.:Asphyxiophilia:.

[Anzeh]

Asphyxiophilia

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The summer of 1995, a musky night with electricity charging every molecule of moist forest air. All the woodland creatures, large and small stood around the downed female. She wasn’t injured, no, but the source of her distress and weakness was the large bulge in her stomach which had grown in agitation and activity over the last few days. Her mate had assured her that everything would be fine, even though most nights she awoke, frigid sweat slipping down her snow-white coat.

Her nightmares were always the same: a snowy demon with deceitful eyes lured her to her doom. Every night she knew it was coming, and no matter how she resisted, the little demon that looked like an angel would always win. The little unicorn with a mane of strung gold and a coat of pure snow, with the voice that lured the wisest to imminent death. She was Aeon Gunner—meaning the “one who sings of death” in the old tongue. But even still her mate assured her that these were only bad dreams—illusions brought on by anxiety and stress. It was fine. Nothing bad would happen. There was no Aeon Gunner, none of it existed.

Which was why as she lay there on the muddy ground in mid-July, she was crying out in terror, not pain. Each contraction made her eyes blurry, each push choked off her breath. There was the ghastly song right in her ear, ringing out, drowning out the sweet voice of her mate. There was something she wanted to tell him before she died, something about their child, but it wasn’t about her evil song or her conspiring within the her warm heat. No, this was something else entirely, but...

As she heard the plop noise of something wet hitting the ground, she knew her work was done. Even so, she couldn’t go down to her little one and clean her, the unicorn couldn’t guide the small one to her milk. Cold exhaustion dripped through her, icy fingertips that numbed her every pain. She’d thought that this type of death would be painless and fulfilling, but her wrongness couldn’t even be explained in words. Suddenly, she remembered what it was, pertaining their tiny daughter.

No noise was coming out of her. As she struggled to create the words, the chocolate stallion that was her dearly beloved hushed her, encouraging her not to speak. He lowered himself to her level despite the danger, and nudged her. Even though his words told her not to worry, worry was obvious in his eyes.

“Aeon... Gunner... father...”

Her vision began to fade and her body and mind became tired. Even though she fought with all her strength to stay awake and complete what she had to say, eventually she succumbed and drifted to a cold, dreamless sleep from which there is no awakening. ‘You are not her father,’ She’d been trying to say. ‘Her father...’ All that was left behind of her was the little foal, whom was breathing thanks to the work of the stallion’s sister. Smelling milk the little foal tried to find his sister’s milk. It was natural, since his sister had a little colt earlier that week that she would secrete milk. Good thing too—the foal would have died had it not been for that.

If it had been his mate and his daughter and he had to choose, the stallion would choose his mate, always, every time all the time. How could he choose the little foal that had taken his beloved, his soul mate? He could never do it. At least if his mate had lived they could continue to sire children despite the death of one, but he hadn’t had a choice in the matter. The stallion laid there until ever last degree of warmth faded from her form, as though waiting for the cosmos to realize that a mistake had been made, that they had really meant to take away the useless foal and not his love. Sadly, nothing of the sort happened, and the male couldn’t help but feel that he’d just been smarted.

Days became weeks, which morphed into months and the little unicorn made developmental advancements, none of which her “father” was interested in. In fact, every time his eyes fell upon the mane of pure gold and the snowy coat she dare steal from his love and wear it as though it was her own caused impossible rage to grow unbound within his body. As she grew older and his love’s death became buried in the past, anger, rage, and hatred cultivated inside him.

Although the little life he felt so much hatred towards was his love’s last testament to this world, and although he’d loved his mate so intensely it was almost unhealthy, there wasn’t a single bone, a single nerve, that loved this child.

Sooner than he wished it to happen, the child entered her second year. That was the year that brought forward the beginning of the end. It was common knowledge that once horses entered their second years they were sexually mature and males from all around would come for a chance to fill his daughter with their seed in hopes that she would bear healthy children. He would have none of that. He reared and bucked and fought off aspiring young colts, but despite his efforts and the efforts of the other horses and unicorns of his group, she was mounted once or twice. Thankfully, since they were both too young, the seed never took root and she continued as she always had.

