Termination Shock
A Sci-Fi novella

Written by: minoan
Inspired by the work of Isaac Asimov

- - - - - - - -

Scent of the earth,
touch of the light,
here, where colors collide,
this black hole ignites
my world in bloom.
My world in bloom.

In Bloom.

~ Ne Obliviscaris – Devour Me, Colossus (Part I): Black Holes

IN THE BEGINNING days and weeks of the crisis – before the disease became The Cataclysm – the idea seemed absurd. But as the weeks turned to months and the pandemic showed no signs of abating, as it defied all quarantines, killing ninety percent of the infected and leaving all survivors infertile, the absurd idea became the last desperate hope to save their species.

The Interstellar Ark in orbit around their planet was never built for this. It had been a great global project completed in the early decades of the final consolidation of nations into the single world government. But lack of continued interest, funding and volunteers had left it languishing as little more than a symbol of unity orbiting ceaselessly overhead for more than a hundred years. Why waste the resources and time on such a project when our civilization has achieved total accord at home? Why send Vulpines to populate distant planets when the one we have is perfect?

The disease answered that question. Facing an existential threat to their survival the fox-like Vulpine race – the only sentient species on their planet and, as far as they knew, the only sentient race in the universe – scrambled to reactivate the Ark.

Even after their civilization decided on this new course and devoted itself wholly to it, the disease continued to spread more rapidly than even the most pessimistic models predicted. There wasn’t enough time. There wasn’t enough fuel. Soon there wouldn’t be enough uninfected Vulpines to make the journey at all.

The Interstellar Ark fired its engines out of orbit of the Vulpine home planet with only a third of the crew it was designed to carry – less than two-thousand souls on board. There wasn’t enough fuel for the ship to make it to the distant stars it was meant for, and the amount of cryo-stasis plasma available wouldn’t even last long enough to keep the passengers in stasis for much more than a few decades.

Instead of traveling out to the stars the Ark would set a course inward. Vulpine astronomers had discovered a thousand years ago that while their planet orbited a star, their star orbited another celestial object – a black hole a ten-thousand times more massive. That was the Ark’s destination.

With its occupants in stasis the Ark would dip close, just dozens of kilometers from the event horizon at its closest point. Over 20 years it would complete hundreds of elliptical orbits. The resulting time dilation would mean that hundreds of years would have passed on their home planet.

It was a crazy idea, a final gambit borne of desperation, but with billions dead and their race facing extinction there was nothing to lose.

When the Ark’s intrepid passengers returned home, the disease would have run its course. The Cataclysm would be over. They would return either as brave heroes to a generation yet unborn or to repopulate the dead planet themselves.

- - - - - - -

* * * Alarm. Alarm. Negative-value periapsis warning. T-minus 6 hours. * * *

Elyon grimaced and squinted his eyes, groggy, reluctantly awakening from a dreamless sleep. It was pitch dark, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t time to wake up – winter in the arctic had been half a year of solid darkness. He’d heard an alarm, but it sounded distant and muffled. Five more minutes, he thought, as he started to roll over to go back to sleep. 

Unexpectedly his long Vulpine snout bumped against a wall, his cold, wet nose pressing against a colder metal surface. He opened his eyes in surprise, realizing he was not in his bunk on the arctic research base. He was trapped in a confined, coffin-like space.

Then the memories came flooding back. The disease, the Cataclysm. The years of quarantine in the arctic. The medical screening robots they’d sent to draw blood and run tests. The news that he’d been selected to be a passenger on the Ark. The mission to save their civilization. The mission to the black hole.

Elyon tried to push open the lid of the coffin-like cryo-stasis pod but it wouldn’t budge. The pods weren’t meant to be opened from the inside, and he wasn’t meant to wake up with the lid still closed. He began to panic before he remembered the pre-stasis briefing and the emergency release handle they told him it was ‘highly unlikely’ he’d have to use. In absolute darkness he bent his orange-furred arm and felt around the frigid aluminum interior of the pod with his black-furred hand, the fox-like claws on his finger tips tapping against the metal as he searched.

There was a loud hiss of equalizing air pressure when he found the handle and turned it, like he’d opened a pouch of the vacuum-sealed freeze-dried food he’d become accustomed to in those years in the arctic. Desperate to escape from the pod Elyon pushed the lid up as hard as he could, struggling against the pneumatic hinges. When he’d opened it just enough for him to squeeze through he scrambled out over the edge. He fell heavily on his side onto the floor.

Elyon’s eyes adjusted to dim red of the emergency lights in the cryo-bay. He felt the cold of the plasteel flooring through the fur on his bare butt as he sat up, leaning on the pod. Any foreign material, including clothing, could disrupt cryo-stasis; he’d been nude when the pod lid had closed on him – however long ago that was – just like everyone else in the cryo-bay.

He stood up to assess his situation. The main lights were off and only a few of the blood-red emergency lights were lit, some flickering, some dim. He looked out at the countless rows of pods that stretched far into the distance like tombstones, but in the dim light he could only see a few dozen of the hundreds of rows that extended into the cavernous darkness. Most of the pods were still sealed, but a few had their lids ajar or fully opened. A fine layer of dust covered everything.

Something had gone horribly wrong. That was clear to Elyon now. Everyone was supposed to wake up from stasis at the same time, the cryo-bay was supposed to be clean and bright, the vid-screens were supposed to on standby for the captain – Captain Asherah – to address the crew. What has happened to us? What has happened?

He focused on the pod adjacent to his, the lid cracked slightly open. He feared what he might find, but he needed more information – his training as a scientist and his years in the arctic as a research assistant had taught him to gather all available information before making a determination. Gingerly he took a step towards it, then another, the soft fox-like paw-pads on his feet making no noise as he crept on plasteel grating. Carefully, deliberately, he grasped it with his hands and lifted the lid.

Elyon’s face contorted in horror, the white and orange fur around his black nose scrunching and his black-furred ears flattening. The occupant of the pod, who he distinctly remembered from right before he entered his own, was dead. Not just dead; there was nothing left but his skeleton. It was surrounded by the same fine layer of dust that coated everything else in the cryo-bay. There was no trace of flesh in the pod, no smell of decay. The bones were clean and white as if they had been there for years. Decades.

Elyon stared at the poor young man’s fox-like skull as, in shocked disbelief, he backed away from the bones. But he stepped on his own fluffy orange tail and stumbled backwards, his fall only being stopped by another pod. The lid of this one was wide open. He turned and looked down and, to his terror, saw that it too was occupied by a clean white Vulpine skeleton.

“No!!” Elyon screamed. He ran to another open pod and saw the skeleton of another Vulpine. He forced the lid off another and saw another skeleton. Then another. And another.

In the dim red light of the cry-bay he turned away from the pods began to run for the cryo-bay exit, not sure where he’d go or what he’d do, only that he had to get out of this mausoleum. Was he all alone on the enormous ship? Was he the only one still alive? 

Elyon ran for the large archway connecting the cryo-bay, the entrance to the long hallway with branching doors that ran down the keel of the Ark and connected its various sections. As he neared it he could see that the light was brighter far down into the corridor, normal lights functioning instead of the grim red emergency lights of the cryo-bay. But then he saw something else: a figure emerging from one of the doors far away.

“Hey! Help!!” Elyon yelled as ran down the hallway. The figure turned and looked at him, seeming not nearly as alarmed as he was. As he got closer he could make out more of the type of Vulpine this other survivor was. A woman – clearly a woman, her tight one-piece jumpsuit accentuating the ample feminine curves of her hips and chest.

And then, all at once, he recognized her. Elyon stopped dead in his tracks. This wasn’t just some other random crew member. This was her.

“Captain Asherah!” he yelped as he raised his hand to his brow in a salute.

- - - -

* * * Alarm. Alarm. Negative-value periapsis warning. T-minus 8 hours. * * *

Asherah’s eyes shot open. Her mind focused nearly instantly on her new situation.

Total darkness – I’m still inside my cryo-pod. Neg-Val periapsis alarm… the Ark is on a sub-orbital trajectory. I’ve got eight hours to save the ship before we cross the event horizon and are swallowed by the black hole.

She deftly located and turned the emergency release handle, waiting 3 seconds for the air pressure to equalize as she learned in training before pushing open the lid and exiting the pod.

As the captain of the Ark her cryo-stasis pod had not been in the main cryo-bay with most of the passengers. It was instead located in a much smaller executive cryo-bay which housed a few dozen other pods reserved for the most senior crew. She noted that most were no longer sealed. Some of the pod lids were ajar, some were open entirely. This was worrying – for several reasons – but there was no time to investigate what happened to the crew. She had to make it to the bridge. Finding out what happened to the crew was secondary to saving the Ark. Everything was.

Captain Asherah only realized she was naked when she felt her breasts bouncing heavily as she sprinted into the main control room. Modesty was another thing she couldn’t worry about with the Ark spiraling towards its doom.

Despite the exertion she wasn’t out of breath in the slightest when she reached the captain’s chair, custom-made to fit her body like a glove. She may have been 37 years old, but like everything else in her life she sought perfection in her physical form. She was in better shape than most Vulpines half her age.

She felt the cool leather on her orange fur as she sat in the chair, hooking her fox-like footpaws into the control stirrups as she inserted one hand into the command gauntlet and activated the captain’s control holo-panel with the other. 

“Asherah reporting, Alpha-Zero-Zero-One,” she said calmly as the Arkstat-HUD covered one of her eyes. It would provide information on all parts of the ship once activated, but first it flashed with a bright blue light as it scanned her retina.

* Identity confirmed. Welcome aboard, captain. *

“Telemetry status, screen code Tango-Sierra-One-Niner.”

* Processing… *

The Arkstat-HUD covering Asherah’s eye flashed several dozen lines of letters and numbers. They would have been incomprehensible to someone without training but they told her everything she needed to know. The Ark was, indeed, on a trajectory that would send it into the black hole in eight hours.

“Ark status report, screen code Alpha-Sierra-Zero-Four.”

* Processing… *
New letters and numbers appeared. Chiefly, Asherah needed to know the status of the main engines and the remaining fuel reserves.

Her heart sank. The engines were in working order, but the main fuel store was gone, completely, along with the reserve and the emergency store. How could this be true?

“Primary flight log, display main screen.”

