Chapter 1
The young Princess Luna stomped a tent stake into the dry ground. She paused, sweeping her gaze over the undulating carpet of savanna all around the camp site Rooibos had chosen.
She knew without looking that her moon was nearing the horizon. She felt the subliminal tug of her power pulling it up toward the edge of the world, and saw the fire of sunset licking at the tips of the tall grass. The stalks bent and rustled under a dry, cool breeze.
It was peaceful here, in the Zebra lands. Quiet. She wasn’t sure whether she liked the quiet, even after the years she’d spent moving from herd to herd. Soon, at last, the savanna would fall into the distance behind her. She was leaving the Zebra lands for the next horizon, continuing her journey to meet every kind of creature her light fell upon.
She pulled her eyes away from the savanna to look at her traveling companion. Rooibos, shaman of the Ooa’O herd. They had sent him with her as a gesture of courtesy and respect. She would rather have flown, but a princess did not refuse a kindness from her subjects. It would be unseemly. Rooibos was unlike the other herd shamans she had met in her sojourn. He was young, shockingly young for a shaman, his muscles still hard with youthful vigor. He was a warrior, like every Ooa’O, to defend the herd against the lions.
He felt her looking, and turned to face her, his posture showing attentive respect. His eyes were black pools above the horizontal slash of red clay he wore across his nose. The clay had meaning. He had earned the right to wear it by killing a lion which was preying on the herd. It cut across the stripes on his face like an open wound, underlining the patient intensity of his eyes.
Luna shivered and looked away, overcome for a moment by the thought of the handsome young shaman earning his clay. It was strange and eerie to recognize that she was not alone in killing. She had omitted that fact among so many peoples for so long that it had become second nature. At times, she forgot about it herself, about the days when the world was new, before language, before rationality. She and Celestia had been alone together in a hostile world.
Celestia had always been love. Luna had necessarily become fury. She had had to protect her sister, and she had done whatever was necessary.
She should be nothing but red clay. She had earned it.
Rooibos still stood waiting. To cover her lapse, Luna asked a question she had asked many times of many creatures. “When I came among you, how did you know I was who I said I was?”
His dark pools blinked slowly. His voice was like warm water rushing over granite. “Because you are cold and distant, like the moon herself.”
Luna felt a thrill—fear, anger, excitement. That was an answer she had never heard. She turned to him, towering over him, a head and more taller. “Explain.”
He bent his neck, either a bow or a nod. “You walk alone, staying apart from the herd; you sit alone, choosing an uncomfortable spot so that none will be tempted to join you; you eat alone, in the smokiest corner of the big tent. You strive always to hold yourself apart. Not in the way of a ruler, but in the way of a penitent.” His eyes flashed above the bloody stroke across his face. “Why?”
She shrank back at the question and turned away. “Distant, yes. But the moon is not cold. It blazes with unearthly heat, baking everything in it to dust and char.”
Silence fell like a curtain, broken only by the sounds of Rooibos assembling a cooking fire. Luna stood stiff as a statue while watching the brilliant white disk of her moon rise above the horizon. Yellow light flared behind her, then there was the quiet slosh of the pot being hung above the fire. She was patient. The Zebra habit was to consider one’s words as long as necessary before giving voice to them.
At last, he spoke, the fluid syllables of the Ooa’O dialect sounding alien to her ears despite her fluency. “What has been burned out of you?”
She spun to face him, startled by the question. Anger rose in her. “Everything that is good is gone from me! I became what I am from necessity, and only too late I learned that the clay cannot be washed off! I corral myself away from the world so that I do not cause more pain.” The anger fell away, and her head dropped. “I cannot trust myself.”
Rooibos brought a packet of herbs from his bag and sprinkled it into the heating water in the pot. He put away the empty packet and went still, sitting like a stone, looking at Luna. After a long pause, he said, “You are wrong.”
Her head snapped up. Her teeth were bared in a snarl of rage. “You call me a liar?”
He sat still and unperturbed. “I call you wrong. You are a liar only to yourself. I have seen you play with the foals. I have seen you touch the sick and speak kindly to them. I know that you give us the moon to light our way in the cool night. I see, and I know. You are not the cruelty you believe.”
She couldn’t tear her gaze away from his eyes above the clay. “Then what am I?”
“You are a warrior who has been too long away from war.”
Luna recoiled from him. “No! I want no more of war! I have killed enough and more than enough, a hundred times over!”