Some hidden part of his heart, which he honestly believed had been there the entire time, realized that she couldn’t just be, and a little blossom of affection for the—he had to admit—beautiful little foal. She was a minute copy of his beloved, and although her “father” understood and recognized that he could not take her and treat her like he’d treated his beloved, there was something he could do.

There was no reason to lie and say that he suddenly loved her like he was sure her mother had wanted him to, because that is not what happened. Hatred and coldness towards her was far more abundant in his heart than the kindness that had begun to grow in his pit of darkness. In fact, part of his decision came from the fact that he had no way to relieve all this pent up aggression and anger in some way, and what better way than to use the excuse of teaching her to fight?

For this occasion he shifted out of his horse form and stood at his six foot glory, his skin fair and his body on the attractive side of muscular. His eyes were angular and chocolate brown to match the tight curls of dark cocoa in his hair. Gunner was very small when she shifted for the first time into her human form, a tiny toddler barely steady on her two little legs. It was first time the man had ever been confused by something as simple as a child. He’d seen many of them, human or otherwise, and had studied genetics, so her human form didn’t make any sense to him. Her hair was straight and black as pitch, her face structure something like that of his love, but held definitely none of his own. Where had these other features come from then? Neither him nor his beloved had straight black hair. He didn’t have blue eyes, but his beloved did.

Which made him wonder where this little foal really came from.
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[Anzeh]

Aeipathy

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When they began the long, arduous training that would begin with him and then move on to be taken up on her own, all Aeon’s father could think about was getting revenge for his beloved from this little thing. But even though she was small, she was endurable. It seemed like no matter how serious the wounds she got from fighting were, she was always back on her feet the next day as though nothing had happened. A normal father would probably be proud of their daughter. But her resilience only served to make the man angry.Not to mention that she absorbed everything he taught her like a sponge absorbed water. Even very complex moves it took him years to learn she got and understood in a matter of days. There was no comparing him to his daughter. It didn’t take much more than a year or two for her to be able to beat the colts that aspired to mate with her to a bloody pulp. Although they wanted this to put them off it only made them even more determined. They saw her strength as a challenge, a trophy. Although the colts from the year before had succeeded in mounting her, truth be told he didn’t accomplish anything. All he really did was mount before someone chased him away.

So now, with the challenge set—not to mention her strength would be a great factor in young babies, Aeon became the center of obsession from young colts. Some even younger than her. Older horses, although acknowledging her for her strength didn’t readily believe she was proper for mating just yet.

Aeon never doubted that there was love behind her “father’s” motives, but that wasn’t the case. even though she did keep horny males away from her, in general it only worked with someone her size or smaller. It was difficult and near impossible for her to fight against someone larger than her and win in the end, and throughout the years it was something that stuck with her. After all, from a very small age the only use she had for the arts her father exposed her to was to fight back against someone her own size and in rare cases smaller. Never larger. Her “father” had never dreamed larger males would want his daughter.

“Ae” means “to sing” adding “-on” at the end gives it the meaning “one who sings. “Gun”, also spelled “Gunn” means “death”. Adding “er” gives the phrase the meaning “of death”. All together it meant, literally, “One who sings of Death.”

It had not been on purpose, but the name in itself both drew and repelled aspiring males. The young colts were never sure if her name meant that she sang of Death towards them or towards enemies. Some thought different things, but in the end it didn’t make that large of a difference.

Once she turned ten Gunner long since exceeded the normal age that horses have children, but she had not even bore her first and in fact was still a virgin. As time went on and in the forest her strength and resilience grew, so much more did males want to have her for themselves. They realized that they could wear her like a badge of honor to make them more appealing to other females. Their children with her would bear threatening names too, like Kwo Gunn, meaning “bitter death” and Uman Jops meaning “Strength of a human.”

The reason her "father" had wanted her to learn martial arts to begin with was the very reason that she was being targeted more than ever before, and that angered him more than any failed goal. At the same time however, as he intensified his training the more she could take, but the more she fell, the more she cut herself and bled and cried out. He got to see for himself the ground turn a sour red color that was sported by old and bloody wounds, and he reveled in it. Even though it was the blood of his beloved, even though it was the DNA of his one true love, he enjoyed watching it splatter onto the ground. The wounds healed but the scars never left--in fact there was a scar from when she'd fallen on a sharp rock and cut her head. It was right under her hairline and was therefore always covered by her black hair.