The huge display in front of her flickered on. Hundreds of lines appeared, the vast majority chronicling mundane maintenance and routine tasks.

“Filter fuel events.”

The display flickered again as the filtered data populated. Asherah’s eyes widened as she tried to grasp what she was seeing.

“No… it can’t be…” 

* Unknown command, unable to comply *

Asherah felt fear – true fear – for the first time in her life.

“It can’t be! Let there be some mistake!!”

* Unknown command, unable to comply *

- - - -

* * * Alarm. Alarm. Negative-value periapsis warning. T-minus 6 hours. * * *

The view was beautiful beyond description.

An entire wall of the captain’s private quarters was transparent plas-glass. It bowed outward in a curved convex, granting a panoramic view of the dense starfield near the center of the gargantuan elliptical galaxy the Vulpine race called home. Stars of all colors and brightness shone in every direction, accentuated and punctuated with wispy, cloudy nebulae of brilliant orange, green, purple and red.

Asherah sat on the edge of the bed looking out at the cosmos. She tried clearing her mind, focusing on the beauty of the spacescape outside her window instead of thinking about how she’d failed everyone she’d ever met and billions she never had.

She’d tried everything – rerouting power, stirring tanks, software debugging, manual overrides, overrides to the overrides. But the immutable truth was that there was no fuel, none, and without fuel the Ark’s orbital trajectory could not be augmented. In six hours the Ark would fall into the black hole. In six hours she would die.

From the flight log she pieced together what she could of how this had happened, what went wrong. A cascading series of hardware failures and software errors had led to the entire crew dying. The onboard computer prioritized her life over theirs, and so the cryo-stasis plasma was reserved for her. One by one they died while she slept.

The mission was supposed to last 20 years. They were all supposed to emerge from cryo-stasis together. But the automatic reanimation program had failed, its backup had failed, and the backup to the backup had failed. Why the program decided to awaken her now, hours before the ship’s demise, she didn’t know. Maybe just a final fail-safe.

As she scrolled through the data logs Asherah came to know that this all happened more than 300 years ago. During that time the Ark dipped close to the black hole’s event horizon hundreds and hundreds of times, depleting all its fuel slowly over the centuries in course correction and orbital maintenance. And while 300 years had passed on the Ark, more than 3,000 had passed on their home planet.

Asherah forced herself to watch the last transmission to the Ark from the Vulpine home world, sent three millennia ago. It was a last farewell to the faint hope the last elderly survivors had that their species wouldn’t go extinct. They’d contracted the disease when were young, like everyone on the planet, and survived. But like all the disease infected it had also robbed them of their fertility. Just a few years after the Ark’s departure there wasn’t a Vulpine left on their planet who could bear children. Unable to reproduce, they were the last of their kind, and they knew it. The Ark, Asherah’s mission – that was their only hope.

“I’ve failed them...” Asherah said to herself, choking back tears as she sat on her bed gazing out at the perfect stillness of the starfield.

She’d never known failure until this moment. Up to now her life had been a long string of uninterrupted successes and victories almost too incredible to believe. A child prodigy whose genius landed her on talk shows and public panels before she was 8 years old. The discoverer, as a teenager, of a new, almost limitless source of power, a process by which energy could be extracted from quantum vacuum fluctuations in empty space. Limitless clean, nearly free energy for everyone, forever.

With her discovery she’d founded the Vulpine race’s largest company and become the first trillionaire in history while still in her early twenties. She’d shocked the world again in her early thirties when she made the technology open-source and donated 99% of her wealth to charities and research projects for the betterment of all. It was well known that she planned to run for prime minister of the single world government, and it was almost a foregone conclusion that she would win the election in a landslide. When the Cataclysm happened she was the natural choice as captain of the Ark. If anyone could save the Vulpine race from extinction, it was Asherah.

But she’d failed. The irony wasn’t lost on her that what she’d discovered could have prevented the Ark from ever running out of fuel, but the Ark was built a hundred years before she was born and the technology it used was just as old. There had been no time to retrofit.

They were all dead now, every last one. She’d failed. She was the last Vulpine alive, the last who would ever live. The planet would not be repopulated, their species would not live on. The last living record of everything their species was or had ever been would disappear from the universe with her in six hours.

Something in that thought jogged her mind. She’d checked every system in the ship numerous times, but she remembered then that some of the pods in the executive cryo-bay had been sealed. Were there any survivors in the main bay? The chief engineer maybe, or someone who might be able to think of something she hadn’t? It was a long shot, but it was better than sulking here in her quarters waiting for the end.

Asherah ran back into the control room, not even bothering to connect to the captain’s chair peripherals.

“Primary flight log reset. View all. Filter cryo-stasis events,” she commanded as she jogged naked towards the screen.

The screen flickered once more as the requested data populated. Before it had even finished loading the first line told Asherah that there was another survivor. And he’d just woken up.

Asherah grabbed one of the blue latex jumpsuits hanging next to the doorway and quickly put it on. It was too tight for her, clinging to her curvaceous body, her nipples and even the cleft of her most intimate part clearly outlined. The material was old and degraded, so several rips had developed in various parts of the suit, exposing the bare orange and white fur beneath.

It was a far cry from a dignified captain’s uniform, but it would have to do. There wasn’t a moment to lose.

- - 

“Captain Asherah!” Elyon yelped as he raised his hand to his brow in a salute.

Elyon’s eyes widened with the realization that he was still completely naked, standing before none other than Captain Asherah in the dimly-lit hallway.

“Sorry!” he winced as his hands shot down to cover his furry sheath and balls.

“Are you an engineer?!” she barked back at him, seeming to ignore the fact that he was naked.

“What? No, I’m...”

“Mechanic? Systems specialist? Maintenance tech?”

“No! I’m just a passenger!”

Asherah’s shoulders drooped, the last echo of a hope she had for saving the Ark dashed. He’s a passenger – not a member of the crew at all, just one of the 1,500 or so Vulpines that outnumbered the crew six-to-one and were the real cargo of the ship. They’d been meticulously screened before selection, not just for the disease but also for any disease, any defect at all. The passengers on the Ark were the designated survivors of the Vulpine race whose only task would be to repopulate the planet. To be selected one had to be an absolute paragon of genetic perfection, almost a holotype of their species.

Asherah had no doubt about the quality of the screening as she looked at the young man. Tall, slim but wiry, muscles well-toned under his radiant orange and white fur. The genetic scientists had certainly done well selecting this one, she found herself thinking – he was as close to the perfect male form as any man she’d ever seen, like a statue of an ancient god.

But he was confused, and scared.

“At ease. It’s ok,” Asherah said to him in a less harsh tone. “Is there anyone else?”

“No. No one else. They’re all… they’re all dead.” Elyon said, glancing down at the floor.

“It’s ok,” Asherah said again, trying to soothe the young man to the degree that she could, trying to soothe herself at the same time now that their fate was certain.

“What’s your name?” she asked him.

“El,” he replied, still looking down at the plasteel floor, both hands cupped over his sheath and balls.

“L? Like the letter? What’s that stand for?”

Elyon smiled for the first time in three hundred years.

“No, not like the letter,” he grinned, turning his eyes up to the captain’s. “It doesn’t stand for anything. It’s short for ‘Elyon,’ but nobody calls me that. Everyone calls me El.”

Asherah smiled back, her eyes meeting El’s.

“Well that’s good to know. Nice to meet you El, I’m Asherah,” she said, reaching her hand out.

“I know who you are. Everyone in the world knows who you are,” El answered.

Asherah watched as he looked back down at the floor, clearly embarrassed to be naked in front of the captain, the richest and most famous Vulpine in the world. He didn’t know yet that there was no more world, Asherah thought. He didn’t know that they were the only two left.

“Don’t be embarrassed about that. No one has clothes on when they wake up from cryo-sleep,” she said to him, placing her outstretched hand on his shoulder. “There’s some spare jumpsuits in the control room. In the meantime you don’t have to cover it. Nothing I haven’t seen before, anyway.”

El turned his eyes up to meet Asherah’s again. Her smile was warm, friendly, sincere. He’d idolized her when he was growing up, following all the news about her successes, then her charity. He’d seen her in hundreds of interviews and speeches and talks over the years, and she inspired him to pursue a career in the sciences. For El, meeting Asherah was meeting a living legendary figure – but it wasn’t like he’d imagined. Now, with her hand on his shoulder, he could see that she was a Vulpine just like him. She was an incredibly smart, famous, powerful, rich Vulpine – but still a Vulpine.

He let his hands drop down to his sides, uncovering his furry sheath. As he did he saw that, subtly, Asherah’s eyes flitted downward away from his face and to his newly exposed loins. Her hand slid slightly down his shoulder to his upper arm before she spoke.

“Right then. Follow me,” Asherah said as she turned away, starting to walk briskly down the hallway. The suddenness surprised El, but he dutifully followed after her.

He was starstruck – he still couldn’t believe he was actually talking to the almost mythical Asherah. Like almost every boy his age the world over he’d had a crush on her when he was growing up. She was 15 years older than him, so right around the time he hit puberty she was in her mid to late twenties, and already the most famous Vulpine in the world. In additional to all her other qualities she was also astoundingly beautiful, her proportions like an ancient fertility goddess – a perfect hourglass figure, a slim waist but with large breasts, and thick, child-bearing hips that were almost too wide to be believable. Despite that, and despite being in her late thirties, Asherah’s muscular butt was still pert and firm.

He didn’t know why she wasn’t wearing her captain’s uniform, but as he walked behind her he certainly wasn’t complaining. His eyes were fixed on her perfect round butt swaying in opposite time with her swishing fox-like tail. This was the butt he’d paused vids on when he was a boy, this was the butt he’d jacked off looking at more times that he could possibly remember, but he’d never seen it like this. The latex jumpsuit she was wearing was obscenely tight. It was ripped in several places, her orange and white fur visible through the gashes.

Asherah, for her part, kept silent as they walked. She didn’t know how she was going to tell this handsome young man the horrific news that they were the only two Vulpines left of their entire species, and they would both be dead in six hours.

For minutes they walked in silence, El too dumbstruck by Asherah’s celebrity to speak and Asherah still unsure how to tell El what was about to happen to them.

“All right, here we are. Just have to scan in,” Asherah said when they finally reached the doorway to the control room. She bent over, leaning towards the retina scanner next to the door. As she bent forward her tail lifted slightly.

