StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Shadow of the Tyrant



Thanks to havokeff for the artwork

When Mary fell asleep, she was in a hot, stuffy carriage going from her family’s estate in Yorkshire to visit her father in London. When she awoke, she was lying on a pile of hard, sharp rocks heated to intolerable temperatures by a blazing midday sun, her clothes had ripped and become wet and a set of powerful, callused hand were holding her still and clamping her mouth shut.

She immediately tried to scream, but upon trying to inhale the hand covering her mouth pinched her nose and the man behind the hands made a soft shushing noise. Then, with strength that she could not hope to match, he turned her towards something she never could have dreamed up in her wildest, more feverish nightmares. She tried to scream again, but again the hands holding her prevented from doing so.

Staring down at her was a monster, what she would best describe as a two legged crocodile the size of a locomotive engine. It’s deep set eyes were black and terrible and looked down at her with all the deadly curiousity of a cat staring down at a cornered mouse. After a second the monster opened its enormous jaws wide, wide enough to swallow Mary whole, revealing glistening rows of razor sharp teeth the size of steak knives.

And then, it snapped its jaw shut with a sound like a steel trap closing and walked off, seemingly bored. The hand holding Mary’s nose released and allowed her to breath several times before turning her again to reveal the fact that there were actually four of the creatures, two larger ones and two smaller ones merely the size of horse drawn carriages rather than locomotives. Milling about them were about a dozen creatures that looked like the emus from her books, except for the fact that they had more teeth and claws than any bird Mary had ever seen. They also had strange clusters of long feathers on their heads that looked a bit like pointy dog ears.

Making a shushing noise again, the man holding her released her mouth. When she went to say something, the hand clamped shut again and the hush was repeated. Releasing her again, the man waited until he was sure she would stay quiet and then let go of his grip on her body. Staying still and quiet, Mary just watched the monsters as the man slipped away.

When he came into view, Mary could only see a long, feathered cloak, similar in colour to the mottled brown-black of the bird creatures. Slowly the man approached the largest and scariest of the monsters, head hunched over and arms thrown wide. For a moment Mary wanted to scream, to run, but fear held her silent and in place. The monster bent down to the man so that its head was level with him and its mouth began to open menacingly.

Then, amazingly, the creature proceeded to lie down and open its jaws wide. The man then began to reach his hand inside its mouth, and instead of having it bitten off, he pulled something out and dropped it on the ground. One of the bird things greedily snapped it up before the entire flock began to swarm over the creature, using the sickle shaped claws on their feet like climbing hooks to clamber all over the giant monster, picking at it.

Eventually Mary realized that the man and the bird-things were cleaning the giant monster, scratching itches and plucking out parasites. When they completed their task, they moved as one to the next largest creature, eventually cleaning all in turn over the course of what seemed like forever under the blazing sun, but must have only been a few hours.

When they were done, the giant monsters seemed to settle in and go to sleep, the bird-things settling in around them and doing the same, while the man turned back to Mary and finger on his lips, bade her to follow him.

He was a strange, savage man, dressed in feathers and reptile leather, the majority of his skin covered in thick, black mud that had become caked on in the blazing heat. His head was shaved bald, a headdress of feathers covering his skull. Thin, tall and wiry, he practically radiated deadly strength. Worst of all though were his eyes, dark and flinty, as deadly as the monsters he serviced.

Offering Mary and hand up, he again pantomimed silence and then motioned for her to follow. Seeing no other option, Mary quietly followed behind with some difficulty as her shoes were not meant for use on the rough gravel and loose, dry caked soil that they travelled on, nor was her dress designed for the mobility the trek occasionally demanded from her. The man at least seemed considerate of her plea and often stopped to let her rest, occasionally offering her a leather pouch filled with hot, stale water that was still the most delicious and refreshing thing Mary had ever let cross her tongue.

Eventually they arrived at the edge of a strange forest. What exactly was strange about it beyond the fact that it was clearly a jungle Mary could not quite place, other than the fact that the plants just looked wrong. Leading her along the edge for a time, the man eventually brought them to a large outcropping of rock that jutted out of the ground at the edge of the forest next to a small stream. The pile of rough stone caused something of a diversion of the water, creating a small pool next to it.

Hanging down from a section of the outcropping was a crudely fashioned yet sturdy looking rope ladder leading higher up. Gesturing for her to proceed, the savage man obviously wanted her to climb the ladder.

Finally having enough, Mary sniffed and said slowly and contemptuously, “I am a lady; I do not climb such things.” She did not expect to be understood by this indigene.

Instead, the man shrugged and said in clear, if cracked and somewhat strangely accented, English, “If you want to spend the night alone on the ground with the predators out here that’s fine by me,” before scrambling up the ladder monkey-like and disappearing into the rocks.

Wide eyed and shocked by the man’s understanding, Mary suddenly remembered the monsters and noticed how low the sun was getting, casting ominous shadows over the nearby jungle.

The man was squatting at the top of the ladder, an amused smile on his face as he offered her a hand up over the final lip on the climb.

“Welcome to my lair,” he says while getting up and heading up a path to a flatter section where he had set up a small campsite. Shrugging off his feathered cloak and headdress, he hung them up on a crude wooden coat rack situated in a protected alcove.

“You can get undressed in the cave over there,” the man says, pointing to a dark hole in the rock.

“What?” Mary cries out in horror, disgust, and surprise.

Looking over her, the man says, “I know you’ve probably been in shock for the past several hours and haven’t really noticed, but when Elizabeth picked you up her teeth cut you in several places and I need to clean the wounds. Plus all that shit you’re wearing is already causing you to overheat, just by looking at you. Are you wearing a fucking corset?”

Gasping in shock at the crudeness of the man’s language, Mary is about to snap back but then he is standing before her, glaring down at her, and she notices just how big he is. Gulping, she looks up into his deadly eyes and wonders what is going to happen next.

“Listen little girl, I don’t know what you were doing for the past several years, but for me it’s been surviving in this hostile hell, alone. I haven’t had anyone but myself to talk to, and I only have memories of women. Right now, if I wanted to, I could turn you into my fuck doll, raping you until I have all this accumulated sexual frustration worked out. You would be left a broken, cum splattered shell of a human being, every scrap of pride and dignity stripped from you. You would beg for death, but death would not come, because for so long as I still cared to fuck your orifices, I would keep you alive, a warm, pliant flesh doll,” the man said, his voice low and malicious.

Mary nearly lost control of her bladder as she cowered under his intense stare and threatening statement.

His face breaking into a cruel smile, he then says, “But I’m a gentleman, so I would never dream of doing such a thing. Now, if you would please, take off your outerwear, if not your underwear, so that I can tend to your wounds.”

Gulping, Mary nodded her head and then ran as fast as she could into the cave and immediately found a hiding place and huddled up to cry. She cried for many different reasons, but mostly out of fear, and she wasn’t sure what she was more afraid of: the monsters outside or the one wearing the form of a man.

After a time, she heard a rustling noise at the entrance to the cave and the exasperated voice of the man say, “Listen… I’m sorry I said that. I… I haven’t talked to people in a long time. I didn’t even know if I would ever talk to another person again. I talk to myself when I’m alone, listening to my own echo just to sate the pain of loneliness. I’ve grown used to speaking my mind. I’ve grown used to more or less getting my own way, because there has been no one to stop me. Just… just… just don’t go away, okay? I probably went more than a little crazy from isolation, and sometimes I don’t know what’s real or not. I… I… don’t want you to be just another dream, or worse yet, for you to die as quickly as you arrived and thus make this little more than a fleeting hallucination. Listen… I’m just a supremely fucked up person and… at least try to tend to your own wounds, okay? I’m leaving some supplies at the entrance, okay?”

Mary didn’t leave her hiding place for the rest of the night. She did stir somewhat when she heard the man begin to sing outside. It was a strange, lonely song accompanied by a peculiar instrumental sound.

“I am the bad one,
Distant and cruel one,
I am the dream that,
Keeps you running down,
With distraction,
Violent reaction,
Scars of my actions,
Watch me running out,

Hell doesn't want them.
Hell doesn't need them.
Hell doesn't love them
The Devil's Rejects
The Devil’s Dejects

Yeah, I am the brains,
Some say insane,
Blood is the rain,
That's what life's about,
In the great wide,
Head split and tongue tied,
Watch the sun die,
When you're running out,

Hell doesn't want them.
Hell doesn't need them.
Hell doesn't love them.

The Devil's Rejects
The Devil's Rejects

Yeah I am the knuckle,
Bow down and buckle,
Hold your breath,
Your world is running down,
Live for the family,
Die with the family,
All is the family,
My gun is running out,

Hell doesn't want them.
Hell doesn't need them.
Hell doesn't love them.
This world rejects them.
This world rejects them.
This world rejects them.
This world rejects them.

The Devil's Rejects
The Devil's Rejects…”

Mary drifted off to sleep as the strange strains of the next song began to pick up, starting off, “My fears hunt me down…”

She awoke the next morning stiff, sore, and cold, and now acutely feeling the cuts the man had been referring to. Crawling wretchedly out of the cave, she found the remnants of a fire smouldering at the entrance, along with the medical kit left out since the night before, several buckets of water, and some meat and berries.

About an hour later and Mary is feeling somewhat better than before, the scratch marks on her body now cleaned and covered in sticky leaves, her tongue no longer parched, and her belly feeling somewhat fuller. She also discovered a latrine that she somewhat clumsily figured out how to use.

She then began to explore the rock outcrop that the man had transformed into his home. The first thing she discovered was his extensive collection of instruments, mostly various kinds of flutes, drums, and stringed instruments, but there were a few stranger items too. All except for a few, she realized probably early attempts, showed remarkable craftsmanship and embellishments, the bone instruments often bearing highly detailed scrimshaw engravings.

Picking up one of the flutes, Mary was struck by how sad and lonely the man had to be to carve such things and then spend his nights playing music out into the darkness, for no audience other than monsters and his own ears. He had made this art not for any patron, but simply to ease the pain in his soul at his isolation. It was profound and disturbing all at once, and Mary quailed in fear at the sort of man who could endure such suffering of the spirit.

Placing the instruments back in their hiding place, she continued to explore, eventually coming across another cave, this one significantly deeper, with a strong chemical smell emanating out. Peering into the cave, Mary discovers to her amazement several shelves filled with leather-bound tomes. Tentatively going inside, she picks up one of the books and looks at the cover.

Fundamentals of Differential Calculus

Opening the book, Mary finds page after page of rough plant matter formed into crude paper and inked with primitive pigments detailing mathematics that her father, a civil servant in the service of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, would have found incomprehensible.

The other books were the same, filled with neat, handwritten notes describing maths and sciences Mary’s expensive education could not even hope to understand. True, she had received an education more suited for a lady, but her father had felt that at least some understanding of math and science would be useful for her should a future husband want to discuss the issues of his work with her at all and desire some level of comprehension.

And then she picked up the book labelled On the Development and Refinement of Quantum Mechanics. Before she could open it though, the man said behind her, “Don’t read that. You’re not ready for it.”

Shrieking in terror, Mary drops the book and whirled about, only to find the man standing there before her, covered in blood and feathers. Letting out another scream, Mary then faints dead away.

Coming to less than a minute later when some cool water is splashed in her face, she looks up to find herself back outside, the man squatting next to her, a haunch of bloody meat hung up next to the hearth.

“I went hunting,” he says in explanation, smiling through the caked on mud.

Shuffling away fearfully from him, Mary keeps moving until her back is to a wall and then she curls up, hugging her knees to her chest.

Sighing, the man says, “Look… I said I was sorry. I didn’t mean any of those awful things I said… not really. I… I kept my distance last night, right? Can I… can I at least learn your name?”

Gulping, Mary nods and says, “Mary… Mary Tennyson.”

Nodding, the man says, “Hello Mary. My name is Eric Branson.”

Mary looked at him confused for a second before saying, “You’re English?”

Looking at her equally confused for a second, Eric then bursts out laughing. It is a cruel, insane sound, the sound made by a man who has not experienced healthy mirth in a long time, and eventually he reaches down to one of the buckets of water and swishes his hand about in it a bit before he begins to peel off his mud mask, revealing well tanned Caucasian features.

“I think one of my ancestors was English in there somewhere before going over to the Americas, not sure though. My mother was Swedish though,” Eric says.

“Oh. Are you American?” Mary asks.

“Hard to tell exactly, I was born in transit on one of the Great Lakes, and I spent my youth bouncing between America and Canada. More Canadian than American I suppose,” Eric explains.

“Ah, so you are a subject of the Queen as well?” Mary asks, feeling a bit more of familiarity with the strange man now.