The pot was steaming, and Rooibos poured out some of the tea into a gourd to cool. “You have never asked, but I have seen the question in your eyes. You wonder why we live amongst the lions and allow ourselves to be threatened. Sometimes, you wonder why we have not simply used our brains to devise a way to kill all of them.” He paused, waiting. She did not deny it. He continued. “The answer, my princess, is that we understand the value of danger. The lions in the dark allow us to appreciate the light with our whole hearts.” He raised his eyes to meet hers, transfixing her. “Why did you fight?”
She answered without thinking. “To protect my sister.”
He touched his clay. “My niece is alive today because my spear was sharp. I often regret killing the lion. She was a worthy opponent, and the feeling of her last breath still haunts me. But it causes me no sadness, because I killed to protect my family and my herd. I am a warrior. A warrior should not love killing, but when it is needed, a warrior must kill. You are a warrior, my princess, but you feel shame for protecting the Princess Celestia. That is wrong.”
Luna shivered. A curious feeling washed over her, like rain under her skin. Maybe she had spent too long holding her guilt inside. Maybe she had twisted up against herself instead of being glad that Celestia’s smile still held the love it did when they were new to the world. She still felt a knot inside, a strange, familiar unease. She said, “What am I feeling?”
“You are a warrior who has been too long away from war. You ache for the contest. I will help heal you. You will fight me.”
She looked down at him with surprise. “I will kill you.” It was neither a boast nor a threat, but only a flat statement of fact.
For the first time, Rooibos smiled. “A possibility. But not a likely one.” He bent forward and lifted the gourd of tea between both hooves. The pose and movement had the air of ceremony about it. He brought it to his lips and downed the liquid in one swift pull. He turned to his bag and brought out a tightly-tied smaller bag and a bundle of twigs.
He separated one twig from the bundle, broke it in half, and put it in his mouth to chew it. The tie came off the small bag easily, and he spread it open. It was filled with powdery red clay. He looked at her, standing before him. He spoke in the ceremonial tongue, the language of the spirits. “Rooibos, shaman of the Ooa’O herd, will now fight she who is Mother and Daughter of the Moon. Aid me, spirits.”
He held his breath. Sweat sprang out on his face, and his eyes blazed at her. He lifted the bag of clay and dumped it over himself. It stuck to his sweaty coat, making a bloody mask of his face and spreading red pools over his body. He seemed to swell and grow as he stood up until she stared eye-to-eye with him. She was unsure if it was magic or if it was only the intensity of his eyes making him seem enormous.
He lowered his head as though to charge. His eyes were holes in the mask. They never wavered from her. She understood.
An ancient fire leapt up inside her, filling her limbs with the drive to action. She hadn’t felt this way for millennia, and she found herself grinning with it. Without warning, she lunged at Rooibos, head lowered to spear him with her horn. She stumbled and caught herself as she struck nothing but air. He was fast, far faster than she had expected. She spun in an attempt to dodge whatever counterattack he would make, but too late. The breath whumped out of her as his kick struck her ribs. Agony bloomed as the power of his blow knocked her from her hooves to slide across the dusty clearing.
She stood gingerly, finding her ribs intact. She looked at him where he stood on the other side of the clearing. He had grown still more, and now looked down at her from a head or so above her. His eyes were black holes in the bloody mask of his face. His muscles quivered with tension under his coat. She felt alive in a way that she hadn’t in so very long. He snarled at her, white teeth beneath red lips, and she answered him with a snarl of her own. They charged each other.
They were evenly matched, the warrior and the goddess, neither able to score a decisive blow on the other. Luna never used her magic or her wings, relishing instead the struggle of bone and sinew. The fight was on the ground, amidst the churning dust of the savanna, witnessed only by the moon and the spirits. They wrestled, they kicked, they bit. Blood flowed in rivulets from a hundred small wounds, mingling with sweat to be flung free and absorbed into the thirsty soil. At last, even their preternatural strength began to fail.
Luna was exhausted, panting and blowing, and Rooibos was in no better shape. Her lungs worked like a bellows. Her heart thundered in her chest like a war-drum. They locked together, shoulder to shoulder, flank to flank, struggling to push the other off-balance. Their sweaty coats slipped against each other, then gave way. She staggered and recovered barely in time. Her growing exhaustion was leaching away the joy of battle, and now, pressed to the straining muscles of Rooibos’ enormous body, she found to her surprise that a different, but equally ancient, fire was stirring in her.
She had not felt a slickness between her lips in centuries. Not since . . . not since she had given completely over to shame and self-loathing. She looked aside at his eye, dull with fatigue but still intent on battle. She thrust herself away, disengaging and leaping free before he could come around to attack.