El had been watching her butt for the past few minutes, but when her tail lifted it exposed a tear right under the hole in the suit her tail protruded from. He could see, clearly, not just the soft orange fur underneath, but the crack between her two round, firm cheeks. He had felt himself starting to become aroused just watching her walk down the hallway, but that was manageable. This wasn’t. Powerless to stop his oncoming erection, the tip of El’s Vulpine penis peeked out of his sheath. 

The retina scanner flashed pale blue as the door to the control room slid open. Asherah turned her head back to El faster than he could react.

“The jumpsuits are just inside hanging on the… oh…” Asherah said as she turned, stopping mid-sentence when she saw the tapered tip of El’s fox-cock emerging from his sheath. She didn’t look away as the first inch of El’s slick pink shaft emerge. Or the second.

“Oh god! Sorry! I’m so sorry!” El finally squeeked. His hands darted back down to cover his maleness and he turned away from Asherah. He’d never been so embarrassed in his life.

But to his surprise, Asherah didn’t freak out. She calmly turned to him and again put her hand on his shoulder.

“Nothing I haven’t seen before, remember? Don’t be embarrassed. It’s just us here, ok?”

El was transfixed as Asherah looked up into his eyes. She was a good bit taller than he imagined – he was 6’2”, but she must have been at least 5’10”. Her eyes were a bright shade of green, much more vibrant than he ever would have imagined from the countless vids and photos he’d seen of her.

He nodded sheepishly but his hands remained on his crotch, covering his growing erection.

“Good. Like I was saying, jumpsuits are hanging by the door. Find one that fits, I’ll wait here in the hallway for you.”

None of the jumpsuits seemed to fit El once he entered the control room and started trying them on. They were all too tight, like they’d shrunk in the wash, and they all had rips and tears in them just like the one Asherah was wearing. He tried on one after another but was unable to find one big enough. His arousal didn’t help things – at least Asherah was waiting outside and not watching while I struggle with stuffing my cock into a jumpsuit, El thought.

Finally he found one that was only moderately tight, though no matter what he did the bulge of his erection, sheath and balls were clearly visible. He buttoned it up – Vulpine’s never used zippers on clothing because of how it caught fur – and walked back out into the hallway where Asherah was waiting.

“Think you got one tight enough?” Asherah asked playfully.

“Just following your example,” El replied with a grin.

Good, Asherah thought, there’s a little bit of his personality. She could tell how nervous he was around her. That wasn’t surprising, since most Vulpines were a bit starstruck meeting her for the first time. But she really wanted El to feel comfortable around her right now, as much for her own sake as for his. They had less than six hours to live – she had to tell him that soon – and they were going to spend them together. They were going to spend what little remained of the rest of their lives together, in fact. Those hours should be as pleasant as possible.

Pleasant, she thought as she took in the hefty bulge in El’s jumpsuit, the outline of his thick cock impossible to miss. Maybe they could have some fun together at the end of time, too.

Asherah was about to make a catty, flirtatious remark back at El, but he spoke again first.

“Captain Asherah… what has happened here on the Ark?” 

She had wanted to tell him in a more comfortable setting, maybe back in her quarters, not here in the middle of the hallway.

“I’ll explain. Let’s get out of the hallway and I’ll –”

“No, please, just tell me. You said… it’s just us here, and all the pods in the cryo-bay, they were… everyone is dead except us, aren’t they?”

Asherah turned to look El in the eye. He wasn’t scared, she could tell. He just wanted to know.

“Yes. They’re all dead. We’re the only ones left.”

She watched as the hope drained from his face, his blue eyes leaving hers.

“I… but how? And why me?” El asked, almost to himself as his eyes darted across the empty hallway back towards the main cryo-bay, the tomb he awoke from.

He returned his gaze to Asherah, their eyes meeting again.

“What has happened?”

Asherah sighed. How do you tell someone they have six hours to live? How do you tell them everyone they’ve ever known or would have known or could have known is dead? How do you tell someone their entire species dies with them?

She could feel tears beginning to well in her eyes as she looked into El’s. This wasn’t like her – she was always so calm under pressure, so stoic and steely. She didn’t break down when she’d recognized the situation and realized what her fate would be. But the thought of telling El these horrible things was so much harder than accepting it herself. It was unlike anything she’d ever had to do.

Asherah felt El’s strong arms wrapping around her back, embracing her in a hug. Instinctively she did the same, clutching onto El tightly and burying her snout in his chest.

“It’s ok, Asherah, just tell me what’s happened,” El said, looking down at the Vulpine woman he’d just met but felt like he’d known all his life. “Everything will be all right.”

“No, El,” she answered, her voice muffled in their embrace. “I’m sorry. It won’t be.”

- - - -

* * * Alarm. Alarm. Negative-value periapsis warning. T-minus 4 hours. * * *

Asherah and El barely noticed the announcement. If anything, they were surprised that two hours had passed since they first met.

Their conversation paused only briefly before El continued where he left off.

“I mean, it’s not like when I was a kid I ever said, ‘when I grow up I want to spend years in the arctic looking at ice.’ I just knew I wanted to be a scientist.”

El had taken the news a lot better than Asherah was expecting. In truth, he’d pieced together most of it – Asherah telling him that they were the last living Vulpines in the universe was more of a confirmation for him than a shock. He’d expected the ship was doomed from the moment he emerged from cryo-sleep and saw the state of the cryo-bay.

He didn’t cry or lament. He’d accepted their fate, telling Asherah that not knowing was always worse. Without knowledge you can’t make the right decision, he’d said, so it’s always better to know than to not know.

He told Asherah that if he had to die, he was glad he would spend his last hours alive with her. That sparked a new line of conversation, and the next two hours seemed to vanish in a flash as they learned more and more about each other. El already knew a lot about Asherah, of course, but he was getting to know her as a Vulpine, not just as the world-famous pioneer he saw so often in the news.

For Asherah’s part, the more she learned about El, the more he spoke, the more she liked him. He was smart – finished college at just 19 and enrolled in a pre-doctoral research program before being stranded at the research station by The Cataclysm. He was witty, modest, selfless – Asherah couldn’t explain it, but El was one of the only people she had ever met in her life that seemed interested in her just for her, not for her as the trillionaire or her as the celebrity.

It didn’t hurt that he was possibly the most gorgeous man she’d ever seen, either. Genetic perfection, that’s what they’d told her they were looking for in passengers on the Ark. They weren’t kidding.

“What made you pursue that line of research?” Asherah asked him with genuine interest.

“Ice cores?”

“Yeah. What made you want to spend a semester freezing your butt off?”

“That doesn’t sound like fun to you? An all-expense paid vacation to an endless ice sheet?”

Asherah giggled, leaning into El and putting her hand on his arm. They were sitting next to each other against the wall in the hallway, but by this point in their conversation they were practically on top of each other. They’d edged closer and closer to one another since they sat down. Some time ago their hips touched, then their arms and legs. They were both aware of the growing sexual tensions between them, though even with her overt flirtation El could hardly believe this was the actual Asherah rubbing against him.

“Honestly though, it wasn’t the ice cores themselves, it’s what they can tell you,” El continued to answer her question. “You can read them like tree rings, but you can get so much more information from them. You drill a mile deep into the ice and pull up a meter-long rod – that ice core is snow that fell a million years ago, then got compressed into ice. Million year old ice, it’s crazy, right? But the amount and variety of information you can get out of them is even crazier.”

“Like what kind of information?”

“So the first thing is that when the snow is getting compressed all these little air bubbles are preserved. You can sample those and get the composition of the atmosphere from any point in the past. That can tell you all kinds of things in all kinds of fields – biology, climatology, geology. Then you can find particulate matter in the strata, and every bit of it tells you something. Ash, pollen, even the quantities of different elemental isotopes… the information is all there, if that makes any sense. It’s there. You just have to see it and decode it. And that’s what I wanted to do. I dunno, maybe it sounds weird, but I wanted to know and understand everything, if that makes any sense. I still do. Is that weird?”

“No, that’s not weird at all,” Asherah answered as she leaned against El’s shoulder. “That sounds… kind of familiar, actually. A little different, but familiar.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean… I don’t think I need to know everything per se, but you always need to have enough relevant information to know what the right decision to make is, and when to make it. That’s true in technology and in business. So I guess for me the goal has always been recognizing that moment when it comes and knowing what action I need to take, then doing it. Maybe it’s just a control thing, I don’t know.”

“Well, whatever it is, you’ve been pretty successful doing it,” El said, pausing for a moment thinking that she would reply, but she didn’t. He could feel the heat from her body on his shoulder through their jumpsuits.

“Were you always like that? I mean, before...” El asked, letting the last word linger without continuing the thought.

“Before I was rich and famous?”

El smiled. “I was going to try to phrase it a little more tactfully, but... yes,” he answered.

“Don’t worry about tact any more...” Asherah started before catching herself, not wanting to remind El or herself that they only had hours left to live. “I guess I was. My mom always said I was headstrong as a child, so I suppose so. Bossing around my three brothers, telling them what to do... I always had to be the one in charge.”

Asherah sighed, leaning into El even more.

“This is the first time in my life that I haven’t had a solution, or been able to fix the problem or control the outcome of the situation. It really is. The first time I’ve reached the end of all my options and just had to… resign myself to circumstances beyond my control. I know… I know what’s going to happen to us. But I’m not afraid. I was always afraid of losing control, not of dying. But now that I’ve lost control… I don’t know. That part isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.”

“Why do you think that is?” El asked earnestly.

“Maybe because I don’t have to pretend to be anything any more, play the part of the mythical, mighty Asherah who has all the answers. Maybe… just because you’re here with me.”

El tilted his head, feeling that Asherah was doing the same. The sides of their fox-like snouts touched, their wet black noses met, their eyes closed and their mouths opened.

Asherah’s hand slid down from El’s shoulder to his chest as she melted into the kiss. Their long, flat tongues curled and danced in each others’ mouths. She could feel herself leaning gently to one side, El’s muscular body following hers and guiding her down to the cold plasteel grating of the hallway floor.

She was surprised how easily and confidently he was in taking charge. But old habits die hard, and she wouldn’t give up control that easily.

“Wait...” she said, breaking their kiss. El opened his eyes, and Asherah could read the confusion in them. “Not here. I... want to show you something.”