A subtle, wry expression crosses over Eric’s face and he responds, “Yes, I suppose you could say that I am a subject of the Queen.” He places a strange accent on the word Queen, but Mary just ignores it for the most part.

Glancing over at the chunk of meat still dripping blood, Mary asks, “So… uh… did you go hunting with those monsters?”

Frowning, Eric replies, “They’re not monsters, they’re animals. But no, I didn’t go hunting with the rexes today, they downed a trike yesterday, just a couple of jackal birds from the court that decided to tag along… and you have no idea what I’m talking about…”

“Well, I figured out what the jackal birds, good name for them too, are but otherwise, no, I don’t really understand,” Mary says a bit more politely now.

“Ah, yes, well, you might as well hear the whole story then. To start with, the large predators are of the species Tyrannosaurus rex, while the jackal birds are of a species that I’m not sure has been documented yet but assuredly they are of the family Dromaeosauridae. That is to say that those are just names, but what is far more interesting is the symbiotic relationship between the two species, and how I have managed to hijack it to my own purposes,” Eric begins to explain, becoming more animated and a light flaring up in his eyes that had not been there before.

Mary just nods and lets him continue, enjoying this happier mood to the psychopathic one he had displayed last night.

“Through various observations of behaviours, I have formulated a hypothesis as to the origins of the relationship, but that is less important than the actual current symbiosis. T. rex hunting is based around family-oriented packs, although family has a looser definition for this species than most others. The full grown adults are the primary killers, while the juveniles are the primary hunters. Due to their smaller size, the juveniles are faster and more manoeuvrable than the adults, thus they serve as beaters to flush out and herd the prey into an ambush by the adults. Some time ago the jackal birds began following the rex packs as scavengers, and through imitative behaviours and colouring, gradually moved closer and closer until they became integrated with the packs. They serve as additional herders in the hunt, nest guardians, and like the bowyer bird and the crocodile they have taken to cleaning the rexes of parasites and removing bits of meat and bone from the teeth.

“Now, through observation, I learned much of their behaviour. The pack behaviour of the jackal birds is very primitive, much closer to mob dynamics than actual coordinated hunting, but while no expert I would say that due to the influence of the rexes, which are true pack hunters, the jackals are just over the line between a pack and a mob. Now, they have two distinct permanent social structures, lead by the Chamberlain and the Sergeant-at-Arms. The Sergeant-at-Arms is the leader of the jackals during the hunt and tends to be the biggest and strongest of the jackal birds. The Chamberlain is the jackal bird most capable of sucking up to the rexes and is more or less the personal attendant to the largest rex. Now, by using a multi-layered disguise consisting of visual, auditory, olfactory, and behavioural imitations, I managed to secure a place amongst the pack and with the rexes,” Eric explains in detail.

Blinking a few times to absorb all this, Mary finally fits his get-up together and says, “You’re trying to look like the bird-things!”

“Yes. Actually, as they had never before seen a human the visual trickery was fairly easy. It was the olfactory obfuscation that was tricky, for the majority of mammalian species either group has come into contact with are egg-stealers. You’ll note that the only hair on my body is on my eyebrows and eyelids, the rest I continuously shave off to avoid the accumulation of mammalian pheromones. The mud helps serve as protection against the heat and sun, but it also traps sweat generated during the day. Although your arrival here suggests that I may have gone a bit overboard in some of my measures as Elizabeth picked you up without any prompting from me. I’m fairly certain that at least she has positively identified me as a different, if helpful, species, and thusly carried hijacked instincts over to you,” Eric elaborates.

Finally it dawned on Mary what Eric had been talking about with her wounds the night before. Some of her schooling had involved the study of Greek and Latin, and he had referred to the big monsters as Tyrannosaurus rex, which roughly translated out to “Tyrant Lizard King” if she remembered her lessons correctly. The titles of the jackal birds, it all added up to one inescapable conclusion.

“One of those monsters picked me up?” Mary suddenly shrieked out.

Nodding, Eric says, “With her mouth. Where do you think the lacerations came from?”

Mary was awoken from her second bout of fainting that morning by another splash of water to the face, although this time it was Eric that backed off when she started to panic again. He muttered as he retreated, “Right… really put my foot in it last night…”

Once Mary had settled down somewhat, Eric says, “Yes, Elizabeth is the name I use to refer to the matriarch of the rexes, the others being Charles, William, and Henry. Like the English Queen, Elizabeth is of the ‘iron fist in a velvet glove’ style. She was quite gentle with you and brought you straight back to their lair for me to look at. It’s just that her mouth is lined with razor sharp teeth.”

Mary had finally had enough and she asked the big question, “Where are we?”

Eric frowned and said, “I honestly don’t know exactly. I went to sleep one day and woke up here. All I do know is that this is some sort of lost world, a place where impossible creatures thought long gone from this world roam. A place where man has never before set foot. Somehow I suspect someone, or something, of malign intellect has placed first me, and now you here. As you can see though, I am trying to make the best of it.”

Glancing over at the haunch of meat, Eric says, “Speaking of making the best of it, I had better start working on the meat before the sun and flies ruin it. You may wish to figure out exactly how you want to arrange your clothing as it is going to get hot today. If you thought yesterday was bad, then you haven’t seen anything yet. Yesterday it rained in the morning and that kept it cooler than normal for this time of year.”

Turning up her head with the best regal sniff she could muster given the circumstances, Mary says, “If you think I will prance around in my underwear like some common trollop for you, you are mistaken.”

His face going hard for a moment, Eric looks like he is about to snap off something hateful again, but then he shuts his mouth, shakes his head and says apathetically, “Whatever,” before getting up and going over to the meat, carrying it off to his butchery grounds.

Waiting for him to leave, Mary then slowly gets up and walks over to the cave where Eric had his library. Finding the book still on the floor, she picked it up and wondered what Eric had meant earlier by, “Not ready for it.” Shaking her head, she decided that she was not going to let some savage, half-mad colonial tell her what to do.

Opening up the first page, she quickly began to furrow her brow as the discussion of various scientists and experiments important to this strange field were listed. She had never heard of any of them, and more so, what was the nonsense with the dates? 1897, 1900, 1905, 1913, 1924, 1927? They were all decades in the future! How addled was that poor man? Especially the madness of some of things that seemed to be described by this strange theory.

And then, after rapidly flipping through to the end, she discovered the final section. The writing was much more cursive and seemed less like it was being copied but rather it was being written on the fly. The chapter was titled, “On Time Travel”. It read:

Long thought impossible except for in strange and extremely small intervals where uncertainty blurs the lines of causality, time travel to the past is clearly possible as here I am, in the past. While the hypothesis that I am in fact dreaming or in some sort of coma is perhaps the most likely, it would smack of solipsism for me to operate under any assumption other that what my senses tell me is real. Not to mention foolhardy, as I reserve the right to be sceptical as to whether killing myself here would allow me to wake up in the real world. In any case, operating under the parsimonious assumption that all things I have experienced are real, it becomes inescapable to ignore the evidence that I have travelled backwards through time.

The first and most obvious piece of evidence is the dinosaurs. Such creatures are utterly unmistakable, especially the T. rexes and Triceratops. The presence of such a readily identified species narrows the range down considerably, to within a few million years. Of course, the lifespan of the T. rex species is such that the error involved is more than ten times the existence of Homo sapiens. Although technically I am only assuming that they are actual T. rexes and not some progenitor or cousin species, which adds an additional million years or two to the error. But I digress. Not that it matters, but…

The second piece of evidence is my experimentations with fire. Simple observation shows that fires burn hotter and more readily here, and more precise measurement, such as it is under such primitive circumstances, has led me to the conclusion that the concentration of oxygen here is greater than in the era of humanity, as fitting with knowledge of the Cretaceous period. Strangely though I appear to be protected somehow from the effects of hyperoxia, something I cannot explain without resorting to some form of outside influence.

The third piece of evidence though, is the motion of the heavenly bodies. Mercury, Venus, Mars, and Jupiter all move the way they should, and had I access to the necessary optics I am sure I could confirm through study of Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. While being snatched up by extraterrestrials and placed in some sort of strange recreation of the Earth 65 million years ago is still a distinct possibility, it involves so much more complexity than actual time travel that, while I cannot discredit the hypothesis, I am forced to embrace the fact that I am so mind boggling lost and alone that just thinking about it hurts.

So, as with all things in this library, this cave, I seek to distract myself from the madness and pain by embracing other thoughts. What follows in this chapter is my best guesses as to the mechanisms of my temporal displacement. While laughably crude, I at least have the knowledge that such travel is possible on a macroscopic level, which puts me ahead of all others trying to perform such thought experiments.

Mary closed the absurd book and began to laugh. What nonsense was this? Travel through time. Why that was… that was…

Mary collapsed to the ground in hysterical laughter, the sound very rapidly morphing into insane screaming and crying as Mary’s mind snapped under the strain and implications. The thoughts were too sharp, too mad to think about, so she retreated into a state of non-being to escape all thought.

Eventually the screams came so hard that Mary began to vomit, her stomach twisted and squeezed by the spasms of her body. Eventually she was just so tired that she collapsed, her throat raw but the occasional insane giggle still escaping her lips. Despite her exhaustion though, she remained conscious, and watched some detachedly as Eric entered the cave carrying a bucket of water and wearing a blank look on his face.

Squatting down, he looks at her and says, “Congratulations, you just read your first forbidden tome and suffered SAN loss. I did the same thing when I first arrived. Okay… there was no book at the time, I had to write all of these in my copious amounts of spare time first, but I did suffer a bought of insanity and depression.”

Looking weakly up at Eric, Mary asks, “How did you…?”

A flicker of that hard madness went across Eric’s eyes before he said, “I can tell you, but you won’t like my response. I can also explain just how lost we are, but you will probably like that even less.”

“How lost are we?” Mary demands.

Doing some quick math in his head, Eric says, “Let’s put it this way. Your time is separated from mine by somewhere between a hundred and a hundred-fifty years. In that time we suffered a single disastrous war, that in six years killed nearly ten times the number of people killed in the Napoleonic wars. A single war, admittedly the largest one ever, where armies of millions of men march across the planet in metal war machines while flying machines drop hundreds of thousands of tons of bombs from the sky. We have weapons that can incinerate entire cities with a press of a button. We have walked upon the moon. Our technologies are impossible to describe to you, but they have made it such that the working poor have a better absolute quality of life than Queen Victoria. That is the difference between us. But if you were to call the distance in time we have both travelled a single day, then those 150 years of separation would amount to less than a fifth of a second. The time between your time and the birth of Christ is about two and a half seconds. That is how lost we are.”

Mary started to throw up again, but having already emptied her stomach all she was doing was retching up some clear fluid.

His voice cold and emotionless, Eric adds on, “I suspect that we are somewhere near where Montana will be some day. Would you like me to show you the ocean two day’s walk from here? Or the volcanoes? Everything you once knew has never existed. It is more than just gone, it never was. I’m sure Darwin has published his controversial book by your time, so you’ll at least know of the theory of evolution and how it posits humans descended from apes. Well, guess what? There are no apes yet. No monkeys. There are rats and mice. The jackal birds? One day their descendents will become actual birds. There is no grass outside because there is no grass. Anywhere. If you take a look at my tools, you will note that I don’t have any made of flint; they’re all made of obsidian, despite the fact that flint is easier to work with. This is because the majority of the flint is still forming at the bottom of the ocean. None of the animals are the same, none of the plants are the same, and even the rocks are different. Do you understand just how lost we are?”

Mary just huddled up into a tight, foetal ball, and whimpered.

Sighing, Eric says, “Don’t forget to drink the water or you’ll become dehydrated very quickly. When you’re ready to learn to deal with the pain, come see me.”

Mary spent the rest of the day huddled up, trying not to think, only occasionally uncurling to try and parch her tongue from the supplied water, dehydrated both by the crying and vomiting and by the intense heat that built up over the day. By the end, Mary had lost all sense of modesty and had stripped down to her underwear, which was still more than the clothing Eric had on.

As the sun set on the second day Mary had spent in this strange land, this strange time, she heard strange strains of music begin to pick up, much stranger than the first day. From hearing Eric’s simple descriptions of his strange and brutal sounding time, she wondered what the music sounded like. There was a quality to the material Eric was performing that suggested that he was trying to do the impossible, to replicate sounds that could not exist.

