Warp Token Update

2k words

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“How tiny-small you are,” her parentrat mused, and she was certain this was her parentrat, as what other conclusion could she come to? “No need-need to fret, pup, you will grow big-large one day.”

She wanted to ask if she would be as big as her one day, but all that came out was a quiet chittering sound, one that her parentrat seemed to take great interest in, craning her long neck over to nuzzle at her small face, replying with a wordless trill.

Her parentrat whispered things into her ears then, things that had diluted over time and had thus slipped from memory. Not all of it had been forgotten, but it always made her feel guilty, realising that for all her ingeniousness, her stupid mind had failed to keep a firm grasp on what her mother had said all those years ago.

“Breeder! Time for-for quota count!”

She paused her ardent sucking at the sudden strange voice, turning her muzzle over her shoulder. Two figures were crossing the rock-strewn floor, their faces and waists covered in filthy rags. Their bodies were covered in a shabby layer of brown fur, nothing at all like the pristine black coat clinging to her mother’s paunchy belly. One of them turned his crooked muzzle in her direction, her view quickly shifting to darkness as her parentrat covered her up in a massive forearm.

With her vision blocked, her world once more became reliant on sound. Crunching gravel grew louder as the pair of ratmen neared, her little heart racing as high-pitched squeaks began to echo across the vast chamber. Their source was unmistakable. She could feel her parent’s belly shift as her siblings were plucked from the teats, chittering their displeasure at having their feeding interrupted. One of the rats turned to leave, the crying pups in his arms slowly going quiet as he distanced. Her parentrat made no move to stop him, not even chittering a single word of defiance. Where were they taking her siblings, and would her parentrat give her up next?

“Eleventeen this time, good-good,” the rat who had spoken before snickered. “Silence!” he added, one of the pups screeching over his voice. The screech sounded a lot like the pup that had bitten her. “Two score of Warpstone for breeder! Quota going up-up from now on. No slacking!”

“Understanding,” her parentrat replied. She could feel her mother’s heartbeat pounding against her muzzle.

The ratman lingered, then began to walk, not away, but towards her parentrat, or breeder as he referred to her. “Hold-wait. What you-you holding in paws?”

“W-Warpstone,” her mother replied, clutching her tighter against her chest.

“What! Not remember you having warpstone yesternight…”

“Spin-rolled down slope. Dropped by careless ratwife, maybe.”

“We not careless rats! Care is middle names! Show me-me!”

Light flooded back into the world as the forearm hiding her lifted away, and she peered up into the dirty face of the ratman, watching his cracked lips peel over his sharp teeth in a creepy smile. His expression shifted as he realised she wasn’t warpstone – whatever that was – but a pup, his red eyes narrowing in frustration.

“Breeder try to hide pup?” the ratman asked, turning his muzzle over to her parentrat. “Rulebreaker! No warpstone for you! Gimme pup!”

He reached out his filthy hands, and she tried to burrow herself into her mother’s fur, her squeaks of terror muffled as her parent shielded her with two giant arms.

“No!” her mother snapped, holding her out of reach. “Please, not this one. Let me keep-have it.”

“Breeder know rules!” the ratman shouted, reaching for the knife stuffed into his loincloth. “Warlords get all pups, no exceptionings! Maybe breeder need another lesson in-”

Her breeder’s clenched fist put a stop to his rasping speech, the ratman’s neck snapping back at an awkward angle. Her parentrat’s movements were so swift for such a massive creature, her mountainous biceps flexing as she decked him across the muzzle.

He crumpled to the rocky ground, the many pups he had tucked under his arms dropping with him. The pink lumps thumped around his twisted limbs hard, but their squeaks and chirps confirmed they hadn’t been injured in their fall. She expected her mother to scoop her siblings up, but she instead kept a tight hold on her, the only pup the breeder seemed even remotely interested in.

She heard shouting from some far-off place, maybe the other ratman had seen what happened to his companion and was shouting for help. She could hear more chittering rising to greet the panicked calls, but they were quickly muffled as the world seemed to spin, her mother rolling onto her other side.

“I don’t want to-to do this,” her parentrat said, bundling her against her chest. “but ratwife was right. Can’t keep you, little pup.”

She had no idea what her words had meant at the time, but her tone of voice, and her sorrow expression, gave her all the meaning she needed to understand. She clung to her parentrat’s belly harder, fresh tears welling in her pink eyes.

The shouting was closer, louder, her mother peering over a massive shoulder at the shouting rats. It sounded like there more than two this time, and she could have sworn she heard something else as well. Something heavy being dragged across the stones along with the voices, something that made metallic scratches as it caught on the occasional protruding rock.

“I can’t keep you, but I can save you,” her parentrat whispered. “save you from these pits. Horned Rat protect you.”

Her world flipped end over end, her breeder’s fingers loosening their grip on her waist. She tumbled onto sloped land, her delicate hands groping into the silt, her cries turning from grief to pain as sharp rocks dug into her skin.

The gravel began to landslide, carrying her deeper into the earth, the image of her mother slowly shrinking away from atop the crest. She extended a paw out, but her breeder was too far away to touch, her parentrat making no effort to halt her fall.