Dutifully, without speaking a word, El lifted himself easily off of Asherah. She rose to her feet as well, grasping him gently by the hand and starting to lead him across the hallway.

El was in a daze. Did he really just make out with Asherah, his role model and celebrity crush since he was a pup? ‘Not here,’ she’d said. Did she mean…?

Asherah was leading him just a few yards away, to the doorway directly across the main hall from the control room. El’s eyes again fixated on her thick, toned butt as she bent forward to the retinal scanner. He couldn’t help it – this was the ass he’d fantasized about a thousand times before. And she almost seemed to be intentionally enticing him, her legs spread slightly, her back arched more than was necessary for her to bend down to the retinal scanner. Several of the rips in her jumpsuit had grown, including the one underneath the hole from which her fluffy orange tail protruded.

The scanner flashed a pale blue light and the two metal halves of the hydraulic doorway parted.

“Come on in, it’s just up here,” Asherah said to El as she cast an unmistakably alluring glance back over her shoulder at him before slowly straightening her back.

“What is it?” El asked, wanting to know like he always did as Asherah led him into the room.

“You’ll see...” she answered, looking back as they walked next to a small partitioning wall that separated the entryway from the main area of the captain’s quarters. She wanted to see El’s face when he first caught sight of the enormous glass wall.

“Can you give me a hint? Is it… oh my word...”

El’s jaw dropped as he passed by the edge of the partition and he saw the view out of the gigantic curved glass wall. Back on the Vulpine home the thick atmosphere obscured it, dulled it so that it the nearby nebulae were just faint streaks barely visible in the night sky, but out here every detail was clear.

Asherah let go of his hand, smiling as El moved towards the panorama. He was shuffling his feet as if they were moving on their own.

Points of light – tens of thousands of stars, more than he could ever count – filled El’s vision in every direction as he peered awestruck at the dense starfield that comprised the center of the elliptical galaxy. Billowing galactic nebulae coursed through them and around them. They were illuminated from within, stars setting them alight but obscured and shrouded by the trillion-mile wide wisps of gas and dust. Orange and red, green and purple, violet and yellow, the vibrancy of the colors defied description. They formed shapes in the mind – elephants, whales, birds, foxes – like watching clouds on a lazy summer afternoon. They were clearly in motion, fluid and dynamic, but moving on a timescale that was beyond his ability to grasp, static and flowing at the same time.

With no atmosphere to distort the nebulae or make the stars twinkle the entire scene seemed surreal. The atmosphere on the Vulpine home world was exceedingly dense; only obscured smudges of color and a vast, homogeneous glow of starlight was visible at night. Out here, hurtling towards the black hole their sun orbited, it was sublime.

“Hell of a view, isn’t it?” Asherah said quietly as she sidled up to El.

“It’s… I don’t have words. It’s incredible. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful...” El replied, his eyes staying fixed on the spectacle.

Asherah bit her lip. She wanted to show El the view of the starfield, that was true, but that wasn’t the real reason she brought him into the captain’s quarters. Maybe it was selfish of her, maybe she was taking advantage of a younger guy, but El was possibly the hottest man she’d ever met. Physical perfection. But was it really taking advantage of him if he idolized her and fantasized about her for his whole life?

Besides, if they were out of options and only had hours to live anyway, why spend those precious hours feeling sorry for themselves? Why not make the best of it and spend that fleeting time the best way they could – fucking like wild animals?

“Never? Could have fooled me, the way you were staring at my butt...”

El turned his head away from the starfield, down to the vixen standing next to him. The colors of the nebulae were forgotten as he looked into Asherah’s sultry green eyes. The desire in them was impossible to miss.

“True,” El replied, deciding to press his luck with the woman he’s wanted since he was a boy. “They’re both top contenders. I might need a closer look...”

“Mmm, you should take one,” Asherah teased, sliding between El and the plas-glass wall, turning her body to face El’s and pressing up against him. “But you might need more than a look to know for sure.”

El’s mouth opened to say something clever and seductive, but no words came. Instead the floodgate of sexual tension that had been building since they met burst open.

He lunged into the kiss with a feral, lustful grunt, his flat Vulpine tongue curling with Asherah’s as his hands slid down her fur-tight jumpsuit, feeling the curves of her firm body underneath.

She moaned into El’s mouth, her tongue roiling against his, their kiss almost feral in their mutual desire for each others’ bodies. She felt one of his hands slide down her back to her butt – El gripped her ass cheek hard, grabbing a handful before his fingers roamed further down to the back of her leg. She felt his other hand on her chest, squeezing and fondling her breast.

Urged on by El’s grip on the back of her thigh, Asherah started to lift one leg off the ground. At the same time her own hand went directly, instinctively to the massive bulge in El’s jumpsuit. She eagerly felt his balls and sheath through the latex before feeling the heat from his engorged penis just underneath. She lifted her leg higher, letting El hook his arm underneath – her body begging her to spread her legs for this stud and let him breed her.

El’s hips surged forward, pinning Asherah against the plas-glass wall with the view out to the cosmos. Even through two layers of clothing she could feel the warmth of El’s raw erection, the shaft of his cock wedged perfectly between the lips of her feminine slit. She was drenched, she realized, as El’s hips surged forward again.

Asherah had never been with a man this ravenously primal before. The boyfriends she’d had in the past – all relatively short-lived relationships – had ultimately only been interested in her because of her wealth, her fame, her power. In bed they’d all seemed intimidated by her, almost afraid to take charge. The paparazzi and the tabloids documented her every romantic misstep. The headlines were brutal and provocative – trillionaire tycoon Asherah dumps another suitor, still unmarried at age 37… will she ever settle down? Is no man good enough for her?

She felt El’s hips roll forward again, his hot cock pushing against her eager sex, desperate to break through the layers of latex and penetrate her. Those celebrities and politicians and billionaires she’d dated before hadn’t good enough for her, but El would have been. He didn’t want what they wanted. He just wanted her.

And she wanted him.

All at once El felt the mature vixen in his arms drop her leg back down and push off from the plas-glass. He’d always known how serious Asherah was about staying fit – he’d watched a particular vid on her strength-training regimen an embarrassing number of times in his adolescence, his favorite wank material for months. And seeing how tall and thick she was in person, feeling how firm her body was, he shouldn’t have been surprised.

Asherah broke their kiss and pushed him hard, sending El stumbling backwards. He saw her devious smile as his legs hit something solid and he lost his balance, falling softly down onto her bed. Asherah followed him down, landing heavily on top of him.

Her black lips found his again, and before El knew what was happening he was kissing Asherah, passionately and ravenously. His hands wrapped around the waist of the goddess laying on him, but hers went for the front of El’s jumpsuit and began quickly unbuttoning it. She only made it down to the third button before she simply grabbed both edges and pulled them apart, the buttons unfastening all the way down El’s body and much of the centuries-old degraded material of the jumpsuit tearing.  

She moaned again; El could feel it through his tongue as it glided over her sharp Vulpine teeth – before she broke the kiss. El opened his eyes to see her face – so familiar to him – retreating from his. She licked his exposed chest, pausing briefly on his nipple before nibbling further down to his abs, his navel, his…

“Oh fuck, Asherah...” El breathed out as Asherah’s lips wrapped around his erect cock. His mind was in a fog; right in front of him, dimly lit by the rainbow of colors from the stars and nebulae on the other side of the plas-glass, the Vulpine he’d lusted after his entire life was now bobbing her head up and down sucking him off. 

“Fuck...” Asherah heard him say again as she sped up her motion. She could taste the faint saltiness of El’s precum as she worked her tongue and lips along the shaft, a taste she’d always loved but had never admitted to anyone. She felt El place a hand on one of the pointed Vulpine ears on the top of her head, holding it with more affection than firmness. He was also starting to thrust up into her mouth in time with her movements.

She closed her eyes, enjoying the sensation. It wasn’t just the taste that she enjoyed about sucking cock, it was the way it seemed to fit perfectly inside her long, narrow, fox-like maw. It filled her mouth without being uncomfortable, reaching the 7 or 8 inches to the back of her mouth but not going further. If he were to cum inside her mouth the knot at the base of his tapered cock would swell, but if he didn’t cum it was a perfect fit. There was something satisfying in that for her.

But not as satisfying as some other things she had planned for this tryst at the end of time.

One of her hands was wrapped firmly around the base of El’s erection as she continued to pleasure him, but the other was busily unbuttoning her own jumpsuit. Just like with El’s suit she only made it a few buttons down before she pulled one of the edges and began ripping down the front seam. She felt El’s other hand grab hold of her head as she let go of his cock with her own, using both her hands to free herself from the jumpsuit as much as she could. Her head continued to bob up and down as she freed her breasts, one arm, them the other from the jumpsuit. It was a delicate and deft feat, but she managed to peel the jumpsuit down to her waist while sucking El, her entire upper body free and exposed.

She had done it so smoothly that El didn’t even know she was doing it. He was focused only on her maw, her face, her mouth – the universe outside this blowjob had ceased to exist for him for the moment. It was only when she slowly raised her head and his throbbing fox-cock left her mouth that he realized exactly what she had been doing with her hands while she worked so fastidiously with her tongue.

Asherah lifted herself to her feet, looking down at the genetically ideal, physically superb male Vulpine laying on his back on her bed, saliva-covered cock jutting proudly from his white-furred sheath. She thought about saying something, but there was no need for words, not now. Not anymore.

El was likewise speechless. The woman of his dreams had sucked his cock. She was standing over him, topless. Her breasts were everything he’s always imagined they’d be – large in size but almost gravity-defyingly perky, small nipples peaking through white fur. 

He watched dumbstruck as Asherah let her hands slip down her hips, grabbing the partially tattered material of her jumpsuit. Easily and fluidly she peeled it down, the orange fur of her legs contrasting with the blue latex. One leg, the other, and there she was – framed by the majesty of the cosmos in the plas-glass behind her, Asherah was standing totally nude in from of him, her beauty eclipsing the starfield. 

But Asherah didn’t give him time to savor it.

With a quick twirl she pivoted on her digitigrade footpaw and spun around. El’s jaw dropped slightly; the sexy, curvaceous butt he’d thought about almost every time he masturbated for his entire life was right here. It was almost close enough for him to reach out and touch it – which was exactly what Asherah had in mind.

