The world swayed. The sunshine, the emerald-green grass, the rustling leaves, and Liam's lust-inducing body melted into the mist.
Naktim's brutal whipping, the chase, and Akrum's dance unfolded before Volya's mind-eyes once again.
Volya forced down his fear of being run down by the galloping horses and focused on the things he had to see. Akrum was important, not the centaurs writhing on the ground. Despite this decision, Volya's primal senses wouldn't let his fingers uncurl. One shiver after another passed through him.
It became easier not to swivel his head towards the riders when Akrum-as-a-wolf fled the scene of carnage. He couldn't tell whose heart—Akrum's or his—pounded on the verge of exploding while Akrum had raced through the night to Naktim.
His heart monitor beeped in the outer layer of his consciousness in the real world, but he resisted waking up. This vision had to be important, if not for Anabelle, then for him.
So Volya clung tighter to Akrum in the dark steppe. The heart monitor's beep dropped off.
Liam could relax now, Volya thought, and an unbid smile curved his lips. Shush, heart. Akrum... What is Akrum doing?
Akrum ran and ran, four long legs pumping furiously, until he reached a low hill. It looked like all other hills, except for a few slabs of bedrock jutting out at its foot. Akrum squeezed behind them and then—into the hidden mouth of a cavern.
Once inside the hill, Akrum paused, calming down his rugged breath. The only source of light in the chamber was a bowl of burning fat. Someone must have stocked the hiding place with supplies beforehand, because Naktim stretched on a felt blanket, lying on her belly, face hidden in her arms. A shaggy pelt covered her legs.
Akrum shifted back to his human shape.
Naktim greeted his transformation with an exhale.
"What did you do? How did you get away?" She patted the pelt, inviting him to sit next to her.
"I did what I was born to do." Akrum squatted by her side. Both of them seemed completely comfortable with his nakedness. "I did what my father had foreseen."
If she was unsatisfied with his cryptic answer, she didn't show it. They sat in silence for a few moments until she asked plaintively, "Is there any water?"
"Yes." Akrum pushed back to his feet and extracted a bulging water-skin from some nook in the cave's wall. While she drank in greedy gulps, Akrum unrolled a few rags from another cranny. Once Naktim returned the skin, he soaked a rag and started cleaning her wounds in easy, familiar motions.
"Tell me what happened, Akrum."
"I cast a spell," Akrum confessed after another long pause. "Nobody had done anything so dark before."
He told her about wielding men to horses, thus creating abominations. His voice seemed too soft for his tidings and his fingers trembled, spilling the shining droplets of water. He finished his tale by saying, "My father warned me that the price of Walkwe's escape would be terrible, and it was."
"It had to be done." Naktim's tone, more than the words, implied compassion, but not for the Yamnaya. She pitied Akrum.
She moved her head into his lap. He brushed tangles from her hair with slow fingers. In the low light, the two looked cozy together.
Volya's experiences with Liam hinted that such intimacy was impossible to achieve in the span of one night, no matter how fraught with peril. He gasped, realizing that Naktim and Akrum must have traveled as far away from their initial dislike of each-other as was humanly possible. He did not know how much time had elapsed in their lost world, but perhaps it was a few months. And in that time period, hidden away from him, Akrum and Naktim had become so close... so close that Naktim accepted his caresses as her due. She even caught his hand to press it to her cheek.
"You should have killed Yasuwa in the tent. How are we supposed to fight the abominations you had created? We barely held out against the mounted men."
Akrum inverted and kissed her palm. "We no longer have to fight them, Naktim. I've created impotent exiles from Yamnaya's strongest warriors and beasts."
A barely noticeable strain laced Naktim's voice. "Did your father foresee that the cursed ones would be exiled?"
"He didn't have to," Akrum replied with a bitter chuckle. "The Yamnaya fear magic more than anything else."
Naktim snuggled closer to him. "You're thinking they will be exiled, like we'd exiled your father."
"Yes," Akrum replied. "Humans are humans. They will chase Yasuwa to the barren steppe if not kill them outright. The memory will scar them for years to come. And we'll keep reminding them, Naktim, we'll keep reminding them."
She pulled herself up, using his shoulders as a support. "But the price, Akrum, the price of this reminder!"
His lips rested on hers so solemnly that Volya didn't feel an impulse to avert his eyes. "No, Naktim, no."
"Every man that has ever lived, every boy-child to be born sacrificed!" she whispered. "It always felt too steep. That's why we didn't believe your father, not because we were afraid of magic. That's why we'd exiled him."
Akrum kept kissing her and talking. "Memory that runs in the blood is the most precious thing. It remains after the stones crumble to dust. It continues from mother to child, for as long as children are born."