“The hallowed lands so far behind
As fleeting dreams still linger
Like distant voices through the rain
Like grains of sand cast from my hands

I never thought I'd go this far
Without a star to cross the seas
So far from shores I'd left behind
Still far from shores I've yet to reach

I try to find the strength I need
To calm the doubts in my belief
With the will, I know my heart won't break

And if I have strength, then I've belief
If I have love, my heart still beats
Here under stars
Far from home

The picture fades, the light recedes
The sound is lost in whispers
My recollections once clear and pure
Now distant lights that dim with time

I never thought I'd go this far
Without a star to cross the seas
So far from shores I'd left behind
Still far from shores I've yet to reach”

The song was slow and sad, and from what Mary remembered from the night before, she wondered just how long Eric had been singing his sadness and loneliness into the dark. Was this how he coped?

Having crawled out of the darkness of the cave into the spectacular diamond studded night, Mary gazed in wonder up at the sky, and she realized that even the stars had changed. The moon looked different too, bigger than she had ever seen it and the patterns on its surface had changed too. It was all impossible, and yet it made Eric’s words ring all the more true.

Having seen her leave the cave, Eric, sitting atop the highest point of the rocky outcropping, looked down at her and switched instruments, one of the stranger ones Mary had seen earlier in the day, although it looked like it was some variation of drum. Picking up a fast beat, Eric began to sing hard and aggressively.

“A million faces, each a million lies
For each and all a chrome disguise
Prompts for action force reaction
Embody promise in a sheen so pure
Hurt, the measure of blind ambition
The testament to your singular disease
Against all wisdom you heed no warning
Your desires giving you away

If I could change your mind
I wouldn't save you from the path you wander
In desperation dreams any soul can set you free
And I still hear you scream
In every breath, in every single motion
Burning innocence the fire to set you free

Your actions turn conquest to dust
In portents of fate you foolishly place trust
Sense fear in your broken breathing
Resort to shadows till your body expires
All creation has the promise of heaven
And still you travel the road to hell
I'm saying nothing for the good of myself
But I'm still talking and you're not listening

If I could change your mind
I wouldn't save you from the path you wander
In desperation dreams any soul can set you free
And I still hear you scream
In every breath, in every single motion
Burning innocence the fire to set you free

As night descends upon the city
The streets are cold, the lights go by
And in the stories of the people
A million faces, a million lies
They'll never say they feel what you feel
That they can see the world you see
And in their faces, their expressions
A million faces, a million lies”

Mary wasn’t sure if the extra emphasis on the bit about talking and listening was original to the song or not, but she was sure that they were for her.

Mustering up the courage, she asks him, “Is that how you have survived?”

Smiling, his teeth white and brilliant as the stars in the night, Eric changes to a more traditional set of drums and picks up a new song, this one even harsher than before, emphatically repeating a single line over and over again in a very, very strange, tinny accent.

“exterminate annihilate destroy

give me your faith, something i can believe in
and you'll be my family, my brother, my friend
tell me a truth that i find not deceiving
teach me a lesson that i understand

build me a shelter, a place i can dwell in
show me a future that i can enjoy
give me a reason and i'll be your fellow
show me the target i have to destroy

exterminate annihilate destroy

show me my leader and i'll pledge obedience
whisper the name of the enemy mine
blessed be my fate and my tools of expedience
i'm going to fulfil what's my mission divine

exterminate annihilate destroy”

Setting down his instrument, Eric smiles grimly and says, “Tomorrow morning I will tell you of the Tyrant’s Promise and you will know how I survived.”


----

Disclaimers: "The Devil's Rejects" is the property of Rob Zombie, "Born of a Broken Man" is the property of Rage Against the Machine, "Homeward" and "Chrome" is the property of VNV Nation, and "exterminate annihilate destroy" is the property of Rotersand, who are in turn using a line from "Doctor Who", the property of the BBC. Or rather, the properties may not exactly belong to those individuals or groups, but due credit has been given, yadda yadda. Insert remaining legalese here.

This story has been bubbling about in my mind since late 2006. Blame Discovery Channel. And again, thanks to havokeff for the artwork.

Great story. I can't wait to read more.

You've really set up an interesting story here, and I'm already addicted. That drawing by Havokeff really helps set the stage for it as well.

That was awesome.

Ok... I'm interested. Post More.

I am currently writing the next chapter, but unfortunately I have an 8 hour shift in half an hour, so there will be no further update today. I can probably be done the next bit by the weekend as I have the next couple of days off. Ah well, gives me time to think up another scene and ask havokeff if he wants to draw it. Of course, if I keep that up the story might need a 56k warning!

I'm sorry, but I find sterotypical classical Victorian Lady characters so one-dimensional they geneally are little more than a named object to speak dialog to instead of just doing a normal info-dump.

I likey a lot! But where's Born of a Broken Man? I don't see the lyrics in there.

Xon wrote:I'm sorry, but I find sterotypical classical Victorian Lady characters so one-dimensional they geneally are little more than a named object to speak dialog to instead of just doing a normal info-dump.

At the time, that was pretty much all they were... A Named Object to show off to Society.
Maybe after she gets over her shock she'll be a better character.

A good story, but when I saw the picture, I immediately thought of other "Man Vs Dinosaur" stories like 'Turok' and 'Cadillacs and Dinosaurs'.

Regarding the "outside influence" that brought Eric and Mary to the Cretaceous period, and which protects them from the effects of hyperoxia. Will it make an appearance anytime soon? Will it be an anthropomorphic enemy, or something completely alien, like the monoliths in '2001: A Space Odyssey'?

Mary is being intentionally written as a one-dimensional character right now. This is actually the third iteration of Shadow of the Tyrant because of the problem of info-dumps. In the first two versions I had the two primary characters hurled back in time simultaneously, but the problem was explaining the various ecological details in a sensible manner. Finally though I decided to have one character arrive first so that I could shuffle long periods of observation and experimentation off into a vaguely defined period from before the start of the narrative. Thus it would be reasonable for a character to know necessary things and explain them without looking like a tool.

Also, the format of the info dumps was intentional as well. In the next chapter you will learn a lot about Eric and Mary, and just how badly Eric has suffered alone in a hostile land.

Alfred, there was only one line from Born of a Broken Man shown, Mary fell asleep just as it was beginning. If you look for it, you can see it. I could probably put the whole thing in as the music has become more integral to the plot than I originally thought, but I decided that Mary was probably pretty fucking tired after such a stressful first day without having all the unpleasant thoughts stuck in there from the second day.

And Sidewinder, the presence causing this is definitely more on the 2001 side than the anthropomorphic. Eventually it will become abundantly clear that something is causing all this, but I'm still not sure whether or not the insitgator will remain in the background or actual come forward at some point near the end.

Oh, now I see the line! Well, don't I just feel silly for missing that.

I read this first at work, so I didn't get to see the pic until now. Bravo Havokeff!

I didn't say earlier, but the idea of the 'jackelbirds' serving the T-Rexes as cleaning service is something that I'd never thought of. It not only makes a lot of sense, as we see that same trick played out with modern-day birds, but it gives the Rexes an extra dimension. Is that your own idea, or has this idea been suggested before by experts?

It is completely my creation, as there is no fossil evidence for such a relationship, but I at least tried to create the jackal birds in a rational manner using what knowledge I have of dinosaurs, ecology, and evolutionary theory.

I might do a reveal of Eric's theory behind the jackal birds in story, but I might not. So for inquiring minds, this is a rough explanation of how the relationship between the rexes and the jackal birds evolved in the story.

The jackal birds featers are a mottled brown/black, very similar to the modern jackal, to serve as camouflage in the volcanic fallout plains of Cretaceous Montana. By a fluke of convergent evolution, tyrannosaur chicks utilize a similar camouflage pattern when young before reaching a size where the insulative properties of the feathers are no longer necessary as gigantothermism begins to take over. Because tyrannosaurs are pack hunters with generational specialization (there is real world evidence for this sort of behaviour), when jackal birds scavenged off rex kill sites, the rexes started to think that they were rex chicks.

Now, modern interpretations of rex fossils show that they were probably like top level athletes, reaching peak size performance around 18 to 20 years of age before burning out at age 30. This means that it would be impossible for an adult to rear chicks for more than a decade, and only for that long if it is the first clutch. So I decided that in my universe, adult tyrannosaurs have developed the habit of "adopting" lone chicks and juveniles on occasion, especially if they need another member of the pack to serve as herders. This was mentioned in the story, but I decided that tyrannosaurs are pack hunters with generational specialization. The lighter, faster (at least in terms of sustained speed) juveniles serve to move the prey into ambush positions where the adults can make a quick charge and attack with their massive jaws.

Anyway, back to the jackal birds. Those that were better at imitating the behaviour of the tyrannosaur chicks were obviously more successful as they had far less to worry about in terms of larger predators attacking them, especially tyrannosaurs! A couple thousand generations later and the jackal birds have evolved to have a more lasting relationship with the tyrannosaurs instead of running the risk that one will figure out that they are in fact not of the same species and getting annoyed. Aside from the already mentioned cleaning duties, for which the sickle claws on their feet are now actually used less as killing tools and more as climbing hooks, the jackal birds also aid in hunting, and more importantly for evolutionary purposes, nest maintenance.

I'm note sure what theories actual paleontologists have, but nest maintenance must have been a bitch for real life tyrannosaurs. At their size and with their small arms and poor manueverability, smaller dinosaurs and mammals must have taken quite a toll on their eggs as once they got in the nest, getting them out without destroying more eggs than the attacker would have been a real problem. So in my universe, the jackal birds serve as guardians of the nests, mostly because they will lay their own eggs in with the tyrannosaur ones. With superior numbers and manueverability, they can easily keep out most small egg stealers, while just about nothing that can't use stealth to avoid a confrontation will willingly go near a momma tyrannosaur.

So there, that is the evolutionary relationship between the jackal birds and the tyrannosaurs in my universe.

Mary slept restlessly the rest of that night, partly because a cave was a rather uncomfortable place to sleep, mostly because she had so many things spinning around in her head. Impossible things, things she did not want to think about, but mostly Eric’s words. The “Tyrant’s Promise” he spoke of scared her to the core. He was mad, utterly mad as a hatter, but he had a focus to his madness, a way of twisting his already warped mind to do things in a somewhat rational manner.

Eventually though she drifted off into a fitful sort of sleep, only to have it shattered in the early morning by a noise unlike anything she had ever heard. It was like a train engine suddenly braking hard, only louder and more organic. Bolting upright and screaming, Mary clutched her head against the enormous, continuous roar that echoed throughout the cave.

Eventually the evil sound stopped, and Mary managed to timidly crawl out of the cave to discover what was going on. And milling about the base of the rock pile were the monsters, the rexes as Eric called them. The heads of the two big ones were level with the lower section of the lair where the ladder was. And Eric was scratching the snout of one of the creatures.

Mary stayed well away until the monsters left, hiding in the shadows of the cave, not daring to move, even when Eric went down the ladder to do something on the ground. She did not change her position until she was sure the rexes were gone and Eric was back up on the high ground.

Mary went to go say something to him, but he just held up a hand and glared at her for silence before heading over to where the stones jutted out over the stream and he pulled out one of his buckets, a long line of woven fibres a rope so that he would not need to go down to the ground for water. After hauling up a bucket, he then went to one of his various caches and pulled out a small leather bundle.

Placing the bundle on a flat rock, he unrolled it to reveal a small supply of tools, mostly various small stone and bone blades, some sea shells, and what looked like a bit of wax. Mary then watched in silence as Eric proceeded to shave off the bit of stubble forming on the top of his head and pluck out a few other hairs with the shells before judging the job complete.

Rolling up the kit, Eric stood up and walked over to Mary, a cruel smile on his face, and he said, “You may wish to use the latrine before breakfast. I shall explain the Tyrant’s Promise after you have eaten.”

A few minutes later and Mary had an omelette sitting in front of her made of what was definitely not a chicken egg, and some meat cut into strips vaguely like bacon, although the texture was completely different. There were also some berries and other plant things in it. Having not eaten in a day, and having thrown up most of what she did eat, Mary was ravenous and devoured three helpings before Eric stopped making more.

“Can you tell me what the Tyrant’s Promise is?” Eric asks softly, almost like a viper’s hiss in its low menace.

Gulping, Mary says, “No.”

His face going from near blank neutrality to a smile so soft as to be more terrifying than the roar of the rex, Eric replies, “Then I will tell you. The Tyrant’s Promise is a very simple proposition made between the strong and the weak. One such promise exists between me and Elizabeth and the rest of her pack. They are strong and I am weak. But since I serve them, they see no need to destroy me… yet. If I go hunting and kill something by my own merits, they can take everything I earned with my effort and all I can do is pick up the scraps they leave behind. When they come, I grovel and scrape on bended knee, and they routinely piss on the rocks of my home to declare it as my own. I am their bitch until either I or their line dies off. But I do not ever think of rebellion. Do you know why?”