She edged back, lifting one leg and then the other to plant her knees on the bed. She straddled El’s body, feeling El’s hands boldly grip her hips. She scooted her butt backwards past his cock, past his toned stomach and his chest. El needed no guidance or instruction as to what Asherah wanted. As she lowered her butt down onto his face she instantly felt his cold wet nose on her tailhole and his hot wet tongue entering her pussy.

Asherah exhaled heavily as El’s tongue start to twist and curl inside her. He may have spent years stranded at a research station in the Arctic, but he was clearly no amateur when it came to eating a woman out. Laying on top of him with his snout buried between her cheeks, El’s throbbing tapered cock was again right in front of her muzzle. She lowered her face and let it slide along the side of her cheek, lifting her left lip in a kind of lustful snarl that exposed her sharp Vulpine teeth. It left a streak of precum along the line where her orange and white fur met as it pressed her whiskers to her snout. Asherah lifted her head and opened her mouth, letting El’s erection slide in.

In this position, upside down in relation to her new lover, Asherah’s black fox-like nose pressed against El’s furry balls with every bob of her head. His entire cock was in her long mouth now, her flat tongue twisting around it as he continued to explore her feminine folds with his.

Her lips closed around the slight bulge at the base of El’s cock. It was barely perceptible now, but the instant he came it would swell to a knot the size of her fist. If it happened while it was inside her they would be locked together for the duration of El’s orgasm – up to thirty minutes. When that happened Asherah didn’t want it in her mouth – she wanted it somewhere else. Badly.

She continued sucking his cock, taking the entire member in her mouth, her black Vulpine lips pressed against the rim of his sheath and her nose bumping against his balls over and over again. But as she did she could feel the growing pressure inside her as El plunged his own tongue in and out of her, alternating that motion with lapping at her clitoris skillfully. She didn’t know where he learned to pleasure a woman so masterfully. She didn’t care. Subconsciously she was rolling her hips. El was rapidly bringing her to climax.

It came – she came – much quicker than she thought. El’s cock cleared her lips with an audible schlorp as she arched her back.

“Fffuuuuu...” she whimpered, her legs quivering as she pushed her ass harder against El’s face. Her pussy was already drenched with her own juices and El’s saliva – he barely noticed her orgasmic squirting as she sat on his face. 

In truth El was barely noticing anything at this point. Asherah’s ass was his whole world now, exploring its every detail his life’s purpose. His hands sank into the soft fur, feeling the warm skin and muscle underneath. His tongue tasted her most intimate part and his nostrils were filled with the scent of her heat. He wanted to feel everything. He wanted to know it.

His hands stayed on her hips as she slowly lifted her butt from his face. El opened his eyes. A scene that had occurred a thousand times in his most lurid dreams began to play out. He watched in a trance as Asherah edged forward. Her thick, soft tail brushed against the side of his face, curling slightly around the back of his neck. He felt her hand on his cock again, saw the silhouette of it in the dim light framed by the unreal scene of the cosmos outside. El saw Asherah bring the tapered pink tip up, aligning it between her legs, between the lips of her sex.

He felt the tight warmth enveloping his cock as she lowered herself onto it.

“God… Asherah...” El said almost in a whisper as, slowly, inch by inch, she let him fill her completely, right down to the slightly bulging but unswollen base of his cock.

She paused for just a moment, the entirety of El filling her. His ample erection had totally disappeared inside her, the short white fur at the hilt of his sheath pressed firmly against the similarly-hued fur of her pussy lips, obscuring the lengthy pink rod deep inside. Then, just as slowly as she’d lowered herself onto him, Asherah began lifting her hips.

When she lowered herself onto El again, letting him slide back into her, it was faster.

El had seen the most beautiful sight in his life moments ago: Asherah nude, framed against the starfield outside the plas-glass window. Now, with Asherah sitting on his lap beginning to roll her hips with a quickening pace, he was certain he was experiencing the most incredible moment. He’d dreamed of this for his entire life, knowing it would never happen. Yet here she was. Here they were.

He sunk his hands into the orange fur on Asherah’s hips again as she started bouncing on his cock faster and faster, harder and harder. It gave him some modicum of control, but they both knew she was in charge. This was Asherah’s bed on Asherah’s ship – the Vulpine home world they’d left behind had in many ways been Asherah’s world before The Cataclysm. He was Asherah’s man now, and if she wanted to ride him reverse-cowgirl until they both fell out of this universe and into the unknown, he would obey.

“Fuck...” was all he could mutter as he felt her rhythmically undulating her hips, his cock surrounded by her tight, warm folds. Her tail had lifted from off his shoulder high into the air, laying bare the entire spectacle for El’s rapacious eyes, the perfect parabola at the boundary where his flesh entered hers.

El let his hands drift inward across and through the fur of Asherah’s butt cheeks, past where the orange turned white. Her hips were so wide – child-bearing hips with dimensions just enough to be conspicuously wider than would be expected at first glance. But her ass was still firm, even muscular. With his thumbs he pulled Asherah’s round cheeks apart slightly as she continued to buck and gyrate, exposing the pink star of her tailhole sitting like an ornament above their union.

He was thrusting up into her now in time with her rolling bucks. He’d always had good control and excellent stamina, but he’d never fucked a woman like Asherah. There was no other woman like Asherah.

“Fuck… Asherah, I’m...” he managed to exhale as he felt the pressure of his impending orgasm coming on fast, unable to stop it. 

“It’s okay, El… you can… knot...”

But he didn’t hear her.

“Haahhh!!” El cried out as he pushed Asherah up off him, his cock sliding out of her and rebounding to his own belly with an audible slap. At the same time the first thick pulse of his cum shot out of the tapered tip, the stream coating his chest with a thick strand that reached nearly to his chin.

Asherah looked back over her shoulder, disappointed. She lowered herself back down onto El’s lap, feeling the pulsations of his shaft nestled flat against her slit. She watched for several seconds as he rode out his orgasm, waiting for his face to change – tongue lolling out of his mouth, eyes half closed, silly grin – from orgasm to afterglow.

“Boo, Elyon...” was all she said.

El’s eyes darted up from the glorious sight of his cock wedged between Asherah’s nether lips to her face, looking back over her shoulder at him.

“Boo? Did I… was it not…” he faltered, sensing that he had let Asherah down in some way.

“No, you were good – especially with your tongue. I was just hoping you’d… you know...”

She paused, studying El’s face. His pointed Vulpine ears were splayed, his nose twitched. It was clear he did not know.

“Cum inside me,” she finished.

Now she saw El’s eyes widen and jaw open slightly in surprise.

“Inside? But you might… I might get you...”

Asherah rolled her eyes as she lifted herself up off El’s lap, raising one leg and turning so that she was no longer facing away from him. Her tail brushed his face before she lowered her knee on the other side of his so that she was straddling his body, now facing towards him, then lowered her body so that she was sitting on his freshly-wet stomach. El was still cumming – he would continue to do so for a good half hour – and she could feel his occasional spurts as his cum squirted onto her butt.

“Pregnant?”

“Y-yeah...” El answered in a whisper as he looked up at the woman he’d been attracted to his entire life. She smiled down at him, shaking her head slightly.

“It doesn’t matter any more, El… we’re not going to be here long enough for it to matter...” she whispered back. “No future, no consequences. All that’s left is us. All we have is now. Live in the moment with me, El.” 

She waited a few seconds, trying to gauge El’s thoughts. She felt his hands return to her, first on her knees planted on the bed on either side of his torso. His fingers slid through her silky orange and white fur up her thick, muscular thighs. They roamed further before coming to rest on the sides of her matronly hips.

Asherah didn’t speak another word or break eye contact with El as she reached down between her legs. From where she was sitting his cock was just inches behind her, a thin jet of cum pulsing out every few seconds. She felt the spray of the hot liquid on her palm an instant before she wrapped her hand around the pink shaft criss-crossed with red veins. She slid her fingers down it, feeling the knot at the base swollen to the size of her fist now that he’d climaxed.

Another jet of El’s cum splashed directly between the lips of Asherah’s sex. She’d positioned it so that the tapered tip of his cock was aligned perfectly, just an inch away. She was just about to edge back into it…

El’s grip on her hips tightened. His gluteus muscled flexed, raising his hips slightly off the bed. She could feel his strong hands urging her body down onto his lap. Her hand, still wrapped around his cock, made sure he found the mark. El did the rest.

“Oh my god… El...” Asherah gasped, her eyes still locked with his. She could feel the heat from his cock deep inside her now; El had buried his shaft as deeply into her as he could, his cum acting as lubrication. She could feel his knot pressed against the white fur of her pussy lips, too large now to fit inside.

She could feel the steady throbbing twitches of his cock, too – and she knew what it meant. Each twitch meant he was pumping another pulse of cum into her, each twitch was all that was necessary to make her belly swell with El’s pups.

She’d never let any of her boyfriends cum inside her in her entire life. She wouldn’t have dreamed of it in the state she was in now, in heat and at the apex of her fertility. She’d always been afraid of a scandal, the most rich and powerful woman on the planet becoming a single mother. But none of that mattered now. Now, she reminded herself as she felt El’s hot, potent cum slowly filling her pussy – now is all there is any more.

Asherah leaned forward. El’s hands roamed through the thick orange fur of her back as their eyes closed and their lips met. Their tongues curled and their hips rolled, the frantic pounding of lustful fucking replaced with the smooth, sensual motions of love-making.

- - - - -

* * * Alarm. Alarm. Negative-value periapsis warning. T-minus 1 hour. * * *

They both pretended they didn’t hear the warning.

“You don’t think it’s weird though? I’m old enough to be your mother...”

“No you’re not...” El answered with the same placid grin that had been on his face for the 3 hours since Asherah pushed him onto the bed. They were now comfortably under the covers sharing the same pillow. They clung to each other like teenagers in love for the first time, their hands lazily exploring each others’ naked bodies under the sheets.

Their lips met. Their conversation had been punctuated with long, passionate kisses, minutes disappearing between sentences as their tongues danced.

“Mm-hmm, I am so,” the Vulpine goddess in his arms purred into his neck after breaking their kiss. “You’re 22, right? And I’m 37. So if my math’s right...”

“I mean… yeah. I guess technically you could, but… don’t make it weird, Asherah,” El said with a chuckle.

“Maybe you like it weird...” she teased, trailing her hand through the white fur on his chest and licking his black fox-like nose.