Naktim wrapped him in her arms. "My vision is clouded, Akrum. I don't see this. All I see is you."
He leaned her back away from him a little, as if to offer her more of a view. "We are using magic more powerful than had been practiced since the beginning of time. If we don't pay, the gift we'd received would tear the fabric of the world."
She drew his head even closer to her, squeezing his face between her palms. "Akrum, your father was exiled for revealing the future to the Walkwe, but you—"
"I was named the Sacrifice," Akrum said firmly. "The final sacrifice, as the old order of life is ending. The first one, as the new order is beginning."
"No!"
"I had known my fate since I could understand the meaning of that word. I've accepted it."
"I hate it. I hate you..." Her fingers ran through his hair to tell a different story.
She arched on top of Akrum, capturing as much of him as she could between her lips and her thighs. He gasped and shut up, accepting. The lovers' moves were clumsy, impatient and real, as humans want to be outside the staged scenarios.
Volya looked away. While he understood that some power, be that magic or genetic memory, kept him linked to the past, he doubted its intent was instructional. He had survived sex-ed as taught by his gym teacher. He didn't need this prehistoric refresher.
While Akrum took his pleasure, ranting feverishly about traveling between the two hills to the valley with the deepest spring he would drink of, Volya's thoughts drifted into his own sensual fantasy.
***
Volya had imagined it before, tons of times, though less vividly.
He was in a room far from luxurious, just something a poor schmuck like him could afford if he applied himself. Almost nothing inside, apart from the books in the corner and a poster peeling off the wall. The stubborn imagination made it Buzzkill's poster, but Volya overrode it. Definitely not the accommodations Liam would have expected. However, the room had everything Volya wanted since he was a kid—freedom and Toshka.
Toshka stood by the window. The window with screeching hinges that could never be restored to the virginal transparency of glass. Toshka breathed on it and traced a heart.
Volya walked over. A captive butterfly beat its papery wings in his throat. He took Toshka's chilly fingers into his own to warm them up. He used to do it whenever some jerk had pushed Toshka into the snow...
He told Toshka how long and how deeply he had loved.
Hold on a sec... Had he always sounded so theatrical in his daydream? So stiff?
When Volya had kissed Liam, his body just clipped onto the other man's, like the pieces of Lego, the joining fully anticipated. But even in his sweatiest dreams, Toshka had always stood apart, awkwardly, the distance between them never closing until Volya would come across the whole room. Like he'd chased Toshka.
Volya ignored it and pulled Toshka to his chest by the waist. He tilted his head forward to find his lips. Their touch was as cold as the fingers had just been. Maybe they would be warm when they were fully opened for him... What Volya saw opening though, were Toshka's eyes, like the cornflowers at dawn. The blue depths didn't reflect Volya's anticipation, only confusion.
Volya yanked his head back, trying to erase the spoiled daydream from his consciousness. He dry-swallowed to dislodge whatever plugged his throat. The fear of rejection, previously bottled like a jinn at the bottom of his heart, was now unleashed to the destruction of his most secret, his most precious dream. It held him afloat for years! Why did it have to end like this? Why?
Usually, in his daydreams, Toshka kissed him back. He drew a blank afterwards, but at least Toshka used to kiss him back.
After kissing Liam, after his hands had touched another human's skin, his imagination balked at picturing Toshka's lips parting under his tongue, because it didn't feel real enough.
It hurt so badly to be unwanted after learning just how unwanted he was through the vision of the ancient past! It wasn't just his mother who abandoned him. His entire kin condemned him to solitary existence because he was born with a penis. He wasn't like Akrum, who was ready to leave. He wanted in! He wanted to hold someone close. He wanted to be loved, if only in his dream.
Why would his traitorous imagination picture rejection by the only person who was close to him for years? Didn't he hurt enough? Waited enough?
He deserved an effing dream where he was embraced, kissed, and fulfilled. He should reign in his imagination, lord over it, have things go just the way he wanted it to go, including Toshka's kiss.
***
While Volya sweated hot and cold, the ancient lovers argued in their post-coital daze.
"Don't you wish to see the child we've made to swell my womb?" Naktim asked. "Don't you wish to receive it in your arms when it comes into this world and put it to my breast to suckle?"
Akrum kissed her hair, fussing with the blankets to keep her warm. "Of course, I do."
"You're our shaman—"
"I was born without the Sight."
"Were you also born without—"
"I'm not a shaman," Akrum interrupted the budding insult to his manhood. He squeezed his head and took a few shuddering breaths. "Another will be born with the gift of the Sight. She'll advise you, like my father did before his exile."
"I don't care!" Naktim wailed, but her anger petered out. She collapsed to cry into Akrum's neck, while his fingers drew long, careful lines down her scarring back, whispering something into her ear, until she had dropped off to sleep. Her hands never let go, with an obvious intention to stay awake and hold him in her grip.