But the abuse was never abuse in Gunner’s eyes. In the eyes of the maturing female her “father” loved her. In the eyes of the child looking upon the only family she’s ever known she wanted him to look back at her with pride and know that all he felt was pride towards how powerful she was, how quickly she learned and mastered. The young unicorn stood on pins and needles awaiting his praise—muttered “not half bad” and “that was a little better than yesterday” and the occasional “it was okay” drove her. Blame her ever-present obliviousness to the hatred within the heart of her father.

It wasn’t until a little before her tenth birthday that the story in its entirety was told to her. Her aunt hadn’t meant to tell her everything, in fact, she had only been teaching Gunner language when she asked what her name meant. And before she could stop herself, she was telling the entire story, about how Gunner’s mother had been filled with nightmares of a demon with the face and voice of an angel and about how she’d awake every night in fear of the “Aeon Gunner” inside of her, the one that would come out and suck her life out with her. She found herself telling the young female about how in her mother’s last moments she hadn’t attempted to lick off the membrane that prevented proper breathing, saying that her father hadn’t cared whether she lived or died. If his mate died then the being that took her life would die as well.

Then the words that Gunner had known but always denied fell from her aunt’s lips. “Your father never forgave you for killing his mate.” She said soberly. “Even though you look into his eyes and see love, all you’re seeing is an intense hatred.”

She knew her aunt was correct. She knew it from the very core of her being as it radiated outwards and tickled her fingers, she knew it as concrete and true, as true that the sun would rise in the east and that the earth was turning. But Aeon had devoted so much time and emotion into her father, pouring herself into him and hoping that he would finally realize that she was his daughter whether he wanted to acknowledge it or not. So far though, he attempts proved unsuccessful. With that unwavering devotion and loyalty children had, she refused to give up. After all, Gunner was her mother’s only memento to the world. In her veins pumped her mother’s blood, and she was now the his link to her.

Why shouldn’t he love her with all his heart? After all, what was stopping him? Was the barrier over his heart that thick that even the unconditional love of a child couldn’t break him free?

At the time, Gunner would say no. She was determined to feel the love her father wouldn’t give to her in any other way. So she wouldn’t give up. She needed to keep trying didn’t she?

Before moving to America (against her will) Gunner lived on a small island where the humans still spoke Latin. The island was extremely isolated and usually surrounded by whirlpools. With no oil veins within three hundred miles and very little precious metals, there was really nothing useful on the island, not even cheap labor since the population of the island at any given time was usually under two hundred.

So the chances of what happened happening were very slim, and yet it happened anyway. Gunner had been wandering around in the forest, grazing mostly and thinking about things, going over forms and fighting maneuvers in her head. Perhaps if she had been paying attention she would notice the men nearby whom were brandishing their weapons at her with greedy smiles on their face. Perhaps she could had avoided being ensnared in their rope trap and thrown into a cage on the back of their truck. Perhaps if she had been paying attention she wouldn’t have had to cry out for her “father” to help her and see him peek out of the brush. Her heart wouldn’t soar and she wouldn’t feel a brief wave of gratitude before he vanished into the forest once more and the truth wouldn’t hit her so hard she could almost feel the pain.

Perhaps if she had been paying attention she wouldn’t lay on the bottom of a dirty cage in the darkness on choppy seas, crying night and day because no matter what she had done, what she had poured her heart into these last ten years of her life, it was all pointless because it was true. It didn’t matter that in her veins was her mother’s blood. It didn’t matter that she was her mother’s memento.

Because she wasn’t her mother, and because of that she would never be loved.
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[Anzeh]

Surrogate

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After many months at sea , Gunner was finally allowed out of her cage. It had been a tiny cage, not nearly large enough to fit her in horse form, making it a great deal smaller than the one she had been originally caught in. Aeon had never been on a boat before, but the experience in the cage would ensure that she never got on one again. Oftentimes she was sliding around and slamming into crates of meat, bread, and preserved fruits. Sometimes she hit the inner hull of the boat. Even though she realized her cage had straps, they were rarely strapped and even if they were, they came undone with very little force.