“Maybe you do,” he teased back, exaggerating his voice for comedic effect. “Asherah the brazen temptress, taking advantage of a young man… robbing the cradle...”

“Mmmm, you’re not complaining though,” she said, her hand moving from El’s chest down to his sheath. Their lips met again,   time escaping once more as they kissed.

“Who would complain about this?” she heard him answer when their lips finally parted, feeling him gripping her curvaceous butt. His hands seem to gravitate there, idly rubbing and groping her round posterior in the interludes between their rounds of love-making – of which they’d had 3 so far. Whether it was his age or something else, El’s stamina was well beyond anything she’d experienced with any other lover. She found the same thought returning to her: those geneticists who chose the ‘passengers’ for the Ark sure knew what they were doing.

“Clearly not you…” Asherah said with a grin, feeling the tip of El’s penis poking out of his sheath, ready for round 4. “But if you keep it up, forget about robbing the cradle… we’re going to need one after all you’ve put in me. Such a bad boy...”

She’d meant it as a joke since it didn’t matter any more, but in truth the geneticists truly had done an ever better job than she’d supposed of choosing passengers to maximize fertility in the event they had to repopulate the planet. With El’s potency and her in heat, it was almost impossible that she wouldn’t get pregnant if he came inside her. 

It didn’t even need the 2nd or 3rd time – the first time, when he came outside her and she guided him back in, had been enough. Just a few hours later she was already pregnant, whether she realized it or not. Her belly would swell and in 9 months she’d have his pups.

At least, she would if they weren’t going to die in an hour. But they were. It didn’t matter any more. There was no future any more, not for them. Only now.

“I think I can keep it up. I think I can do anything you want me to do, Asherah,” El whispered, his shaft rapidly emerging from his sheath into Asherah’s gently stroking hand.

He gripped her butt tightly again and started to lean into a kiss when she spoke.

“I want you to knot me this time...” she whispered back.

El froze. Asherah sensed the sudden change, the flinching tenseness in his body.

“What?” She asked, though she already knew the answer. She knew it the last three times they’d fucked when he pulled out just enough to let his knot swell outside her, preventing them from tying.

“I...”

“Tradition?”

El sighed, rolling gently from his side to on his back and letting go of Asherah.

“Yeah...” he answered in a muted, embarrassed way, averting his gaze away from Asherah and out to the starfield outside the plas-glass wall. “I’m sorry, it’s just… I don’t know. I grew up in a pretty conservative and traditional place. I know it’s dumb and outdated but it’s kind of… I don’t know. It’s like it’s hard-wired into my brain.”

He didn’t need to explain anything to Asherah. For Vulpines knotting was the final, almost spiritual expression of love between two individuals. It had been that way throughout the entire history of their civilization, across thousands of years and hundreds of cultures. And in every one, universally, the ultimate sexual taboo was knotting someone who wasn’t your soul mate, knotting with more than one mate, knotting someone who wasn’t your spouse.

The more progressive Vulpines eschewed the traditional customs and norms, but even they couldn’t deny the ancient symbolism and cultural importance of knotting. Even Asherah had to admit that, while she saw nothing wrong with it, she had never knotted with any of her boyfriends in the past.

Of course, she’d never let any of them cum inside her either, so it didn’t seem like such a big bridge to cross now.

“What part of it?” she asked, still gently stroking his cock. “Because… we will be spending the rest of our lives together, you know?”

El grimaced, just slightly. He had been trying not to think about what would happen to them in less than an hour, trying to live in the moment with Asherah while he could. So much for that. But she was right. Was this not the woman of his dreams? The one he’d obsessed over since he was a child? They’d be dead in an hour. What did it matter now?

“Yeah… I guess that’s true. That’s not it, though. It’s just… I don’t know what it is, Asherah. I’m sorry.”

“I know what it is,” Asherah said knowingly as her hand went to El’s shoulder. “We’re not married.”

El opened his mouth but no words came. She was right; the ancient taboo was too strong in his heart, he had always wanted to share the experience with his wife and his wife only. Doing it now, even though he didn’t have a wife, even though they were about to die – it just seemed wrong.

“What if we were?” she asked him.

El’s eyes went back to hers. Asherah could see the mix of confusion and interest she was hoping for.

“What… do you mean?” El asked in a whisper, as if he were inquiring about some grand secret only someone of Asherah’s importance and intellect would be privy to.

Asherah parted the sheets and leaned upwards, as if she were getting up and out of bed. El instinctively leaned up too, into a sitting position, and Asherah rolled so that she was seated in front of him, face to face. Then she was still, and El beheld her – her shadowy, naked form against the backdrop of the starfield was ethereal.

“What is a marriage? Two Vulpines agree to be with each other and with each other alone until their dying day. They speak it into existence. That’s all,” she said.

“But… we’d need a priest...” El protested weakly, his mind trying to fathom Asherah’s words.

“There are no priests, El. They’re all gone. Everyone is gone. We’re all that’s left. We’re the last, El, the last man and the last woman. If there are priests, they are us. Our word is the only law. Here, now – we make the rules. We make the rules in here. We speak it, and it is so.”

Asherah placed her hands on El’s, one palm down and one palm up. El did the same, instinctively, knowing the symbolism that Asherah was evoking, realizing the ritual she was beginning.

“I am that I am – Asherah, alone.”

The fur on El’s neck bristled, a shiver passed over him. Every Vulpine who he’d ever known knew those words by heart. The words were the first of the sacred Vulpine marriage vows, unchanged since time immemorial.

His mouth was dry. He knew the next line was his to speak; ‘the meeting and the offering’, this instigating portion of the vows were called – a remnant of the ancient days of nomadic, pre-agrarian Vulpine society, when sons and daughters would be married off between neighboring tribes. The words were that old.

“I am that I am – Elyon, alone,” he replied with a quiet, stilted voice, completing the meeting portion of the vows. He paused and swallowed before continuing.

“In you, Asherah, I have found my mate, if you will have me,” he offered, speaking slowly and deliberately.

“I will,” Asherah answered without a trace of nervousness or trepidation.

“In you, Elyon, I have found my mate, if you will have me.”

“I will,” Elyon whispered. 

“Then it is so.”

“Then it is so.”

The most perfect Vulpine who had ever lived, it seemed to El, was smiling at him, naked and unashamed in from of the sprawling starfield. The actual moment was better than any dream he’d ever had.

“Where there was separation,” El continued, his voice stronger as he continued with the sacred vows.

“There is unity,” Asherah responded.

“Where there were two,” El offered.

“There is one,” she answered.

In unison they started the next line, the only one meant for both of them to speak together.

“One body. One spirit. One soul. We are that we are, until the seas shall boil and the stars shall fall from the sky,” they spoke in one voice.

“So it is spoken.”

“So it is done.”

These were the final words of the sacred vows. They looked into each others’ eyes, seated on the bed in the Ark’s captain’s quarters as husband and wife. Their palms were still touching in the ritual above and below pose, the meaning and symbolism long lost to time.

Seconds of silence passed, neither feeling the need to speak. The experience had been more profound than either was expecting in a way that neither could articulate. In their eyes they could both sense what the other was thinking – a desire to freeze time on this moment, the one they were living together right now, this instant of connectivity to another soul beyond what either had ever experienced, the afterglow of the forging of an eternal bond.

But time would not wait for El and Asherah. Not in this universe.

* * * Alarm. Alarm. Negative-value periapsis warning. T-minus 30 minutes. * * *

They remained still for another moment after the alarm sounded, desperately wanting the feeling to linger. But it was fading – the reality of their situation had been briefly forgotten, but they couldn’t ignore it any longer.

Asherah sighed heavily. She lifted her hand to El’s chest.

“When the end comes,” Asherah said, her voice low and dire as she finally broke the silence, speaking to her husband for the first time, “when the darkness overtakes us… whatever happens, don’t let go. Hold onto me as long as you can, as tight as you can, and I’ll do the same. Whatever happens, whatever we face in there, once we cross over into it... we face it together.”

El nodded slowly, placing his hand over Asherah’s.

“I’m not afraid of dying. I’m not,” he said. “I’m afraid of being alone. Losing you.” 

His fingers interlocked with hers.

“I won’t let go, Asherah. I promise I won’t let go.”

For a few brief seconds their eyes remained locked, the stillness of the room absolute, before all at once their desire for each other overwhelmed them both. Before either of them realized it they were kissing again – not the lazy, sultry kisses from before, but the needy, lusty, carnivorous kind, flat tongue and sharp teeth and black Vulpine lips.

Asherah let herself tip and fall backwards towards the foot of the bed. Her hands were on El’s hip and stomach as he followed her down and on top of her, gently but with enough weight for her to know he was going to stay on top. She instinctively spread her legs to accept the sculpted body following her down onto the bed, a different kind of offer for her new husband.

She could feel his rippling ab muscles flexing under his creamy white fur as her head rested softly at the foot of the bed, cradled now by El’s strong hands as they kissed wildly, one rubbing her pointed Vulpine ear. Her own hand slid from El’s waist directly to his sheath. She curled her toes as she wrapped her fingers around his fully erect cock. Before she even stroked it El was gently thrusting into her hand.

El broke the kiss, feeling his wife spread her legs even further, bending her knees and lifting them up off the bed. He felt that she’d tightened her grip on his cock, just enough to let him know what she wanted. She tilted it downward and raised her hips slightly, guiding the tapered tip exactly where it needed to go to consummate their marriage.

“Fuck me... El...” she whispered up to him, their black Vulpine noses still inches apart. “Let me feel your knot... inside me...”

Her body heat radiated through her fur – El felt her warmth through the pads of his palms on the back of her head, through his chest pressed against her soft breasts, from her thick thighs straddling his hips. Those thighs squeezed, just barely, as he slowly edged his hips forward. El felt Asherah’s sublime warmth enfolding and engulfing his Vulpine cock as it sank into her.

“Oh my god… El...” he heard her sigh, feeling her legs wrapping around him. Their eyes remained locked, one to another, as El began rocking his hips, gently and smoothly.

Asherah could feel El’s hot breath on her lips as he exhaled. Her lips curled as she inhaled his masculine scent. Her hands slid up her husband’s body and around it, one sinking into the orange fur on his back and the other grabbing onto his muscular ass. She felt his bushy, furry tail brushing against her arm as it wagged back and forth.