Mary shakes her head in terrified silence.

His voice the quiet rasp of a knife across leather, Eric replies, “Because they protect me. That is the Tyrant’s Promise. A tyrant will promise to protect you always, in exchange for one simple, trifling thing. Your soul. You must give everything you are to the tyrant, be what the tyrant wants you to be, and the tyrant will look out for you. Give you food and shelter; fend off the terrors in the night, all for one soul. Some promise, huh?”

Mary gulped significantly.

His smile broadening into a feral, predatory grin, Eric says, “And now my dear Mary, we come to the part of the conversation that involves you, no?”

Mary nodded her head with a slow, dreadful motion.

“I am strong and you are weak, no? Aside from simple physical strength, I have knowledge that you need; the knowledge of how to survive, even prosper in a land such as this. I have stores of food. I know how to work around the predators of this place, make them lend their strength to my survival, to your survival. So the question is therefore what use will I have for your soul?” Eric asks in a cold, crocodilian tone.

Her tongue completely dry, Mary has not the words to answer such a terrible question.

Standing up, Eric walks around the fire pit to stand behind Mary, squatting down until his breath was hot on the back of her neck, a finger lightly running down the side of her paralyzed cheek. She wanted to scream, to vomit, to do anything to get away, but she knew that it would do no good. She knew this madman would let her go, only to up the price when she came begging to return later.

Whispering in her ear, Eric says, “You have two choices as to how you sell your soul here today. One you will hate, and the other you will hate more. The question is which one?

“The first option is this. As I said the first day we met, I could take everything from you through simple strength alone. But I am a gentleman, so such thoughts disgust me. So instead, I will buy you. In exchange for your body, your being, I will protect you from the monsters and provide you with all the things you need to survive. Degrading, no? Although, from what I remember of my history classes, that is what marriage was in your time, no? I’m quite a find, aren’t I? I have the ear of kings and queens and all the human wealth and military capacity in this world at my command. Quite the step up socially, no?” Eric whispers, cruel and seductive all at once. On the one hand, his proposal was to essentially reduce herself to the status of whore, but on the other, she could still hear the words of her mother. How a woman’s role was to serve her father until she found her husband, at which point it was to serve him and any children she gave him.

Was that option really so different from the life she had expect, nay wanted, to live since childhood? Would submission to this man really be any different from the submission she was expected to show any other?

He was right. She hated this option. Not because of what he demanded, but because of what it meant. It meant that in his madness he was still more observant than her. Still smarter than her. And it grated on her how much better than her a lunatic, a commoner, a colonial really was.

Picking up a tear sliding down her face with a single callused finger, Eric holds it there for a moment before saying, “Or, there is the second option. You can sell me your soul bit by bit. Food will cost one piece, fire another, shelter another still, and on and on until you are safe and I have you. Each new price will strip away a bit of you, until nothing is left, but you will not have to suffer to be my bride, to share my bed. You will learn to whore yourself out just as surely as if you took the first option, not with your body but your spirit. Does that sound better? Do you hate it less?”

Eric had been right when he began. She hated one option, and she hated the other more. But right now she wasn’t sure what which one it was. Both sounded horrible, but she really had no other choice than to accept the madman’s proposals. She couldn’t survive on her own. She wasn’t strong enough. He was.

Her mind racing, she quickly decided that if she had to choose, she would choose the second. She was still in disbelief over the entire situation. It didn’t seem real. She still clung to the hope that rescue was coming. If she just held out long enough, she could escape his insane clutches and return home to Britain, to father and mother and nana and Sophie and Wallace and…

“I’ll take the second,” Mary states through trembling lips.

Eric lets the lock of hair he was examining fall carelessly from his hands and says, “So be it. Perhaps this is the wiser choice. You can always change your mind this way. If my prices become too intense then perhaps the sale of your body would be better.”

Standing up, Eric walks over to one of his buckets, and picking it up, he uses it to douse the fire. Sitting down again, he says, “There is little need for a fire right now, the air is warm and I have plenty of food that I do not need to cook first. I have not yet thought of the price for fire, but I will eventually. Right now though, my price for supplying you with food is something simple, something trifling. My first price is… your hair.”

“What?” Mary asks incredulously, not believing the demand.

“I said I want your hair. Every last follicle. In my hands. Until my demands are met, you get no food,” Eric says simply while flopping down on the ground.

“My… my hair?” Mary asks tentatively and worriedly, fingering her long brown locks that she could take hours to brush. Already it was beginning to lose some of its healthy shine and was taking on a dirty, grungy look.

“Yes, your hair. If you want food from me, you will shave it all off,” Eric states, waving his hand dismissively.

Mary begins to eyeball the shaving kit lying at Eric’s side, but he just laughed cruelly, picked up the kit, and said, “Have you paid for the use of this yet?”

“What? But how do you expect me to…” Mary asks before trailing off and saying, “This is what you meant, wasn’t it?”

Still smiling, Eric says, “This is the path you chose to follow, but unlike the Dark Side, you can always turn back.”

Mary decides not to comment on the strange comment, but instead asks angrily, “Then how am I supposed to pay your price?”

Shrugging, Eric holds up two fingers and replies, “Two options. The first is to figure out a way to do it yourself, be it ripping your hair out with your own hands or making a knife to do it. The second is to pay my cost for the kit.”

Narrowing her eyes in anger and suspicion, Mary practically hisses, “And what is the price?”

His smile twisting subtle from the cruel to the lewd, Eric states, “A strip show. And it had better be entertaining.”

“What? But you said…” Mary begins.

Cutting her off with a dismissive wave of his hand, Eric says, “I never said it had to be a lap dance. I will not touch you, and you will remain intact, but that is my cost. I said this road would piece by piece take everything from you. What better way to start than to demand your pride and dignity, for you to willingly demean yourself before me, as a bitch grovelling before her master? So, will you accept my price?”

Mary had had enough. Her fear of Eric had been pushed aside by the righteous anger growing within her breast at the casual smugness he was showing, the way he was constantly looking down on her. He might be stronger, smarter, and more capable, but right now she was going to refuse to let him be better than her.

“No! I refuse! I refuse to be your trollop, your… your… your toy! I’m nobody’s bitch! I’m a lady!” Mary screams in fury.

Throwing his head back, Eric laughs, an awful hyena’s cackle, manic in its fervour. Sneering subtly at her, he says, “I see you continuously choose the hard paths in life. You would have made a poor wife in your time.”

Glaring angrily at him, Mary states spitefully, “I would have made an excellent wife for a real man; you would be lucky to get a blind, syphilitic whore to go to bed with you.”

Snorting derisively, Eric casually waves and says, “Fine. If you want a knife, I suggest you start walking. The best stone available is obsidian and the nearest guaranteed source is three days away into the mountains by an old volcanic flow. There are other, closer sources, but you may have difficulty finding them.”

Narrowing her eyes suspiciously, Mary says, “I presume you have a price for this knowledge?”

“Now you’re learning girl,” Eric states, smiling brightly and sarcastically.

“What ludicrous price do you have now?” Mary asks venomously.

“Your corset,” Eric replies.

“My corset,” Mary says flatly before replying, “Is sex the only thing you think about?”

His face twitching subtly for a moment, Eric replies, “What makes you think it is about sex? Besides, you’re not even wearing it.”

Rolling her eyes in annoyance, Mary says, “Fine. Have it you perverted savage.”

“Excellent. The nearest source of obsidian is the stash of it I have in one of the caves on this rock outcropping. You’re welcome to as much of it as you want,” Eric says.

Screaming in frustration, Mary cries out, “Must you be so obstinate?”

“I’m a tyrant. Obstinate is what I do. However, since I don’t want you messing up some of the other items I have in that storage cache, I will get the stone for you. Isn’t that nice of me?” Eric says sarcastically.

Crinkling her nose in a sneer of truly royal proportions, Mary replies sarcastically, “Down right saintly of you.”

Getting up, Eric disappeared into the cave where he had his bookshelves and returned a few minutes later carrying Mary’s discarded corset and a fist sized lump of glossy black rock. Slumping back down, he tosses the rock to Mary while he begins to examine the corset.

Clumsily catching the rock, Mary almost immediately drops it as a sharp edge slices into her hand. Wincing in pain, Mary immediately begins sucking on the wound.

“Get used to it,” Eric says dully, the maliciousness gone from his voice.

“Get used to it, why…” Mary trails off, her tirade forgotten as Eric holds up his hands, for the first time clearly displaying his palms. They are a nightmarish labyrinth of puckered scars.

“Obsidian is a glass. It’s wickedly sharp and you will cut yourself on it, to the bone or beyond if you’re not careful. I once nearly decapitated an ornithomimus with an obsidian arrow,” Eric states dully.

Gulping, Mary looks down at the piece of black and dark grey rock sitting on the ground, a line of red across one of the uneven jags. Red blood. Her blood.

“Let me guess, you can show me how to be careful, for a price,” Mary says sarcastically.

The cruelness returning to him, Eric replies, “But of course. The act of creation is fundamentally also an act of destruction, and visa versa, so in order for me to grant you this service of creation, you must grant me a service of destruction. My new corset, I desire it only for its individual components. Take it apart for me.” Eric then contemptuously throws the bundle of cloth and boning at Mary. He then pulls out a few fine bone tools and says, “And since I want it done right I am generously allowing you to use some of my tools to accomplish the task.”

Taking the offered tools, Mary slumps down and contemplates the task before her, and then breaks down crying. Not because he was asking her to do something horrible, but because the action innately repulsed her, and she didn’t know why. Why did the thought of taking apart her corset fill her with dread and loathing? Why?

“Do you hesitate because you are vain? Do you resist the destruction of your corset because when you wore it, you felt pretty, felt all the eyes of the men upon you, looking at you hungrily, and enjoying it because of the power you had over them. The power to turn their heads with your laced up body, to make them desire you, make them want to do things for you. Do you cry because you will never be able to perform that lie of the flesh again, that no man will love you because all you had were your manufactured looks that you are now destroying?” Eric asks, his voice soft and steady, sharper than the obsidian than cut her. Infinitely sharper and more wounding.

Now bawling her eyes out, Mary desperately clutches the article of clothing, hating it and herself but unwilling to let go of either, terrified at the implications Eric is whispering.

Cocking his head to the side, Eric then says, “Or do you cry for the memories it represents? The link to your past. Does it remind you of the first time you put one on, and had it laced up snugly by your mother or servant? Does its physical presence soothe the wounds in your mind; give you concrete proof that the grand world you left behind was once real, once true? Do you fear that eventually the memories will fade, become blurred and shadowed, that the pain of loss will become dulled with the passage of time?”

Sniffling, Mary considers the words, and she does not know if they console her or not, if they will make the task easier or harder.

His demeanour hardening into something she had not experienced before, something truly sadistic rather than merely cruel, Eric says in disgusts, “Then if you cry for the memories that soften and dull no matter how you try to preserve them, cry too for the memories that do not become less sharp or painful no matter how hard you try to forget.”

Mary remembers the bookshelf filled with tomes, and something clicks in her head, and all Mary can say is, “Oh… my… God!”

Cackling maniacally, Eric states venomously, “Now you get it! All those books in there are copies without originals. What did I copy from? Memory! Raw, fucking memory! I’m one of those rare, gifted individuals with near perfect memory retention. Page 409 of Calculus: Early Transcendentals, Fifth Edition by James Stewart begins, ‘If C(x) is the cost of producing x units of a commodity, then the marginal cost is the derivative C’(x)’. Of course, that means that I can’t forget everything I have lost, letting it become a dull, pleasant memory. All those things will remain with me until the day I die, the pain never becoming any less sharp, any less of a knife in my side, a knife in my mind. Forgetting is a blessing in this sort of situation.”

Mary gulps and considers this statement, and wonders just how truly mad Eric really is. A mask seemed to have slipped off his face, the cold, casual hardness replaced by a bubbling insanity, his facial features twitching with suppressed rage and lunacy, his flinty eyes shattered by the emergence of a sick light behind them, his hands clenching and unclenching around unseen throats. For a moment Mary was afraid that she was about to die, or worse, but then she realized that he was gazing a thousand yards beyond her.

Staring at the corset in her hands, Mary considered it for a moment before she took a bone awl and began to carefully pick apart the stitching. It wasn’t worth it to cry over it. Had she been back home, she would have thrown it out without thinking otherwise considering all the stains and damage it had sustained over the last two days. Its disassembly was a trivial thing in the long run.

