But it was too late. It bridged us both now.

The Rataishtars around us had stilled now. Their corpses, charred with Jyoti's mysterious blue light, lay on the desert floor where they had dropped. Not a one survived. The Parthian women and children, those who had survived their tortures, shied from the monsters in their midst. They would take to the desert, these survivors, and find more of their people, perhaps make their way to the cities of Dahae. And doubtless Alexander would send more mercenaries after us: perhaps his own men, after the failure of Xerxes' own.

We left the Parthian camp and I carried my girl at preternatural speed across the desert, West-ward, and when we reached the Caspian Sea I took her into those waters and carried her until the cool waters reached my waist. I stripped her of her clothing, and me of mine, and let them float around us, the blood diluting from them. The cool night air pricked our skin, made gooseflesh of it. I lifted Jyoti up to me, and she wrapped her legs around my waist, one hand on my ass and the other around my back. Likewise, I cupped her ass with one hand and pressed my palm against her lower back, and as we let our trembling lips meet and softly kiss, my cock pressed against the lips of her labia and slid inside her, deep and to the hilt, so that I felt her labia brush the hairs of my balls.

The sky was starting to stir, a light coming into from the East. I had time enough for this at least, and slowly rolled my hips so that the length of my cock gently slid out of Jyoti's pussy and then drove in deep again. I lowered us into the water and continued to kiss as it engulfed us.