"Sleep..." he said louder, so Volya could hear it. A trickle of magic lined the word. "Sleep."
Akrum's own tired head rolled back. His teeth, filed to sharp points, bit the lower lip. The yellow eyes hooded against the inner struggle. Finally, Akrum's resolve built up enough for his scrunched features to relax, letting out a tear.
"The Sacrifice must be complete for the bloodline to continue," he repeated a few times in a sing-song way. To Volya it appeared as if Akrum was repeating what he'd heard from his father to shore up his resolve.
Finally, resolute enough, Akrum freed himself from Naktim, tucked in the pelt closer around her. With slow, unwilling motions, he gathered some clothes and ducked outside to dress. The sun almost made its way to zenith by then, but Akrum didn't shape into a wolf or made any effort to hide.
Volya followed him to the top of the hill overlooking the familiar settlement that was overtaken by the Yamnaya. From their vantage point, Volya saw how far the yurts and horse pens stretched, far beyond the palisade of the former Walkwe's village.
The place buzzed like a disturbed hive. The resemblance was made all the stronger by the many hands waving the torches in the air.
Yasuwa, now a muscular, ill-tempered centaur, instead of a muscular, ill-tempered man, and the rest of his centaur-kin, were chased away by his own brethren.
A man dressed like a shaman—a different kind than the shape-shifting seers of the Walkwe, Volya supposed—towered in their midst, gesticulating wildly.
The angry shouts of the crowd, far outnumbering the centaurs, drifted through the air. They drowned out the pleas, the threats, and the bidding. The once peaceful hills echoed the curses. Strife crushed the Yamnaya in its iron glove. Its putrid juices flowed, filling the landscape with the worst of humanity's aura.
"That was foreseen," Akrum spoke into the emptiness. "The miserable existence and the lessening through the generations brought forth by preying on your own blood-kin and the beasts."
The scene of banishment tightened Volya's chest.
Yasuwa's blows landing on squirming Naktim, his ugly threats, and the panic Volya had felt when he was afraid of being ridden down by Yasuwa were fresh in his memory. But being driven away by fire and hatred... Volya couldn't hold back a sob. He was thrown away like rubbish too because he was different.
Akrum was made of sterner stuff than Volya. A grim smile curved his lips, the first one since he'd parted from Naktim. He celebrated his vengeance. In all likelihood, forgiveness didn't count among the virtues in his lifetime.
***
The infighting among the Yamnaya took up the early afternoon.
Akrum watched it from the top of his hill. The fluffy ends of grass bent around his knees when wind picked up and fell again. Sun beat down on his uncovered head, but he never moved, never stopped smiling.
Finally, Yasuwa gave in. He swore in the voice worn down to practically nothing from shouting and cursing, wheeled round, whistled and galloped off with his centaurs to whatever destiny had befallen them.
Akrum pushed to his feet slower than an octogenarian and started down the hill toward the Yamnaya.
Volya closed his eyes, blood pounding in his ears with the anticipation of a nightmarish cruelty. What other lot could befell Akrum but being torn from limb to limb for the curse and the divide he had inflicted?
Father, Volya's heart said, removing the many great-great-grands that separated them over the centuries.
All the logic in the word, all the science, didn't matter to him at this moment of clarity. Akrum was his father. It was for the scientists to figure out how it was possible. He just knew it was how it was, because his blood, bone, and sinew told him so.
His father went down the hill and stepped inside the circle of Yamnaya's yurts and pens. He wore his unmistakable wolf's head, shirt and breeches covered with symbols. He didn't carry his staff, but there wasn't a doubt in Volya's mind that the Yamnaya wouldn't recognize him as a man who had cursed Yasuwa.
One of the Yamnaya was pouring water into the trough for the horses in the nearest pen. He lifted his head at the sound of Akrum's steps. He pointed, cried, choking on saliva and disbelief.
More heads protruded from the tents, more fingers jabbed in Akrum's direction.
They converged on Akrum and swarmed, like ants over a sugar cube, tearing clothes and pulling hair. The first blood spurted, and Yamnaya's wrath fell in earnest.
Volya's mist-wolf appeared in the sky, lifted his muzzle up and issued force a heartrending howl.
Volya sobbed, drifting between the two worlds, seeing his father turn into a misshapen slab of meat. Seeing what nobody should ever see, least of all alone.
Volya's heart rate monitor stuck on the same note as his mist-wolf: one endless wail of alarm.
***
AN: I have marked the next chapter for Nudity and Sexual Content. Please, feel free to skip it if the descriptions like that bother you. A small note at the beginning of the follow-up chapter will catch you up on the plot-important stuff that occurs along with making out.