As she worked, she also noticed out of the corner of her eye that Eric was slowly calming down, his ragged breathing becoming more even and the twitching subsiding as the stony mask reassembled itself. And Mary wondered; did Eric serve more than one tyrant? Was he his own tyrant, keeping the madness he suffered in check, protecting himself from himself at the cost of himself?

Within half an hour Mary had the entire corset reduced to piles of fabric, thread, and boning. The utter destruction hurt on some level, but on another it felt liberating in a way. She… she… she didn’t know what she felt, just that she felt more good than bad from the whole incident.

Nodding, Eric stood up and said, “Pick up the stone and follow me.”

Carefully grasping the chunk of volcanic glass, Mary follows Eric to another section of the outcropping, this one littered with pieces of stone, wood, and leather. It was, apparently, Eric’s workshop. The first thing Mary noticed was that there was a large section of stone with strange brown markings that did not seem to fit with the rest of the rock.

Smiling wryly after noticing her gaze, Eric says, “That stone is a little different there, more porous. I don’t rightly understand the geology of this rock outcrop other than the fact that it is an igneous intrusion, but in any case that section tends to soak up an absorb liquids. Including blood. This is where I learned to knap obsidian. This is where you will learn.”

Gulping, Mary watches as Eric takes a set of tools out of a small nook in the rock and begins handing some of them to her, although the ones he proffers are so primitive as to strain the definition of “tool” as they tend to just be rocks.

Eric then proceeded to spend the next two hours teaching Mary how to work the stone into a rough, thin triangle about as long as her hand and razor sharp. By the end of it though her hands were soaked with blood and strips of her dress were being used as bandages. There was even a cut on her cheek from where a stray chip had gone flying. She had asked why she couldn’t use a piece of leather to hold the sharp obsidian, and Eric asked her where she would get the leather.

And that was when Mary realized why there was so much blood on the stones and Eric’s hands were so cut up. If he wanted leather, he had to kill and skin something, and he couldn’t do that until he had a knife, which meant that he had to suffer through and hope nothing serious was cut or infection set in. And knapping stone properly was hard, and Mary was only barely capable of creating her knife because Eric was teaching her how to do it. His first creations must have been little more than shards of broken glass.

Intellectually and physically drained from the entire experience, and with the sun starting to heat up the land to near intolerable levels, Mary had forgot the entire purpose for creating the knife in the first place until Eric started making lunch and when she looked like she was going to take some, he looked at her critically and said, “You still owe me your hair.”

Mary blinked several times before open and closing her jaw like a fish gasping in open air, trying to think of something to say before finally slumping down and picking up the blade, considering it. And then, closing her eyes and trying not wince, she begins to cut. The thin wedge of obsidian went through her hair like butter. By the end she was crying, both from a sense of loss she could not describe, and because of the numerous nicks and cuts she had taken getting her head down to stubble.

Eric offered her a bucket of water to help her clean up, but when she was finished she found him still looking expectantly at her. She said in a confused tone, “I did as you asked…”

Shaking his head, Eric says, “There is still more. I said I wanted all your hair and I meant all of it. Arms, legs, armpits, genitals, all must be free of hair. That is my demand. And I need proof.”

The tears flowing fresh now, Mary wants to scream at him, but can only shudder in horror at the damage the knife will cause, but Eric just gently puts his hand on hers and lowers the knife before saying, “I recommend plucking the hair from more sensitive areas rather than shaving with a stone knife.”

What followed was the most embarrassing and degrading thing Mary had ever done in her life as she provided “proof” that she was doing as her tyrant demanded. She wasn’t sure whether or not his quiet, cold, clinical analysis of her work was worse than if he had stared lecherously at her and made crude commentary. On some level, lechery was better than indifference, at least then she would know that she was attractive to him and…

Mary spent the meal in silence out of embarrassment, but not for the reason Eric undoubtedly thought. She was not embarrassed because she had to show her lady parts to Eric, but because she had wanted to him to be attracted to her. Was that vanity? Was she attracted to him? Or…

She remembered when he had practically proposed to her and she had thought of her mother. Was she really that dependent upon a man in her life that she would desire to be with such a deeply disturbed man simply because he was the only option? This was a facet of herself that she had never considered. Since she was a little girl, she had dreamed of a faceless man to marry. He would be strong, handsome, charming, rich, influential, and…

And all those things were truly superficial and useless in a situation like this. Strength meant nothing against the monsters out there. The strongest man in the world was no match for one of those Tyrannosaurus rexes out there. In fact, it would probably take cannon to seriously injure one of them. Looks and charm? Meaningless if he couldn’t survive. Rich? She thought she had heard a quote from an Indian Chief in the Americas involving not being able to eat gold. Influence? With who? The only one who had any power in this hell was Eric, who had claimed it with wits and wits alone.

And really, wasn’t what Eric offered what every husband was supposed to offer? Food, shelter, and protection for his wife and children. Wait… children? What was she thinking? She shouldn’t… couldn’t dream of having children with this barbarian. It was impossible. It was… why was it impossible? Why was she repulsed by Eric so strongly? Why wasn’t he good enough for her?

And then she turned the thought over and she wondered why she cared. She had never dreamed that she would ever have a choice in who she married, just that she would be set up with a suitable husband by her parents. Was she opposed to the whole concept because she could never get her parent’s approval?

That was it. That had to be it. Any relationship she had with Eric would never be legitimate, never be proper. But what weight did legitimacy have here? Was she scared of being found out? Did that mean she was still hoping for rescue, to return to a sane world?

She ran a hand over the stubble of her head, feeling the scabs forming over the cuts. Was this an act of defiance or submission? And if defiance, was it proper for a lady to defy the will of a man? Perhaps not with regards to her purity and maidenhood, but surely there were other areas where she should be more in agreement with Eric. And thus, if she expected escape, was it right to act in such an improper manner towards him?

The issues hurt her head more than the book from the day before. She could ignore and repress the painful, insane issues, but not these rather trivial ones. It was all so complex for her. One insane man and her feelings for him were more tangled than the web of social intrigues at a courtly ball! She should despise him! She should obey him! She should pity him! She should respect him! She should… she should…

Mary was broken out of her reverie by Eric saying, “I’m going to gather a few items from the jungle. Since I doubt you want to come, just hide in the caves if one of the rexes shows up.”

Watching him go, Mary waits until she sees him disappear into the dense foliage before heading for the cave with the bookshelf. Running her fingers over the spines of the leather bound tomes hurts her cut-up hands, but it also reminds her of the old wounds on Eric’s hands.

These were all highly technical books on mathematics and science. With his memory and obvious intelligence, Eric must have been a genius and polymath where he came from. An academic… how much had he truly suffered? She could see in her mind’s eye the man he had been before coming to this nightmarish world.

He was tall man here, so he would have been tall anywhere, perhaps a bit lanky and awkward, or maybe a bit podgy from not getting enough exercise as he was preoccupied with more intellectual pursuits. His hair was dark and unkempt, concerned as he was with other, more important things, while his skin was clean and pale from long hours indoors. He would have a pair of wire frame scholarly glass… no wait, he didn’t need glasses here. No glasses. They would have not been out of place though. He would be an engineer, professional and reliable and concerned with only the grandest of projects, or a scientist working on groundbreaking new fields. She could see Queen Victoria knighting him for some great achievement. She could see her parents asking to arrange a marriage between the two, highly approving of him.

His hands would have been soft and gentle, callused only by holding a pen, stained only by ink. She could practically feel them running through her hair, down her side, across the bulge of her belly where their son was growing and…

Shaking her head violently to break out of the daydream, Mary snatched her hand away from her stomach, worried by how low it was wandering. Such things were unfit and unhealthy for the commoners, to say nothing of a lady such as herself! She felt a deep, abiding shame at the warmth she felt and the sweat starting to accumulate that had nothing to do with the heat of the day.

Still, every time Eric had come into contact with her, while his hands had been rough, his touch was soft. True, he had said all those terrible things when he had seen her, and made her suffer so, but he had yet to be cruel to her. He let her eat a big meal before he told her he would give her no more food, and his conditions for giving her more were trivial. He… he… he was harsh, not cruel. He had said it himself the first night: he did not want her to die.

And in this harsh, hard world, could she ask for anything more than a protector who was harsher and harder. Very hard in fact, for while his skin hung off his bones in places and his ribs were visible, what meat he did have was solid muscle. The soldiers she had been introduced to were over-primped dandies in comparison to Eric, who could probably break them in half if he wanted to. And the casual endurance he demonstrated on occasion…

Mary chastised herself again, and despite her face a flaming red with embarrassment, she still tried to lie to herself and say that the itch between her legs was because she had plucked out all of the hairs there a few hours ago.

Scanning the books, she tried to find a title she could understand, something she could use to distract herself from the unseemly thoughts bouncing around her head. Finally she found something, a book of songs.

Taking it off the shelf, Mary began to leaf through the pages, amazed by Eric’s intellectual capacities. He had dozens, maybe hundreds of songs in here, all notated with small, precise script, showing full lyrics and notation for the various instruments used. Many of the songs seemed to rely heavily upon vocals, percussion, guitar, and piano. Or rather, she assumed it was a piano because the actual reference was to “keyboards” and the notation did not seem to fit with the harpsichord or organ.

The songs were also exceedingly violent, sexualized, and crude. Why, one of the songs was scandalously titled, “How Many People Want to Kick Some Ass?” Despite the vulgarity of many of the pieces, many also had a striking beauty and delicious complexity to them. Mary could see herself playing the piano, or even adapting some of the pieces to the violin, especially that song “Through the Fire and Flames”. The lyrics were nothing to write home about, in fact mention of them was probably best avoided, but the accompanying instrumentation was fascinating.

Soon she began to run her fingers over lines, quietly reciting the lyrics, listening to the structures of the songs. There was much passion and sadness in them, themes of rage and loss, isolation and madness, hope and victory, war and peace. She remembered Eric talking about how a single war from his era had killed ten times more people in half the time of the Napoleonic Wars. War had scarred his people, and she could see it here in the music.

The songs he had chosen to transcribe also tended to have themes of time and truth, something she could understand considering the circumstances. One song in particular caught her attention, and before she knew it she was trying to memorize it. As the day wore on and the heat increased, her eyes began to droop, exhaustion catching up with her.

Mary awoke hours later to the sound of music beginning to pick up. It was dark, so it must have been time for Eric’s nightly concert.

Leaving the cave, Mary heads out to find Eric sitting on his perch, playing a guitar and stomping his feet on the stone with an almost military march rhythm.

“ASPIRAT PRIMO FORTUNA LABORI
ME DUCE TUTUS ERIS
VOX POPULI VOX DEI
AD MAIOREM DEI GLORIAM...
AD INFINITUM

You know just who I am
Don't be so distant
Cause when you're lost
I am solely there to share your grief

Wailing for your sorrow
Is only my way to comfort you
Reminders of innocent youth
Waiting for morrow you're lonely
I name your solitude
I speaketh the truth

Now tell me all about your pain
Down to the detail
Don't say its love
Your fragile heart feeds my contempt

Wailing for your sorrow
Is only my way to comfort you
Reminders of innocent youth
Waiting for morrow you're lonely
I name your solitude
I speaketh the truth

Chase the heathen call
We belong... you and I
Unison in all you deny

I am the thorn in your side
That seeks accomplishment
Reminding the mortal of death
I am the spore of your pride
An angel heaven sent
The master of all
I am the urge of the flesh”

The song was as often slow and seductive as it was fast and harsh, and Mary could almost feel Eric’s finger across her cheek again, and she fought down the urge to feel flush and excited by it. It was unladylike to feel such things from simple, vulgar music.

“Does the tyrant have a message for me?” Mary asks sweetly and sarcastically.

“If you were listening last night, you would know the answer,” Eric replies, a broad smile on his face. His teeth… Mary had forgotten how spectacular and dazzling his teeth were, so straight and white, even after all this time in the harshness of this world.

Mentally kicking herself yet again, Mary says, “Well perhaps I have a message for you dear tyrant?”

“Does it involve the message, ‘Go fuck yourself’? Because I do clean the pipes every Wednesday,” Eric replies with a friendly banter.

Taking several seconds to figure out his meaning, Mary makes a revolted face and says, “You’ll go blind doing that.”

Shrugging, Eric points out, “I haven’t needed glasses yet.”

Shaking her head in disgust, Mary says, “My message is a song.”

“Oh?” Eric asks, intrigued.

“Yes… I was reading your song book and I found one I liked so…” Mary says hesitantly.

“Then by all means, sing it. Let us see what you can do my dear,” Eric replies jovially. Perhaps this time, when he was performing his music, was when he was the most in touch with his humanity and the furthest from the madness that he hid with varying degrees of success.