She was stored in a dark smuggling ship and learned sailors by their actions towards her. There was one man who was gentle and had an oddly deep voice and he always had bit of sweet linseed cakes for her. Another man who shoved the food into the cage and left without another word. Another man took advantage of her nudity and wouldn’t feed her until he touched her a little. But there was one more man that existed in her dank, dark world.

She didn’t know what he looked like until later, but his voice was one she’d recognize anywhere. It was mid-deep and slightly nasally, with a curious undertone she couldn’t identify at the time. Later she would recognize it as the undertone of pure insanity.

This first conversation went something like this:

“Hey. My name is Riley. Everyone calls me Emz.” He said, setting a spoon near her lips. Even the kind man with linseed cake didn’t feed her himself.

“Why?” She asked in Latin, not expecting him to understand what she’d said. He was quiet for several long seconds before laughing with mirth.

“I don’t know! Perhaps I should ask.”

It was, perhaps, thanks to that that she was out of her cage. Perhaps it was thanks to that that she was now trying to figure out how to stand on a platform that was constantly changing. Emz, ever since the first time she saw him, had been the most attractive male she had even laid eyes on. His hair was black and streaked with purple, the roots clearly showing at the base of the streaks, He wore pants that were slightly baggy and tucked into his boots. The shirt was tattered and striped white and red with a bandana. There were holes sliced into the bandana, and she noted rather quickly that he was… furry…

Her very first thought was that he was a cat. But once she saw his tail, thick with matted fur, she realized he was a wolf. Emz gave a smile and trotted towards her, his tail wagging happily, yellow eyes, pointed ears resting above his head through the slit in the bandana, every part of him seemed to scream that he was happy. Gunner noticed that one ear was pierced twice. “Gunner!” He exclaimed. “You look nice.”

“Tha… than…” Se was attempting to speak English, which, for all its Latin roots, was a Germanic language.

“Thank…?” Emz supplied.

“Thank you.”

Her work aboard the ship wasn’t easy. There wasn’t anything for a girl to do aboard, so she often ended up cleaning the deck with Emz and fetching things from the hull while avoiding perverted older men (there were 7 people on the ship she didn’t know because they’d never fed her), all the while practicing her English with Riley, AKA Emz.

Eventually she learned things about Emz from other crewmembers. He was thirteen years old and was part wolf, just as she had thought. The Pervert Man who used to feed her (he no longer touched her after Emz lunged at him and nearly ripped off his hand), explained to her that he heard voices and talked to them when he thought no one was around.

Aeon didn’t understand why him hearing voices was bad. After all, she heard voices too. She heard them every time someone spoke to her. But she didn’t speak English natively, so maybe there was some hidden message that she just wasn’t getting.

Since Gunner no longer lived in the cage, she stayed in the captain’s quarters. At first, she was surprised that the captain was female, but all too soon it began to make sense. It at least explained why even though Emz nearly took off the perverted man’s hand, he was barely reprimanded.

Captain Lisai, as she was called, was a strong woman. She wasn’t bulky but definitely strong. Her proportions caused men on the ship to drool, but any attempt to touch her that was unwanted was met with a frigid bite of steel. Lisais’s hair was short and tangled and the color of ebony. Her eyes were milky brown, the pupil taking up much of her eyes.

Her first time in the quarters she had a rather uncomfortable conversation, but she learned a lot about the outside world, more than she would learn from Emz. Lisai became her mother figure. She taught her how to cook and sew, while at the same time abhorring the very acts she taught her.

“Women,” she began, always, “have never been equal to men. In this world, having a woman’s organs gives men a license to treat you like a somehow lesser being.”

“So why,” Gunner asked back, her English improving every day but still holding an awkward accent that wasn’t French or Spanish or Italian, but somehow a mix, “why teach me these things if it’ll make them treat me like a lesser being?”