El was taking it slowly, letting each plunge linger inside Asherah, letting his body lay on hers and follow her every contour. Something was different this time than the last three. They both felt it – the distinct and incommunicable unreality of knowing, absolutely knowing, that they were sharing the last conscious experience of the Vulpine race, here and now. Nothing could change that fate any more.

With a grunt El dove back into a kiss. Asherah’s hands trailed up his back against the grain of his fur, pulling him into her. With her legs she was doing the same, crossing and locking them behind El to keep him as close to her as possible. Mouth to mouth, chest to chest, stomach to stomach, loin to loin – the mutual desire to feel everything the other had to offer overriding all else.

El was speeding up now. Slowly but surely, with each push and pull of his hips Asherah could feel he was building up. His thrusts into her weren’t only faster, they were deeper, harder. Their bodies yearned not just for closeness but for unity, El to fill Asherah and Asherah to be filled.

Asherah squeezed her legs and thighs even tighter around the small of El’s back, her Vulpine foot paws crossing and locking just above the base of his tail. His humping was getting more and more intense – before she realized it her thick hips were being lifted slightly off the bed each time the slightly bulged base of her husband’s cock slid out of her pussy, then pushed down into the mattress as he drove it back into her.

With a whimper and a trail of saliva she broke their kiss once more. The opened their eyes simultaneously.

“Fuck… yes… just like that...” she breathed up to El. Each thrust was lifting her lower body up off the bed more and more, their sensual love-making rapidly turning into heated, feral fucking.

One of El’s arms dashed from behind Asherah’s head to her upper back, wriggling between her and the bed so that he could better control her body. At the same time Asherah clung tighter to El with her own arms wrapped tightly around his back.

“Fuck me harder… harder…” she said with a broken, almost begging voice.

El didn’t answer with words, only snorting like a wild animal. His upper lips pulled back in a snarl and his muzzle lowered. Almost instinctively she tilted her head upwards to expose the soft white fur of her neck to him.

With another grunt El latched onto her neck, nipping her softly. It was more of a kiss than a bite, only his black lips applying any pressure with his teeth only softly grazing her fur, but the gesture was steeped in meaning in their collective psyches as Vulpines, deep in the more primal, primitive recesses of their animal brains – the male claiming his mate, the female submitting that most sensitive part of her body to him in total trust.

Juices were absolutely gushing from Asherah’s slick pussy now, churned by El’s throbbing shaft plunging in and out. Her entire lower body was being totally lifted off the bed now each time El lifted his hips, the unswollen base of his cock clearing the drenched lips of her slit. There was an audible slap every time he rammed it back in, hilted to his furry sheath as his balls smacked against her butt, driving her down into the bed.

“Nnhh! Hnnhh! Hahhh!!” Asherah moaned. She was past the point of words, clasped tightly onto her husband as his jaws were clenched firmly but carefully around her neck. Her head, tilted back, was off the edge of the bed, her vision filled with the boundless view of the starfield and nebulae outside.

“Ahhhhnn!! Ahhhhh!!” she cried in pleasure, over and over again as her husband ravaged her body. He lifted and slammed her down again into the bed at a frantic pace. Asherah had lost all track of time by now but he must have slammed her like that for minutes on end; El’s stamina was incredible.

“Fuu-Ahhhhhnn!!” Asherah screamed, her orgasm overtaking her like a flood. Usually her climaxes were slow-building, but this one had happened all at once, triggered by the roughest, most raw sex she’d ever had.

El could perceive that Asherah’s legs has started loosening from around his body, then trembling, seconds before she reached her crashing orgasm. At the instant he heard her scream he slammed her down forcefully a final time, pinning her body to the bed with his cock buried as deep inside her as was possible. He bit down on her neck just a little harder – not hard enough to cause any pain, but just hard enough for her to feel his teeth on her soft, vulnerable skin.

“Hnnhh!! God, fuck!! Haanhhh!!”

El held her tightly as she rode out her crashing orgasm. Connected so closely at nearly every point on their bodies he could almost feel the waves of pleasure rolling through her, from her shaky legs to her undulating hips to her arms wrapped around his back, holding onto him as though her life depended on it.

And then the moment passed, as El knew it would. He could feel her body now as if it were his own. At the instant El felt his wife’s body relax, the crest of her orgasm passed and the heady afterglow setting in, he let go of her neck. 

Asherah panted breathlessly, tilting her head upwards once more, away from the sprawling view of the starfield out the plas-glass wall. The sight that greeted her, she thought in that moment, was even more mesmering, beguiling and wondrous. El was smiling down at her peacefully, serenely. There was no mistaking the look in his eyes, the look a man only gives his wife. The look of love.

They kissed without either needing to initiate – it was the flow of their bodies and souls taking control. No words needed to be spoken as El began gently rocking his hips once more, slowly and intimately and fluidly like at the beginning of their love-making.

Asherah panted, breathing heavily still through their kiss. Despite his exertion she could tell El was not fatigued in the slightest, breathing normally while she panted. He inhaled her warm breath as he quickened the pace of his smooth, gliding thrusts, and Asherah tightened her legs and arms around her lover once more.

For minutes more they remained locked in the passionate and sensual embrace, holding tightly onto one another as El smoothly worked his cock in and out of Asherah, fluid and steady, like the ebbing and waning of the tide. Asherah felt as if he was conveying his emotions through his hips and into her directly – lust and love, want and need, caring and concern, passion and promise. 

Without his hips missing a beat El broke their kiss. Asherah opened her eyes. They met El’s instantly.

He didn’t need to tell her he was close. She didn’t need to tell him to finish inside her, to let his knot swell inside her, locking them together. They both knew. Their bodies said everything.

El’s hips rolled forward a final time. Asherah heard a pleasured, muted gasp – the first noise from El’s mouth since his promise not to let her go. She felt his body weight shifting from his knees to his hips, from his hips to hers, pinning her down to the bed.

“Unnnhh! Asherah!!”

Their eyes remained locked, inches apart, as the first jet of El’s seed surged from the tapered tip of his Vulpine cock deep into Asherah. They didn’t dare to look away from each other as the bulbous base of his cock swelled inside her, connecting and uniting their bodies as the knot grew beyond the point where it could be removed, sealing the life-creating liquid inside Asherah’s already-pregnant womb.

“Asherah… Asherah...” El whispered. She could feel him riding out his orgasm, grinding his hips in time with the pulses of hot cum he was pouring into her. The physical sensation of the knotting was indescribable – a deep, almost fundamental sense of unparalleled fulfillment for Asherah as El’s warmth grew and spread inside her; an amorous, impassioned release for El shared for the first time with the woman he’d admired and been infatuated with since he was a child.

But the physical experience was eclipsed by something far more powerful. Just as their loins were locked together, so too were  their eyes. Neither of them looked away, gazing deeply into each other, Asherah losing herself in El’s deep sapphire pools while he was transfixed by her vibrant, almost glowing emerald-hued eyes. They could both feel it; this wasn’t just a physical connection. They were united now in body, mind and soul, and would be forever.

“Asherah… Asherah… I love you…”

Love. Asherah had only known Elyon a few hours – there was a part of her that acknowledged that. But this connection couldn’t be denied. The marriage ritual had been real. It was binding, final and forever. Elyon was her husband.

Asherah knew that Elyon was also the last living Vulpine aside from herself. Love… there was no one else to love. Loving El was tantamount to loving the Vulpine race. If she couldn’t open her heart for him, if she couldn’t love El, she could never love anyone – love would no longer exist. So she would choose to love.

But even if all that were not true, Asherah knew she would feel the same way about him. She was meant to be with Elyon and he was meant to be with her. Had The Cataclysm never occurred, had life continued as normal they would have met, somehow, and fallen in love. They would have married and he would have fathered her children. She couldn’t explain it but she knew it to be true. It was their fate, their destiny. She’d known him for only hours, but she’d never been more sure of anything. 

“And I love you…” she breathed in response, still feeling his warmth spreading inside her as his knot pulsed, “I loved you before I met you, El. I’ll love you after the seas boil and the stars fall from the sky.”

* * * Alarm. Alarm. Negative-value periapsis warning. T-minus one minute. * * *

The last two Vulpines who would ever live kissed. Their tongues curled around each other. El pushed his hips forward again, feeling Asherah’s arms and legs wrapped around his back as she felt his knot deep inside her.

Asherah and El would not spend their last moments alive panicking. The last minutes of the Vulpine species would not end with crying or screaming, they would not be spent praying to their old gods or begging for mercy. The Vulpine race would not face extinction in alone in fear. It would meet its demise in these two, Asherah and El, with love.

* * * Alarm. Alarm. Negative-value periapsis warning. T-minus ten seconds. Nine. Eight. * * *

Their eyes opened as they broke their kiss. El could see the reflection of the light from starfield outside the plas-glass wall begin to flicker and dance in Asherah’s viridian eyes.

 * * * Seven. Six. Five. * * *

Asherah saw the same flicker of light reflecting in El’s eyes. They both raised their gaze to look at the plas-glass wall.

* * * Four. Three. * * *

The static nebulae began to drift lazily like clouds in the sky. The pinpoints of light started moving, slowly at first and then faster, thousands of stars no longer fixed in place but floating and wandering like fireflies. 

* * * Two. * * *

The nebulae began moving faster and faster, no longer resembling drifting clouds but more like a churning, turbulent, billowing river. The stars’s motion quickened, the slow dance of fireflies turning to frenzied chaos, fireworks bursting against a background of swirling color. The motionless, eternal stillness of the starfield had become an ever-accelerating cosmic orrery.

The Ark was traveling just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction below than the speed of light, a second away from crossing the event horizon. Time dilation – the same effect that their mission sought to take advantage of to ride out the pandemic and repopulate their planet – was now running haywire on an exponential curve to infinity. Hundreds of thousands of years had passed in the universe outside the plas-glass wall in only seconds from Asherah and El’s perspective.