Inhaling deeply, Mary looks up with a discriminating eye and says, “Don’t laugh.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. You should have heard me when I first started doing this,” Eric states.

Taking a deep breath, Mary then begins to sing. Unsteady at first, she soon begins to pick up momentum as Eric recognizes the song and begins to add accompaniment with his guitar.

“Clock is ticking while I’m killing time
Spinning all around
Nothing else that you can do to turn it back
Wicked partnership in this crime
Ripping off the best
Condescending smile

Trying to forget
(Wasting my time)
We’re falling right through
Lying to forget
(Telling more lies)
We’re raising our truth

Go on and tease me

Clock is ticking while I’m stealing time
Can’t you turn it back?
Stop the cycle, let it free and run away
Silent sneaking along my path
Rugged the road
But we feel it like we’re flying

Trying to forget
(Wasting my time)
We’re falling right through
Lying to forget
(Telling more lies)
We’re raising our truth

Trying to forget
(Wasting my time)
We’re falling right through
Lying to forget
(Telling more lies)
We’re raising our truth”

Panting hard at the unexpected exertion required, Mary finds her face on fire when Eric begins to clap for her and say, “Bravo, bravo. Perhaps not as good as Christina Scabbia, but then again she is a professional singer.”

Still blushing at the praise, Mary can say nothing, and to a certain extent is glad she had not replied when Eric adds on, the hardness returned to his voice, “But do not mistake my courtly manner for anything but a mask, for tomorrow I shall be the same tyrant, as will I the next day, and so on and so forth. Never forget that.”

Mary considered this for a moment before smiling. Eric might be a tyrant, but he was her tyrant, and at least he had spelled out their agreement beforehand. His cruelness… no, hardness… it served a purpose, she now knew. She still wasn’t sure what exactly, but she could feel that there was an underlying reason to everything he did. He was his own tyrant, and he would demand nothing less.

----

How Many People Want to Kick Some Ass is by Stroke 9, Through the Fire and Flames is by Dragonforce, March of Mephisto is by Kamelot, and Our Truth is by Lacuna Coil. And you are all probably getting a good idea of the kinds of music I listen to

A good chapter, but Eric's... harshness... diminishes his appeal as a protagonist. (Or is Mary the protagonist?)

I keep wondering, however, how well Turok would do in Eric's world.

It seems clear that Mary is the protagonist. The text is entirely focused on her, and her thoughts.

Very neat. I wonder what Mary's reaction will be when she hears Eric belting out some Static-X.

Eric stayed up long after Mary slipped off to sleep. He wasn’t quite sure why, but he only needed about five or six hours of sleep a day, and he typically got about half of that during the heat of the midday when he typically took a siesta. So far his leading two hypotheses had to do with the alterations to his biology to handle the higher partial pressure of oxygen by whatever had put him here, and the other had to do with his insanity.

It was quite disconcerting to know that you were insane, especially since normally the shattering of the mind left you incapable of realizing you were fucked in the head. Eric knew though that no human being spent as many years as he had alone and in a hostile environment without developing severe mental disorders. He had simply figured out ways to use one disorder to keep the others in check.

Eventually around midnight he drifted off to sleep, his dreams, as always, troubling reminders of the life he once had, his subconscious mocking his conscious seemingly out of spite. Fortunately he only went through one or two REM cycles before waking up in the predawn twilight.

Mary was resting soundly in one of the caves, exhaustion still dragging her down. She probably had no idea how hard his tyrant’s demeanour was on him, how much his thoughts and actions were out of synch. Of course, that was because, despite the fifth of a second between them, the differences between the Victorian era and the early 21st century were probably greater than the Roman Empire and the Victorian British Empire.

It was difficult for him to mistreat her so. He had not come from a time when it was socially acceptable for men to be so overtly imperious and women meek and submissive. In fact, while not a milquetoast loser who let his partner bully him around, he did have an attraction to strong women. Perversely because he understood that everyone had moments of weakness and thus it made him feel stronger knowing that he would be the man she would come to when her own strength failed.

Thus when Mary had continuously defied him and kept choosing the harder paths presented to her, it had taken all of his considerable willpower to avoid getting an erection, a condition hard to conceal with a loincloth. He would never let her know that right now all he wanted to do was fall at her feet and worship her, and make her squeal with delight in all the right ways.

More so, he would have protected her even without the sale of her soul. Writ large in the evolution of the human male was the Three Ps: provide, perform, protect. Male dominance in society was all too common for various, often economic, reasons, but men who crossed the line from dominance into actual abuse of their partners were sick and unnatural.

Of course, Eric was sick and unnatural. Maybe not that sick, but still…

The problem was, dropping to his knees and introducing Mary to the joys of oral sex would be unfair to both of them. First of, he had known from the first sight of her that she would not respect him at first. She was from a different time, a different social class, a different social structure, where respect was easy to inherit but hard to earn. If he came at her from a submissive position, as was his first reaction upon seeing another human being and a woman at that, she would treat him as a servant, and she would never give him the emotional responses he craved like a starving man presented with a buffet.

Not only that, but when he first saw her, he knew that she was weaker than he was when he first arrived. His exceptional mental capacities might be a knife in his mind, but they were only sheathed there, not embedded there. He had been chased by wild dinosaurs countless times, nearly starved eight times, suffered life threatening infection six times, seriously contemplated suicide four times, and suffered bouts of madness for longer than a week twice. All in the first year here. But through wits and perseverance he had prevailed.

Mary had no where near the wits or strength of character to survive in this primordial world. Yet. Somewhere under a lifetime of Victorian conditioning that she was little more than an ornament for the men in her life, there was strength in her. Eric had originally feared that he would have to dig all the way to the hard core where the raw, instinctive drive to survive existed in all people, but it turned out that there was material he could work with just beneath the surface.

And so he would be the tyrant, teaching her the lessons he had learned dealing with the rexes and his own demanding personal issues. And he would chip away everything unnecessary to her survival and prosperity in this place. Only when she was strong enough that the weight of the world would not crush her would he let her be free of his tyranny. But of course, he could not actually tell her that. He knew that she would not understand his purpose and methods until the end.

The sun was rising. It was time for his morning rituals. And rituals they were. He was an atheist with an utter contempt for dogmatism and all that went with it, but he had discovered the utility of ritual. It gave him a focus, something to start his day with; an edge piece to the puzzle that was his mind.

First up was a routine of callisthenics Eric had developed to warm him up for the day’s exertions. Originally it had been to build up some muscle mass that his nerdy frame had not possessed, but he kept doing it because it was a useful part of his ritual.

Next up was a few minutes of archery practice. It was extremely difficult for him to kill any large dinosaurs with just a bow and arrow, but he had discovered that it was possible. The best method was precision shooting, thus it was very important to practice on his aim. Because the only way a human could semi-reliably kill a triceratops was to shoot it in the eye at close range. He had so far managed to do that once, after springing out of hiding and firing on an old, sick bull and getting extraordinarily lucky. So lucky in fact that he had not actually intended to kill the damn thing but just to startle it into an ambush.

Descending to the ground, he began firing horn and bone tipped practice arrows into a set of targets he had set up. While not sharp enough to reliably use for hunting, the practice arrows did tend not to shatter on impact, a problem with the obsidian ones.

Aside from giving him some exercise, the activity also gave him a way of venting some of his frustrations. Mostly he symbolically killed all the people from his past. Because he could not forget them and intellectually knew that they were not dead, he had to create an emotional disconnect. It wasn’t exactly healthy, but considering what a wreck he had been in before, it was an improvement.

Some days he started with his enemies and moved on to his loved ones, but today he was feeling in an angry mood, so that meant moving on up to people he hated. By the time he was finished, he was good and sweaty and pissed off. This meant that he now needed to get clean and cool. Fortunately the stream was not deep enough for crocodiles, and he kept the latrine on the other side of the lair, so it was quite safe and clean.

By the time he had finished all but one of his morning rituals, the sun was just above the horizon. The day was beginning, and there was much to do. Or rather, there was much to do to fill the time. The combination of human intellect with tyrannosaur muscle made hunting rather easy and Eric had to commit maybe one day a week to hunting. Gathering was rather more time consuming, but he still tended to have the majority of the day off.

Returning to the lair, he drew up a bucket of water and set himself down on his shaving rock. By this time Mary was up and about, and Eric looked at her significantly.

“Do you want to eat today?” He asks sweetly.

Looking at him bleary eyed, Mary scowls but goes to get her knife anyway. With her back turned, Eric smiles significantly. Both her acquiescence and silent, meaningless resistance were good signs. If he could keep this up, then maybe there was hope for her yet.

As he went to clean off one of his shaving blades in the bucket, he looks at his reflection in the water and silently wonders how long he could maintain his composure. Her presence was both painful and soothing. Painful because she was now a constant reminder of what he had lost, but soothing because he was like all humans, a social animal, and he needed contact with others.

Which of the two would win out in the end was still to be decided.

After eating breakfast in silence, Mary was the first to broach the subject of the day’s work, asking sarcastically, “So what Herculean tasks do you have for me today?”

By whatever gods there were out there, just hearing her voice was maddening, but in a good way. For so long he had only heard his own voice, to hear another was indescribable, almost unreal. He had to watch the movement of her lips just to make sure that everything was synching in time. Of course, watching her lips made his mind start going off on inappropriate tangents, so he had to quickly shove those into his subconscious to avoid embarrassing himself.

“Oh, nothing much, I was just thinking that if you want to do anything but run around in bits of disintegrating, soiled cloth and eventually nothing at all, you will need to have new attire,” Eric replies sweetly before waiting to watch the gears turning in Mary’s head.

Gears turning… what an appropriate metaphor, when he thought about it. Mary was from the Industrial Revolution, he was from the Information Age, and the comparisons between their intellects probably equalled the differences between an analytical engine and a microprocessor. Ultimately one was much faster at the cost of much greater delicacy of function.

Finally Mary says, “Let me guess… you’re not going to outright give me the materials unless I perform some perverted sexual favour for your amusement, but will instead make me go through a series of absurd, lesser tasks that wastes both our time?”

Eric’s smile was one part joy for her getting half-way there, and one part annoyance for her failing to figure out the rest. Not wanting to give it away yet, Eric replies, “But of course. Did you think after yesterday’s performance I would do anything less?”

“Well, I was hoping that might do the trick,” Mary says with a roll of her eyes.

Oh, there had been a communications disconnect between the two of them. He had been talking about the tasks of the day, but she seemed to think he had meant her song. Before, such miscommunication tended to drive him insane, especially since the only one he had to talk to was himself, but such an act was more proof that she was not a figment of his imagination, not an extension of his own mind. For some reason this made him horny, and he had to quickly stuff the thought in his subconscious.

Then he remembered how she had sung last night, and how horny that had made him, and he had to shove that thought back into his subconscious.

His subconscious was becoming a very perverted, horny place of late. He hoped it wouldn’t implode in on itself, spawning a dark god at the centre of a ragged hole in the universe where the laws of physics blurred into madness.

…

Wednesday could not come fast enough.

Having taken only a half second to go down that tangent and having maintained a flat, stony expression, Eric manages to pass of his momentary lapse as a poignant pause before saying, “Such things are small, trivial steps down the path you must walk. If you think I will congratulate you for crawling, you presume too much. If you think to gain my favour by running, I will merely laugh at you when you fall due to your own foolishness.”

That was a pretty callous thing to say, especially since he wanted repeat performances, but he needed her to develop some calluses first. Ha… callous/callus.

Sneering, Mary replies, “Well then see if I ever do something like that again.”

Damn. Oh well. Just another thing to add to the list of sacrifices he was making for her long term survival.

“Just because music soothes the tyrant’s soul does not mean he will not crush you anyway if you defy him,” Eric says coldly.

Twitching her nose angrily, Mary asks, “Fine, what do you need me to do?”

“What do you think?” Eric asks, hoping she could figure out the sequence of events necessary to actually making clothing.

“Oh, you’ve probably got a stash of leather hidden somewhere that you won’t give me, so you’ll ask me to do a bunch of tasks that will waste both our time because you want to make me mad enough at you to just give up and give in to your lusts,” Mary says, annoyed.

Frowning slightly at her thick headedness, Eric contemplates how to best respond. He really wanted to give his plan away, but he knew that she simply would not understand his intent. He still had to chip away some unnecessary parts of her personality first. So instead he says, “What can I say, I’m a very easy man to understand.”

Hardly.

“Should I even ask what it would cost to get the leather you already have on hand, or should we just skip straight to the first of your inane tasks?” Mary asks in annoyance.