“Stop! Stop, Rooibos!” He halted in his advance, regarding her warily. “I call truce, an end to this battle.”
He relaxed, slumping down on his hooves, the bloody mask becoming complete as his eyes fell closed. “Thank the spirits. You are a great warrior, my princess. I would not have been able to continue for much longer.”
She bit her lip, then plunged on. “You have done me a great service. I thank you for your wisdom and your prowess, shaman Rooibos. I would ask one more boon of you.”
He hauled himself upright to stand straight and attentive. “Anything.”
“You reminded me what it is to feel like a warrior.” Heat gathered in her cheeks to match that between her legs. “Now I ask that you remind me what it is to feel like a mare.” She turned her back on him and lifted her tail to the side, presenting to him. She looked back over her shoulder, uncertain how he would react. He was the picture of surprise, his eyes huge in the clay.
The tableau was broken by his penis spilling from his sheath, stretching to dangle toward the dusty soil. Then it began hardening, lifting away from the ground to form a great dark arc, throbbing between his legs. Luna stared at it. It was strangely curved, different from the members of the ponies she had lain with in the far past. She could hardly wait to feel it inside her. She flagged her tail and wiggled her rump, wordlessly encouraging him in.
He approached as though dazed, but hesitated. He nuzzled her hip, and the clay stung in her many cuts. “May I truly?” he asked, timid and hopeful, as though he could hardly believe his good fortune.
Luna was irritated by the delay but pleased by his awe. “Yes, you may. And quickly. I find myself starving.”
He lifted himself onto her back, his hooves pressing firmly on either side of her spine. There was a blissful sensation of pressure at her opening, and then his broad head entered her, spreading her open and filling her with hot delight. She moaned in approval and bucked back against him.
He walked forward, his hooves on her back moving up toward her neck, the curve of his erection pressing strangely against her walls. It was wonderful. At last he hooked his arms over her shoulders, his front hooves dangling in front of her chest, and rocked his hips to plunge the last inches into her.
“Hold there for a moment,” she breathed. His thighs were pressed to her rump and she was full to the brim, and she savored the sensations. His long penis twitched inside her, and the spell was broken. “Now, and hard!”
Rooibos complied, thrusting half his length in and out of her in fast strokes. She threw her head back with a gasp, and he bit her neck, pinching the skin gently between his teeth. The echo of the combat they’d just had was too much for Luna, and an orgasm rushed over her like a flash flood, swamping her mind with pleasure. She panted, and each exhalation was a little cry of delight.
Rooibos continued thrusting for a little while longer, then gave a desperate grunt and shifted his hooves on her, preparing to back away. She grabbed his arm with a strong hoof, holding him in place. “No! I want your seed.” He sighed, a long gust that clenched into a gasp at the end, and then there was heat inside her, long hard spurts filling her to overflowing, more than any pony had ever given her. She continued coming, bucking back against him, driven to ever greater ecstasy by his vast heat filling her, flowing out of her, running down her legs.
Their voices rose together in a growl that became a howl, ringing out across the empty savanna. At last, their orgasms faded and Rooibos slid himself out of her, both of them wincing at the tug of flesh against sensitive flesh.
Rooibos collapsed next to the embers of the fire, panting with exhaustion. He rolled his eyes up at her and said, “Thank you for that gift.”
Luna’s knees wobbled, and she lowered herself down next to him with what grace she could manage. Despite her exhaustion, her heart was light. She shook her head. “You have it wrong. I am the one who must thank you.” She rolled onto her side, pressing hard up against Rooibos, and fell asleep almost instantly.
In the morning, she woke to find that Rooibos had reduced to his normal size and was curled against her. In the early morning light, his mask of clay was decorative rather than warlike. Luna lay her chin on his shoulders, looking out at the early morning mist rolling over the tips of the savanna grass. It was quiet here in the Zebra lands, and peaceful, and now she remembered the meaning those words held.
The striped coat under her chin quivered as Rooibos stirred toward waking, and she smiled. It would take them another week to walk together to the edge of the Zebra lands. She could have flown it in a day. She was glad she hadn’t.
Author's Note: This story was originally written for Prompt #30 at Sexty Minute Ponies, but it ran long, and then it ran longer, and finally I knew that I couldn't submit it in good conscience. So, here it is.
For your edification and amusement, the prompt was: Camping! The great outdoors! And best of all, privacy. We could do anything, right out in the open.