* * * One. * * *

Both Asherah and El’s eyes widened. The stars zipped in incomprehensible chaos, a swarm of hornets. The nebulae formed swirling disks and burst into new points of light, and then the nebulae were no more. Millions of years were passing outside the plas-glass wall. Faster and faster and faster, the points of light were no longer distinguishable, just a blur of glowing energized foam. Billions – billions of years were passing outside. The future of their universe was unfolding in front of them, they couldn’t look away. The foam shifted from blue, to white, then orange, red, a deep crimson…

At once there was a terrific flash of light. Photons that found themselves trapped in orbit at the perfect equilibrium of the event horizon, where escape velocity and the speed of light were the same, accumulated over the billions of years between when Asherah and El kissed and the death of the last star. The photons flooded into their retinas, burning out their eyes the instant they crossed the event horizon.

“My eyes! My eyes!” El screamed in pain.

“Hold on! Don’t let go!” Asherah yelled in reply, her own eyes seared and useless.

The superstructure of the Ark began to creak and groan under the stress of the gravitational tidal force, gravity becoming a gradient across the vessel as they fell towards the singularity. There was a loud bang that reverberated throughout the ship, and at the same moment the Ark’s artificial gravity system failed. The springs on Asherah’s bed rebounded and the two naked Vulpines found themselves floating weightless in zero-G, husband and wife clinging tightly.

“I’m blind! It burns! It burns!” El cried.

“Focus on me! Don’t let go!” Asherah screamed, trying not to fixate on her own pain. She squeezed El as hard as she could with her arms and her legs. She focused on the feeling of his knot still deep inside her, the heat from his tapered, pulsing cock as he continued to ejaculate, the warmth of his cum that filled her womb. She focused on love and blocked out the pain.

The groaning of the ship’s hull grew louder and the pitch higher, the shrieking sound of twisting, spalling titanium. There were several more loud bangs as bulkheads collapsed throughout the vessel. The cryo-bay burst open, spilling the bones and dust of a thousand centuries-dead Vulpines into the void. Entire sections of the Ark sheared off, each one sending tremors through what remained of the hull. The air in the hall outside the room was howling as it vented into the vacuum.

“The Ark! It’s breaking apart!” El shouted over the cacophony of the disintegrating ship.

“Just hold on, El! Hold –”

The plas-glass wall shattered in a deafening detonation. The air in the room was sucked out into the void along with Asherah and El. The air in Asherah’s lungs was purged before she finished her thought. El tried to scream, his breath racing from his lungs never to return.

Still they clung to each other. Asherah felt El’s powerful arms clutching her tighter than she’d ever been held. El felt Asherah’s body wrapped around his, ankles and wrists locked, fur on fur of chests and stomachs pressed together. And they were still knotted, their bodies still connected in the most intimate and eternal expression of Vulpine love.

Asherah felt the vibrations of El’s neck against hers as he screamed silently without breath, three syllables repeated again and again. There was a sensation like sand being blasted on her fur, then fiery hot ball-bearings pelting her. Then there was another force, like something was pulling her paws and her head at the same time. It was subtle, overshadowed by the heat and burning pain on every inch of her body, but soon it became overwhelming.

El felt it too, through the blistering pain. He clinched his claws, digging into the burned, charred fur on Asherah’s back as the tidal force of gravitation tried to pull them apart, the same force that ripped the Ark to ribbons now acting on their own bodies.

Now the burning was overshadowed as both Asherah and El started to feel their bodies being torn apart, pain beyond either had experienced as their joints dislocated, their bones snapped, their flesh ripped. El tried to scream again, but the tidal force was so acute now that the difference in gravitation between his upper and lower jaw prevented him from closing his mouth and, then, ripped his lower jaw from his face.

Still they clung to each other. As their bodies were shredded they held on. The tidal force of the singularity split their flesh into cells, split their cells into molecules, molecules to atoms, atoms to quarks, leptons and bosons, a stream of elementary particles that had been Asherah and El spiraling towards the singularity. And in and among these material particles was another type of elementary particle that could not be further split or divided – the indestructible kernel of sentient consciousness they both possessed.

The pain stopped. The chaos quit. Asherah didn’t just feel El’s arms around her and his knot inside her – she felt the warmth of El’s love surrounding her, washing over her and flowing through her body.

Asherah opened eyes she no longer had. She saw El’s face looking back at her again, smiling warmly. It was wreathed in colors she had never seen before, colors beyond the spectrum without names. They were arranged in impossible, logic-defying shapes that seemed to be expanding endlessly, a kaleidoscope of infinitely blooming Mandelbrot fractals.

‘I Love You, El.’

Asherah voiced silently to El. He heard her without ears.

‘And I Love You, My Wife. My Asherah.’

They leaned in and kissed once more, their fractal bodies dissolving and accreting around the point where their lips met. Like the two spiral galaxies that collided and merged to form the elliptical galaxy they once called home, the fractal pieces of El and Asherah swirled and whirlpooled around their kiss until, at long last, the two kernals of sentient consciousness coalesced into a singularity.

All was quiet and still. El and Asherah could feel each other and nothing else. They felt as if they were floating in an infinite ocean of warmth and love, knotted, tied one to another in eternal coitus. Floating here together was comfortable, tranquil. It would be easy to stay still and enjoy it together forever.

But that wasn’t in their nature. El needed to know. Asherah needed control.

‘What Has Happened To Us?’  They asked to themselves in unison.

A torrent of information opened in their mind’s eye, reliving the experience of what happened to them in the hours before they disappeared into the black hole. The question wasn’t sufficiently addressed, and they found themselves reliving the events of their lives further and further back. Asherah became aware that she wasn’t just reliving her own life – she was reliving El’s. She saw his entire life through his eyes, from the moment he was born to the instant they disappeared. His childhood, his adolescence idolizing her, his long years in the Arctic… she didn’t just see it, she experienced it, feeling everything he had felt at every moment.

So too was El experiencing Asherah’s life. A child prodigy, the invention of the vacuum flux energy drive, world fame, endless wealth – lifelong loneliness – he lived the entire 37 years of her life in a timeless instant.

But now, though they knew everything knowable about each other, the underlying question was still unanswered.

‘What Has Happened...’  They asked to themselves, a far more expansive question than they even realized.

Every piece of information that had ever crossed the event horizon of the black hole was condensed into the singularity and available to them. Not just light – not just electromagnetic waves, infrared and radio and gamma and x-rays – but also gravitational waves. Every movement of every particle in their old universe, no matter how slight, created ripples in spacetime that crossed the event horizon and fell into the singularity.

Asherah and El relived their own lives again, then each others, before broadening their scope. In first-person and in real time they experienced the lives of all their family, friends, and then everyone they had ever known.

They realized that here in the singularity there was no linear progression of time, and all information was preserved forever; they were not limited to reliving the lives of the Vulpines they knew or who were alive when they were. They lived the lives of  famous heroes and villains, statesmen and scoundrels throughout the entire history of the Vulpine civilization. Their curiosities led them to other lives along the way, and they experienced a branching network of interconnected lives all experienced in exactly the same way as the individuals themselves, every sight and sound, every thought and emotion. The branches continued to expand, and Asherah and El lived more and more lives.

And so it was that Asherah and El lived in experiential fullness the life of every Vulpine who had ever existed in their old universe beyond the event horizon, billions of lives and trillions of years.

And the experiences that had been ‘Asherah’ and ‘El’ blended into the manifold billions of lives such that they seemed to hold no special weight or meaning for the Being that had once known itself by those names, but still the question was not answered.

The Being branched further like lightning snaking its was across the sky, living the life of every creature on its old planet in its old universe, every fish that swam and bird that flew and predator that stalked and prey that fled. But the question was not answered.

The Being saw that the Vulpine race was only one of countless billions of sentient species that had lived in the duration of the old universe, and Its experience branched further. Now It lived the life of each individual among them, visiting world after world and spending trillions of years on each one to experience in fullness the totality of the life of each sentient being that had ever lived. Once finished It revisited each planet to live as every non-sentient creature, then as every non-sentient creature on every planet across the old universe across its trillion year history.

But still the question was not answered.

The Being followed the lines of life back to emergence. It followed the particles that created that life back to their own creation, each formed in a singular instant at the beginning of their old universe. The Being picked one particle, following it in real time from that emergence through its trillion year history to the time when only black holes and entropy remained. Once completed, the Being went back to the beginning of time and chose another particle to follow through eternity. It chose another, and another, and another…

And so it was that the Being came to know the journey and history of every particle that had existed in its old universe. The question, ‘what has happened,’ had finally been answered.

But the Being did not rejoice. It understood that It had reached the end of knowledge, that all that was knowable was now known. And It became forlorn and was filled with loneliness, for It knew that the knowledge was static and unchangeable. ‘What has happened’ was a record of events that occurred in a universe beyond the Being’s grasp now. Knowledge was a window It could look through onto a universe it would never again be able to be part of. It could play the recording forward, backwards, view it from every perspective, but the recording would never change. The Being was sequestered outside that realm, beyond the event horizon in Its own pocket universe. The Being was imprisoned and alone.

In desperation and anguish the Being played through the recording of the old universe again, searching for new perspectives to view it from, but the perspectives were exhausted. In despair It played through every particle again, start to finish, looking for an answer. It relived the life of every creature across the entire span of space and time searching for something, anything, to offer hope for Itself to not be trapped and alone, knowing everything but feeling nothing, unable to live in the old universe but also unable to die.

The Being came to a fox-like race of sentient life, so similar to millions of others, that lived on an unremarkable planet orbiting a common type of star deep inside an elliptical galaxy that looked identical to billions of others throughout that old universe. They called themselves ‘Vulpines,’ and the Being once again lived through the lives of each one from the beginning of their species to the end.

Now the Being came to the lives of the last two Vulpines who had lived. They’d been on a mission to save their species from extinction, but they had failed. The Being relived their lives up to the moment they were sitting on the captain’s bed, the marriage ritual, the protestations of the male, the words of the female...

‘Asherah’s Words...’  The Being voiced silently to Itself from inside Itself.

‘We Make The Rules In Here...’

‘Our Word Is The Only Law...’

‘We Make The Rules In Here...’

‘We Speak It, And It Is So...’

And the Being remembered who It had been, and It knew what It must do to sever Itself from the old, dead, static universe – to start anew.

And It willed Itself into a form once familiar to Itself: two Vulpines locked together in eternal coitus, a singular Spirit created from the love between two souls.

And It opened its mouth to speak, the distance between its jaws creating and defining space, the new reality of a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ that action setting time in motion.

And It spoke for the first time into the darkness of the void.

And Asherah-El said, “Let There Be Light.”

And there was light –