Shrugging, Eric replies, “It’s up to you, as always. While I’m sure you would enjoy the direct route more, if you would rather take the hard path then we should go right ahead, now shouldn’t we? If you want I can tell you the easy path, but the hard path is pretty simple. In exchange for making the kill to provide you with the hide that you will transform into leather, I demand an exertion of equal magnitude.”

“What?” Mary asks, confused and more than a little worried.

Smiling predatorily, Eric says, “You’re going to sweat for me my dear, lifting and stretch and doing all sorts of wonderful exercises. If I am going to go to all the trouble of heading out into the dangerous wilderness, killing an animal of the appropriate size, and then hauling it back here, then you will perspire as much as I will. Got that?”

Mary looks at him suspiciously for a moment before saying, “That sounds perverted somehow, and yet I get the feeling that the alternative is something far worse dreamed up by your deviant mind.”

It would always be worse, always. That was the point. To make her take the path he had in mind for her while making her think that every step she took was her own decision. Because she would never be free of his tyranny if she gave in to him, did what he told her for no better than reason than because he told her too.

Grinning, Eric says, “Okay, then to begin, I think we will warm up with some callisthenics and then see where we go from there.”

Two hours later and Mary was barely able to crawl she is so exhausted from Eric’s athletic routine. He had really pushed her hard, repeatedly telling her, “When I sweat, you sweat. When you sweat, I sit back and enjoy a pina colada.” She would probably ache for the rest of the day, but it would be far less than the pain of having to develop the necessary musculature the hard way. The hard way was trying to learn to hunt and skin and gut and carry and all the other physical tasks related to survival while trying not to starve to death.

That had sucked.

And while it pained him to see Mary suffer so, he had to admit that he enjoyed seeing her sweat. She was drenched, and her clothing was sticking to her body in all the right places and…

Wednesday definitely could not come soon enough.

“Very well, your exertions are enough for me today, and since you are so weak I will go and get the needed materials for you,” Eric says smugly, adding extra emphasis on the word weak to try and drive home his intention. Mary however was too tired to do more than nod.

Sniffing dismissively, Eric grabbed his weapons, cape and headdress and then descended from the lair. Heading for the creek, he set his gear down and began to scoop mud out from the bottom. He had been at this for years, but he had tried to minimize erosion by returning mud and soil to the stream later. Still, he knew the course of the water had changed slightly since his arrival, and not all of that was due to natural causes.

Eric was at perhaps his most morbid when he applied the mud, for as he smeared the cool substance across his face and body, he could feel the human parts of his mind go quiet. In the action of masking his form and scent, he served to obliterate himself for a time, allowing something else to take his place. Something that was cold and calculating. A brutal survivor without emotion or pity. The perfect tyrant.

With his armour against the world complete, Eric slipped away into the jungle, a killer, nay, a killing machine, on the hunt. In his own world, his species had become killing machines without peer, and even the tyrant lords of this world would have bowed before humanity or suffer eradication. In this world, he might make a snack for any predator larger than him, but he was still the most lethal species nature had ever concocted and the fact that he was still alive gave mute testament to this fact.

In the shadows of the forest, he was nearly undetectable, quietly slipping between pools of darkness with feet long since trained to make no noise. His senses picked up on everything and relayed them to his mind, where he analyzed the information and used it to pick up on his quarry while avoiding detection. He liked to think of it as making up for poor recon abilities with a kick ass analysis team. He might not sense as much as the animals, but he could certainly find meaning much easier.

While the biggest, most nutritious, and easiest to hunt prey were out on the plains, he did not need anything so big and dangerous, especially since he would need to haul the carcass back for Mary to work on. Thus he was hunting a deer sized animal, although he was not quite sure what family the species belonged to. He strongly suspected a distant relative of the triceratops, but he was not quite sure.

In a small clearing, he found his prey, a small herd of perhaps a dozen of the curious creatures. Small and gracile in build, they were adapted to the forests and border zones. Many other dinosaurs were too big to move easily in the forests or too small to exploit some of the available resources, the strange animals were going for high agility and medium size. Eric suspected that they were newcomers trying to bull their way into an ecological niche, as they looked somewhat incomplete to his eyes. Good enough to compete, but not quite fully adapted yet.

While they used their beaked faces or backwards curving horns to scrape off bark from the trees or dig up roots, they seemed oblivious to Eric’s approach, which was just how he wanted it. He got to within about forty paces of the nearest animal before he had selected his target, a juvenile that looked about the right size for him to carry back after he had gutted it.

With a target in sight, the random, cacophonous thoughts in his head quieted completely as the predator, the tyrant, in him took over totally, leaving only cold, rational decision making in its wake. The Terminator wasn’t half this calculating.

The first thing that happened was for the rest of the world to fall into a blurry periphery. He was still aware of outside happenings, but his focus was firmly on his target. As his focus increased, memories of previous hunts and butcheries came back to him, and he began to overlay previous knowledge onto the animal in his mind’s eye. Weak points in the hide practically glowed, and as his focus increased, he could picture the bones and blood vessels of the animal.

Head shot was right out. The creature had a heavy skull that was more than capable of resisting an arrow from close range, especially an obsidian point as it could shatter on impact with bone. If Eric had a steel, or even a bronze, arrowhead, he might have felt comfortable taking such a shot, but as it was he would rather guarantee the kill and try to preserve his arrow.

A throat shot was a possibility, but the angle was poor, and the animals had a dewlap hanging from their necks for display and protective purposes. Better shots existed.

A heart and lung shot was better than a head shot, but not much better. While far more gracile than their elephant sized cousins, these forest dwellers were still quite bulky, and the ribs would present a problem. Especially since these creatures were fast breathers, the rise and fall of their chests nearly continuous, creating difficulty in lining up the timing of the shot. If he was lucky, he would drive his arrow through a lung and the heart and pierce the second lung. If not he would hit a rib and it would bounce off. It had happened before.

That left the groin. On these animals, it was the best shot he could take, especially at this angle. There was a thin point in their skin about the hip that also corresponded with the femoral artery. While there was some thick muscle in the way that for the most part kept predators like the jackal birds away from such a critical point, Eric could drive an arrow much deeper than a jackal bird could sink its claws. And he would take muscle over bone any day when he was using such sharp, fragile edges. Plus, even if he missed, such a wound would slow the animal down and give him time for a second shot.

Silently drawing an arrow, he double checked the weight in his hands while before smoothing out the fletchings with his mouth. This was a good arrow. It would fly straight and true. Next he “tasted” the air, trying to get a handle on the humidity and wind. Plenty of the former, none of the latter. As expected in a jungle.

With infinite care and patience, Eric drew his bow, the wood barely making a creak as he brought it up to its full extension. He estimated his current bow to be somewhere in the 400 to 500 Newton range. No English longbowman by a long shot, but about twice the draw of most hunting bows from his time.

As he lined up the shot, the back of his mind was running through hundreds of calculations at a break neck pace, and once more Eric offered quiet thanks to that one professor who had decided that studies of advanced aerodynamics was the best way to teach a fundamental physics course. Ever since he had started bow hunting, Eric had long known that the challenge for him was not figuring out the shot but figuring out the way to get his body to perform the actions his brain mandated.

Eric was about half a second from release when the air was split by an ear-piercing shriek and the bellow of the herd as they began to run. Eric still had time to take a shot, albeit a less accurate on than he had planned on, when a stripped blur struck his target. Slowly letting the tension out of his bow, he swore under his breath. Of course the one time he had to impress a woman a khan had to get in his way.

Fucking cock blocker.

If the creatures in front of him… which he had never really named now that he thought of it… were deer, then the khans were the tigers of this world. They were much more refined than their prey, and their ancestry was definitively Dromaeosauridae, and had probably been hunting in forests like these for millions of years. Unlike the general plains predators and scavengers that were the jackal birds, the khans were specialist forest dwellers. They were low slung, going on all fours as often as they went on two feet, and built for speed and agility. They were probably the most agile dinosaurs of their size on the planet in fact.

The trick was that they had abandoned stiff tails as balance poles. They still used their tails for balance, but they lacked the ossified tendons of most Dromaeosauridae, giving greater flexibility and allowing for much tighter turns that their cousins might not be able to make in the dense forests. Instead, the khans used their hands to grasp the ground or trees to make some impressively tight turns.

Of course, the biggest reason why Eric called them khans was because they had brown and yellow stripes to blend into the forest shadows and with their low slung frames they looked eerily like tigers. Convergent evolution at work again.

With the herd scattered and the khan busy ripping the juvenile’s throat out, Eric could only shake his head sadly. An hour and half of work and he had nothing to show for it. Oh well, hunting was often like that. Maybe he could bag something turkey sized and tell Mary that beggars couldn’t be choosers, and that she wasn’t skilled enough to work with larger hides yet.

That would take a bit more time, but he could use his sling instead of his bow, which would be wastefully overkill against something that small. Because he would be using rocks instead of worked obsidian, he could also afford to throw more of them around. Checking his pouch though, he noted that he had not brought along any sling stones.

He would have to swing back around to the lair and pick up some smooth stones from the stream. There was a bend it took that tended to deposit nice smooth stones perfect for his needs.

Slipping away from the kill site, Eric quickly made a beeline back to the lair instead of the meandering path he had taken tracking his prey.

And when he exited the forest he was suddenly glad that the khan had interrupted his hunt, because if it had not he never would have made it back to the lair in time to discover two important facts. The first was that Mary was for some reason on the ground and mostly naked.

The second was that Phillip had decided to show up.

Phillip was a tyrannosaur. A rogue, juvenile tyrannosaur with no pack and a bad attitude.

And he was hissing at Mary threateningly, sounding like a steam engine about to lose containment and erupt in an explosion of violence.

In retrospect, Eric should have anticipated a move like this on Phillip’s part. The court of jackal birds played an important part in tyrannosaur hunting. Killing off the court would decrease hunting efficiency and might allow Phillip to insert himself into Elizabeth’s pack. And since Eric was the most efficient and effective member of the court, a member that tended to wander off alone, attacking him first made perfect sense.

The only reason the brute had yet to attack was probably because Mary confused him. She would look and smell similar to Eric, but not the same, so the rex was probably still trying to work out whether or not she was the correct target. In a few seconds he would probably just attack anyway.

Eric’s brain went into overdrive.

The cold tyrant spoke first. He pointed out that attacking a Tyrannosaurus rex, even an immature one that was only three-quarters full size, was tantamount to suicide. Even if Mary somehow managed to use the fight as a distraction, she was still too weak to survive on her own. If Eric died, she died too. If she died, Eric could still slip away and hide. One death was preferable to two.

But after cold, hard reason was finished, the human side, only let out once a night to sing, spoke up for the first time in a long time at one of these meetings. First he pointed out how life had not been worth living before Mary had shown up, so to lose her would definitely hurt to the point where thoughts of suicide would dominate existence. To lose Mary was to lose his mind, permanently this time. Then he pointed out how the Tyrant’s Promise demanded for action in such a situation. Finally, the obvious was pointed out.

A damsel in distress.

A ferocious dragon.

A castle with a moat in the background.

There could be only one course of action.

Activate the White Knight protocol.

…

The tyrant relented.

Rising from a crouch, shucking his cape and headdress, Eric knocked the arrow intended for his prey and drew back. His knowledge of tyrannosaurs gave him one weak point, one target to aim for. And he needed Phillip to face him first.

So he shouted out at the top of his lungs, “Hey! Ugly!”

Phillip turned to face him, the animal’s dark eyes boring into him, seeing the target he had come to assassinate.

“Don’t blink,” Eric whispered as he released the drawn string.

---

As the author, I would like to take the opportunity to cackle maniacally. I hadn't updated in a while, so I decided to make this bit a little shorter than the last two and give you a cliffhanger.

Fight scene should be done by the weekend.

A good chapter, but I wonder if the T-Rex's own femoral artery could be hit from the rear. Or is the muscle too thick to be pierced by Eric's arrows?

In this story the rexes skin is about as close to biological chainmail you can get without using osteoderms, and its muscles are insanely thick, especially around the legs. Eric's arrows might be sharp enough to penetrate the skin, but his bow simply does not have the draw strength to send an arrow deep enough. Plus, unlike the deer-things, tyrannosaurus has had to deal with shots to the groin from prey for millions of years.

So, no. The only way to get an arrow into a rex and do more than superficial damage is if there was an hole for entry in the first place. Hence why this whole affair is suicidal.

I'm almost disappointed you've turned him into a sympathetic character, but if you think about it, does thinking it's necessary and for her own good make him less of a psychopath? Would I do any differently? Good stuff. It's also not really any less long, it just doesn't have a bunch of songs this time. Good cliffhanger.