To this, Lisai would chuckle and say, “Your gender is a part of who you are. Sure you can change yourself down there, but up here—“ she’d gesture to her head— “You’re always a female in one way or another.”

As Gunner opened her mouth to say something else, Lisai would show her some pitfall to watch out for, and the unicorn would have always made that mistake and she would be too absorbed in correcting it to question Lisai anymore.

It was one morning—Gunner was cleaning the deck with Emz when some odd birds began to fly overhead. They didn’t look like anything she’d ever seen, but the wolf boy nearby seemed to recognize them as some sort of sign. Almost immediately afterwards, the lookout shouted “Land Ho!” and pointed towards the horizon, in the direction of even more of the odd, squawking birds. Even when she leaned off the edge and squinted, she couldn’t make out anything that looked anything even remotely like land—all she could see was more of those black smudges that passed for birds.

For a while the work was forgotten as they ran to and fro, trying to help but generally getting in the way of the sailors that actually knew what they were doing. Seeing this, Lisai banished them both under the deck until all the needed preparations were made. Even thought he couldn’t see those birds anymore, the look on his face made it clear that they were the only things he was thinking about.

After several minutes under the ship, Emz looked up and turned to look square into the female’s face. “Aeon, do you know what those birds are?”

Silently she shook her head and he ruffled her long-ish hair, beginning to explain that they were called Seagulls. Soon he was going into detail, about why they were important while at sea. He explained that seagulls were birds that hunted off the coast of landmasses. The sight of Seagulls meant that land was nearby, which was always welcome after an extended time at sea.

Emz turned on a flashlight an reached towards a nearby crate. He pried it open with his fingers and pulled out something that smelled weakly of sogginess and mold. It smelled like wood and mildly of sweetness. Between his furry hands was, as she learned later, a book. Seeing the oddly curious way she looked at it, he gave a toothy smile. “Can you read?”

It’s important to realize that although Emx taught her to speak English, she was essentially illiterate. She’d never seen a book in her life, and didn’t know that there were funny little squiggles that corresponded with the sounds she made while talking. The book in his hands was a book of Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes, stories like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, and Nursery Rhymes about Old King Cole and Hot Cross-buns. Always the unicorn scolded him for reading too fast by the light of the little machine as she tried to match phonetic sounds to the squiggles. After some time she could recognize all the letters of the alphabet, and once Emz taught her the song, she would sing it whilst reciting a rhyme about a baker putting blackbirds in a pie.

It was the next evening, as the sun was setting, that they docked against land. Everyone was solemn, especially Emz who kept very close to her as they walked the streets. A few paces ahead was a man with a cage and a gun, and the heart of the young female fell. She had no sense of geography, but judging by what Lisai had told her they were currently somewhere in India, and realized that this was the moment it all had been leading up to. She’d been on the boat for six months, and she considered them her family. But she was trading hands now, to another man with a tiny cage.

She whipped around and grabbed Lisai’s arm, looking up to her and pleading. The man hadn’t realized they were near. “I don’t want to go!” She cried out, he eyes filling to the brim with tears. “I love life on the ship! Please don’t make me leave! I’ll do everything right! I won’t spill stuff at dinner! Please, please just let me stay! Please!” The tears fell over and streaked down her face, but Lisai wasn’t looking at her. She couldn’t stand the thought of the child pleading there before her, so needy and so helpless and do what she was about to do. Of course the captain couldn’t understand why. It was just like so many jobs she’d done before. What made Gunner special? Why couldn’t she bear to give her up to the man?

It was because just as Gunner thought Lisai to be her mother Lisai considered Gunner to be her daughter. The entire crew had accepted the unicorn and no one was willing to let her go, especially not Emz. He had protested vehemently, saying if Gunner left then he would leave as well.

She threw her hands into the air. “Screw this,” Lisai said and took Aeon’s small hand into her larger one. “You’re coming back to the ship.”

That night a massive party was thrown, and Gunner was so happy to be with her family, her real family, that she didn’t even think about the island. She didn’t think about her father and how he left her to die. All she could think about was the wonderful nights and days to come aboard the ship. After all, they were pirates. It was what they did.
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