Movement on the side drew her attention, a ratman identical to the last leaping up onto the mountain of her mother’s hip, the sheer size of the breeder only now registering in her infantile mind.

The ratman held up a dagger, the knife glinting in the ominous green light as he brought it down, slicing her parentrat across the arm. Shrieking, her mother backhanded the rat, sending him arching high into the air. Two more ratmen appeared, circling behind her massive head, lugging some massive object between them.

Her descent came to an abrupt halt at the bottom of the slope, momentum lodging herself into a small wedge of rock. Her right leg bent at an awkward angle, crushing up against her pink chest, her muted chirps taking on a guttural quality as pain shot up her spine. It hurt too much to even move, and she desperately willed her body to keep still, glancing up at her parentrat, wondering why she had been discarded after being nursed and cared for.

The glint of bronze metal drew her gaze to the thing the two rats were carrying. At a glance it looked like a giant cone of orange metal, flared open at one end, tapered shut at the other. Two giant canisters protruded from the thin end of the device, the transparent orbs filled with sirling gas. Pipes criss-crossed from these canisters to various points all along the device, two such tubes trailing into a pair of distinctly looking eyespots on the higher end of the device. As the ratmen positioned themselves behind her breeder’s head, they exposed the underside of the contraption, where various rubber straps hung in loose loops, secured to the cone by metal brackets. At a glance it almost looked like the metal visage of a face. Her mother’s face, to be precise.

She squeaked out a warning to her breeder, but her chirps went unanswered, the ratmen were laughing too loudly for them to be heard. With a shared heave, the two ratwives placed the device over her parentrat’s face, replacing her features with an unsettling, metallic counterpart. She tried to pull the mask off, but another two more ratwives clambered up her chest, taking advantage of the distraction to pin her limbs down, slicing and cutting with their knives as she struggled.

She appeared bed-ridden, her massive legs unmoving, seemingly only in control of the upper half of her body as she writhed. The two ratmen who’d carried the device moved to those dangling straps next, pulling them tight against the breeder’s chin. Leather creaked as the straps were puled taut, one of the ratwives pressing a claw against a switch built into the jawline of the contraption.

Hissing chemicals drowned out the maniacal laughter of the rats, those canister near the chin beginning to swirl with thick, acrid smoke. Her parentrat’s resistance began to slow, her chest inflating as she took a deep, muffled breath. After a moment, her apparent alarm subsided, the ratmen skittering clear as she relaxed her fists, her long toes curling as she wriggled on the spot.

“Where pup go?” one of the ratwives chittered. “Breeder drop thing somewhere!”

“Found it!” another squeaked, holding up a sharp rock triumphantly.

“That not pup, you idiot! Find real pup! Quick-Quick!”

Squinting through soft eyes, terrified and alone, the pup that would become Skyseeker watched as the ratmen began to prowl the slope, every shouted word making her squirt fear-musk. She could do nothing but wait for them to take her, her paws digging into the little stones as the ratman came closer to her hiding place, one of them stamping a large paw in the silt inches before her snout.

Her mother’s movements were sluggish, those canisters on her mask swirling with each breath she took. Those tubes were pumping that gas into her mouth, eyes, ears, every orifice in her face, and she didn’t look the least bit bothered by it.  

“There you are!”

The ratwife stuck his muzzle into her hiding place, her shrieks met with no mercy as he sealed his jaws around her, not applying enough pressure to bite, but just enough that he could lift her up into the air, her view enclosed by his teeth-riddled maw.

“Breeder take great interest in you!” he hissed as he plucked her from his jaws, holding her out in one paw. “You fortunate! Pups not last long down here. Wait-wait!”

Just as her mother had done, the ratman ran a finger down her torso, exploring at her anatomy for whatever reason. But where her parentrat had been doting, gentle, his strokes were rough and prodding, his discovery making his features light up with glee.

“Ooohhh, you are breeder too! Sense is making! Stupid bitchrat thought it could hide you! No female hide from breeder duty! Make sure you and breeder know this. Know this very well!”

He turned around, scampering up the slope with her clutched in one paw, squeezing the air out of her lungs with a harsh clench. Her world shook with every pace, but she could just make out her mother’s prone form returning to view, the ratman reversing her parentrat’s efforts with a horrible ease.

She kicked and squealed, but her parentrat didn’t hear her efforts, couldn’t, not with that mask on. They would put a mask on her next, and Skyseeker would never earn that name, not here, where she would grow fat and soft, too crippled to escape. They would treat her like a calf, amounting to nothing more than a specimen to fuel the Lord’s armies with children, never to know the touch of the sun or the kindness of another.

And that mask would make sure she was compliant.

She cried for her mother as the ratman took her past her large form, but nothing came out, just a dry, airless croak. She tried to wrestle free, but her limbs didn’t move, and the pressure on her chest grew ever tighter. The last of her breath left her in a wordless scream, the darkness of the cave consuming her…

-xXx-

… and then she woke with a horrified cry. Though the night was warm, she was shivering all over, Skyseeker’s eyes blazing open as she felt herself return to her adult, developed body. There was something above her, something putting pressure on her chest, her throat, Skyseeker realising she had not escaped the dream. Without even thinking about it, she reached for her weeping daggers, driving the blades towards her strangler’s face.

“Skyseeker! It’s me, lass!”