Good chapter. I have a question, though: couldn't Eric, given that he's been there for eight years, have begun to work metal in some fashion? Our own ancestors, after all, had to start somewhere. Or is this particular region just too metal-poor for that to be possible?

Wednesday definitely could not come soon enough.

He may have to move up to Tuesday/Thursday, or MWF.

But DAMN what a cliffhanger! POST SOON!

Alferd Packer wrote:Good chapter. I have a question, though: couldn't Eric, given that he's been there for eight years, have begun to work metal in some fashion? Our own ancestors, after all, had to start somewhere. Or is this particular region just too metal-poor for that to be possible?

Eric may have no idea where/when tin and brass came close to the Earth's surface, and may not have the ability to identify the raw ore even if he did. Even if he did recognize the ore, the sediments that will become coal is not yet laid down. We also know there's no real 'trees' available, which means no source for charcoal. There's two sources for the heat needed that Eric just doesn't have.

The arrow leapt from the bow like an intercontinental ballistic missile from its silo, ready to deliver instant death to Eric’s enemy’s with the mere twitch of a finger… unfortunately the missile happened to be of Russian make, so it was just that critical percentage point off target.

Instead of plunging through Phillip’s eye socket and into his brain, the arrow landed just to the left, striking hard bone and shattering on impact. The eye itself was undoubtedly wounded, but probably not permanently, and it certainly was not a decapitation strike.

“Fuck,” Eric noted dispassionately.

In the time it took Phillip to process the connection between Eric and the stinging he felt in his right eye, Eric managed to knock and draw another arrow. Unfortunately, the only targets he had were the eyes. Those were the only weak points on a T. rex. They were his only hope of ending the fight immediately.

He fired again.

This arrow was completely off target, but that was because Phillip moved in the fraction of a second it took for the arrow to travel the distance between man and beast. Instead of striking the right eye, it instead struck the tyrannosaur’s snout. But by some incredible fluke, the arrow did find a soft target.

It went straight up the right nostril.

Phillip reared back in pain and shock, bellowing in surprise and fury at the sudden stinging sensation in his nose. Eric smiled grimly. He had just won. That was the easy part.

The trick would be surviving the victory.

Eric tossed his bow aside. Phillip would charge in a second, and there would be no more opportunities to fire his bow. No sense risking breaking it or letting it slow him down in what was to come.

Phillip charged. Back up time, there had been much debate over how tyrannosaurs moved, over whether or not they could run. Eric had spent years studying them up close and personal, and thus he knew the answer most definitively.

Tyrannosaurs could run!

No human being stood a chance in hell of outrunning a T. rex in a straight line. Thus, Eric did not even try, as he would only die tired.

But the adult T. rex was built solely for straight line motion, while a human was built around the “crazy simian” body plan. Khans wished they were as agile as Eric.

With the ground shaking beneath him as 4 tons of death incarnate charged forward at a good thirty kilometres an hour, jaws held wide enough for Eric to step inside and have head room, the displaced descendent of a monkey stood his ground.

Until, with the Grim Reaper about to pat him on the shoulder and ask what was taking him so long, Eric dove to the side in a display of body kinetics and timing that left Phillip snapping at empty air and Eric wondering whether or not the sensation of the soles of his boots being scraped off by teeth was part of his imagination or not.

Hitting the ground in a roll, Eric was up on his feet again in a second and running towards Phillip. He didn’t have a chance of outrunning the beast to his lair and then climbing the ladder, so the safest place was just behind the animal. It would take Phillip about four seconds to make a half turn, which meant that so long as he was up close he could always keep the bulk of the animal between him and the deadly bits.

The trick, of course, was keeping Phillip so pissed off that he did not simply disengage, gain some distance from the pestiferous human, turn around, and charge again. Only this time pay more attention to the blinded side that Eric had leapt towards on the last charge.

So Eric moved closer still, and drew another one of his arrows. Rushing up, he leapt through the air and slammed his arrow into the nearest weak point on a T. rex. If this did not piss Phillip off then nothing Eric could do would work.

Eric jammed an arrow up Phillip’s ass.

Well, more precisely, he jammed it up the cloaca, so he jammed an arrow up Phillip’s ass and genitals.

The damage was superficial and easily survivable, but Eric would be damned if the rex did not make a sound like a train’s brakes squealing. Of course, his amusement was short-lived as he was forced to make another flying leap to avoid a kick from one of Phillip’s prodigious talons.

Landing hard on the gravel, Eric immediately rolls out of the way of the foot coming down again with the intent to eviscerate and crush, dumping several of his arrows in the process. Regaining his feet as quickly as possible Eric then pulls out the last arrow in his quiver and his obsidian knife. What exactly he intended to do with such puny implements against a rex he was not quite sure, but he would think of something.

Still keeping close and keeping up with Phillip’s desperate attempts to face him, Eric knew that the fight would not last more than two minutes longer. That was because two minutes was about how long before exhaustion ended the fight in favour of Phillip. Diving rolls at the last second took a lot of a person.

And then it was Phillip’s turn to throw a surprise at Eric.

For an adult T. rex to run was an inherently risky proposition as if they fell there would be nothing to stop them from crashing to the ground fatally. The stress and risk of running at that size actually contributed to their low life span after reaching maturity. Eric should have thus anticipated Phillip doing something risky to try and end the fight.

Phillip jumped and span in the air.

Crashing to the ground with thunderous force, the rex was suddenly facing Eric with jaws open wide and darting forward.

Eric cut support to his knees and dropped to the ground backwards like a pro limbo dancer, just narrowly avoiding being torn into tiny bits by the jaws snapping shut. He did not however avoid the spray of bloody spittle. Nor did he avoid getting the wind nearly knocked out of him as Phillip’s lower jaw slammed into his chest.

Fortunately, Phillip’s little move had left the dinosaur off balance, and he was forced to relent before a fatal bite could be delivered lest he fall to the ground and break something.

As Phillip’s head withdrew, Eric knew that the dinosaur would recover faster. Then it was merely a question of whether jaws or talons would finish him. Eric had to get closer.

He slammed the arrow and knife into the meat of Phillip’s lower jaw, and when the tyrannosaur pulled away, he held on, hauled off the ground effortlessly by the enraged predator.

Throwing his feet up, Eric tried to secure his legs out of range of Phillip’s tiny but deadly strong arms. They were strong enough to keep grip on a struggling triceratops, which meant that they were strong enough to take Eric apart.

And then Phillip began to thrash, throwing his head from side to side in a move typically used to break girder sized bones once a hold with the mouth was in place. Eric tried to hang on as best he could, but his hands were slick with blood and his feet weren’t secure yet.

His hand slid right off the arrow and his feet went flying.

He saw death coming in slow motion, gleaming white and fatally serious. It was one of those tiny, stubby little two fingered arms, and Eric was about to run right into one chest first. He would be skewered on one hand first, before the other hand grabbed him and ripped him apart like a Christmas cracker.

His knife tore loose.

The last minute change in his trajectory saved his life. Instead of slamming straight into the claws, he hit at a glancing angle. For an instant he thought he was still dead, the tip of one claw grazing his chest, tearing a long line from his sternum across his left breast and flank, but somehow, miraculously, it did not catch on his ribs and tear out his lungs.

And then Eric was beyond Phillip, sailing through the air to come to a bouncing, then rolling, stop on the gravely plain. Somewhere along the line there was a small “pop” and Eric’s brain noted that in addition to the world of hurt he was already in his right arm was now somehow both on fire and had completely numb.

Eric rolled over using the last of his energy. He wanted to look his death in the face when it came for him so that he could at least spit on it. He already had the quote he would use on his lips.

“From Hell’s heart I stab at thee… For Hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee…” Eric managed to intone, trying to raise his knife in one last act of defiance before realizing that the popping sound had probably been his arm dislocating.

But somehow, death did not come. Rolling his head to the side, Eric saw Phillip dealing with his own problem. Phillip’s snout was covered in blood… his own blood. It was pouring like a river out of the nostril that Eric had punctured with his arrow.

Oh! Of course! The arrow had stopped dead on impact rather than slowing to a stop, so it had undoubtedly hit a bone within the nasal cavity, causing the fragile obsidian arrowhead to shatter, causing razor sharp shards to scatter everywhere. The violent shaking motions Phillip had used to dislodge Eric must have sent them bouncing around more, playing merry hell with delicate, blood gorged tissues.

Phillip was now definitely having trouble breathing as his nose was so filled with blood that it was leaking down his throat. He shook his head violently again a few times before exhaling explosively out his nose, sending out a wave of blood that rapidly formed a small cloud of red mist before settling. Neither of those actions could have taken out the offending shards, and both had probably only served to further the damage.

Phillip was fucked, plain and simple. He might not bleed to death, but the infection would be horrific beyond compare and almost certainly fatal.

Ha! Eric had won the fight and made the kill. The only question left would be if he survived to celebrate.

And then, like the gates of heaven opening up to the fanfare of thousands of angels, Eric heard the most beautiful thing ever.

Four tyrannosaurs bellowing cries of challenge at an interloper.

Phillip had not let out a roar up until the point where he lost his temper when Eric shot him in the nose. He had not let loose a roar because the sound would immediately attract Elizabeth and her pack. Thus the fight was over the moment Phillip gave his position away. To be caught in the act of such a blatant transgression on Elizabeth’s territory would result in a fight Phillip would have to flee from with scars.

Phillip was blind in one eye, had no sense of smell, was coughing up blood, and would walk funny for the rest of the week with an arrow still lodged up his ass.

Elizabeth would make sure Phillip would never get a chance to heal and make a second attempt on her pack.

It was all over in a second. Phillip tried to submit, to back off, to mewl and chirp like a wounded chick, but Elizabeth would have none of it. She just stepped in and grabbed Phillip by the back of his neck and bit down. There was a series of loud popping sounds as Phillip’s neck broke and a gush of blood as teeth penetrated the carotid artery, and then Phillip went limp.

Dropping the corpse contemptuously to the ground, Elizabeth let out an enormous bellow that was soon picked up by the other three rexes. This was their territory, and nothing was going to take it from them. Especially not a two bit punk like Phillip.

The important bits taken care of, now was the time to look after the wounded member of the court. Elizabeth casually walked over to Eric and then bent over to sniff at him.

He could see the workings of her mind displayed plainly on her face. Tyrannosaurs were somewhat sociable animals, so they had a few visual cues as clear as cats to let you know how they felt. They were also reasonably intelligent creatures, certainly not as smart as an African Grey Parrot, but quite smart for their time.

Smart enough to make a fundamental attribution error, although such a complex term was undoubtedly too complex to describe Elizabeth’s mistake.

Just by looking at her, Eric could tell that Elizabeth was confused, but not in a way that would end with him ripped apart… he hoped. The problem, as far as he could tell, was that Elizabeth’s brain was hard-wired to categorize objects as threats or harmless, and then as unimportant, competitor, food, useful, or family. Jackal birds were harmless and useful. She had thought Eric a type of jackal bird, but he was obviously not harmless, as evidenced by this whole affair. He was not a competitor, nor food, and definitely not unimportant. But there had never been a useful threat, so Elizabeth could not comprehend such a thing. Thus that left only one option left.

Elizabeth licked Eric, her enormous, raspy tongue clearing away blood and mud from his torso and leaving Eric covered in saliva. She was cooing at him. Because the only thing that was a threat but also not was family. She thought he was one of her chicks. Eric also figured that she was just smart enough to have a flicker of an ego and feel proud that one of her chicks had managed to fuck up Phillip so badly.

Thus, Eric did not offer any resistance when Elizabeth picked him up in her mouth, not that he could have considering that his muscles were so flooded with lactic acid and his body so high on endorphins that resistance was currently impossible.

Elizabeth took him the short distance to his lair and then gently deposited him on the low point where he usually met her to give her nose a scratch. Once he was splayed out on the rocks, Elizabeth moved away for a moment. A brief feminine shriek followed, and then the image of Mary scrambling up the ladder wearing nothing, her dress flying out behind her like an off-white banner, Elizabeth giving her a nudge with her snout to get the girl up into the nest faster.

Fuck it, Eric was just going to scratch out the days on his calendar and write “Wednesday” over every day.

---

This fight scene has been kicking around in my head for a while, so I was up until 1 last night writing, so you get the conclusion to this bit early. If you count both parts together then this was the longest chapter thus far, coming in at a little over 7000 words in comparison to the 6500+ words of the last two.

Oh, and I have plans for all sorts of things Eric has been cooking up for years now.