Your Husband Chases You Through The Woods In A Primal Roleplay

Transcript

In Dilarun, there is a ritual, was a ritual. After the harvest season, between the last breath of spring and the first gasp of autumn, the valley was host to an ancient fertility rite. In later centuries, the rite was replaced by animal sacrifices and a procession of virgins, a parade of masked young men, for the people of Dilarun had become civilized.

But scraps of papyri from this era claim some still practiced the old way, the uncivilized way, the chase. The wind catches your hair as you stand up from the dig site, your thighs release the tension of kneeling for so long in the dirt, and your knees pop, you let the wind carry your sigh into the forested hills and smile into the fragrant aroma of pine and oleander. It feels good to stand.

Soil cakes your palms and fingers and you wipe them on your stained khaki shorts. You gaze down at the neon ropes separating the various phases of the excavation, the thrum-like guitar strings plucked by the wind. The sky is a bloody festival of cirrus clouds and early stars.

Dusk arrives quickly in this hidden valley. The sun will soon disappear over the western hills. Don't stay out after dark, the locals told you.

They don't know how strong you are. You are young, but you have been working at this for a long time. It took years of dedication, hours upon hours of study and not a little physical fitness to earn your place on this archaeological expedition.

It's been your life's dream. Since you were a girl, Delarune has called to you, excited you. The sound of my brush sifts through the whisper of pine needles and the singing crickets.

You watch the muscles in my forearms twist and tighten as I uncover shards of pottery and calcified wood. I am crouched on the ground, my thick back bunched and straining against my dusty t-shirt. You can't help it, you imagined me 3,000 years ago, no t-shirt, no tattoos, or perhaps some kind of tattoos, a concoction of breast milk and soot staining my sun-darkened skin.

In Delarune, there is a ritual. After the last grain is taken in and the earth turns its face to the golden lance of autumn, the young women of the valley stand amongst the broken sheaves, bodies towards the setting sun, fertile women, women as tall and strong as this region ever produced. You know that from the skeletons they left behind, but when they lived, when the blood pumped through their vigorous hearts, they looked to the bloody sky and waited for the sun to fall behind the western hills.

How many nights have you lain awake imagining yourself in their place? Papyri and paintings tell you, and you know in your bones, that the women were youthful, fertile, full of life. Untouched, up for debate, it was only later that they became virgins when they no longer participated in the chase.

And the men that chased them, these you know even less well. The men wore masks, black masks carved from the pines depicting elk and bear and serpent, limbs and torsos painted in forest green to hide their powerful bodies in the encroaching dark. Were they young men? Warriors? Were they older men, proven seed-bearers of strong children? At some unknown signal the women would run into the forest.

Beneath winking stars and a harvest moon, your eyes follow the thrumming lines of the excavation through the valley and the rural town beyond, up into the black hills. This was no game. Before the colonizing of these people, before the town took shape, the chase was sacred.

Women that could not run, did not run. They were chosen for their strength, their fleetness. They were told never to let the men win.

Some boundary in the forest marked the point of no return, where the men failed and were no longer welcome in the valley. For men, to catch their prey was not enough. They needed to dominate their women, and their women did not submit without a struggle.

Women would bite. Women would fight. Women would claw and tear and gouge if necessary, for that is the way of the earth.

To subdue it, human hands must force it open and seed its womb. And even then, winter might come early. The bear or serpent or even elk might strike us down.

And so the men of Dilarun chased their fertile women, hearts pumping, muscles firing, desperate to outrun the dark fate of all living things. To take what they desired with their own hands and wrestle it to submission. Force their seed into their mates.

Force destiny to capitulate to one more generation of survivors. Was it barbaric? Yes.

Yes. It makes you wet. The locals say the valley remembers.

Remembers the chase. Remembers Thu and Sinyu, beating hearts, breathless lungs, the grunts of men on the hunt and the squeals of women caught, captured, claimed. The hill of conception.

That is the name of the highest peak in the west, where a people were made. The locals say the men of this valley fall to barbarism around the harvest moon. That any woman, out after dark, must be prepared to run.

You're not on birth control. You stopped taking your pill the moment you got this assignment. It has been five weeks, here in the valley of your dreams.

The moon is high, full, and with its waxing, you have felt it call to you. You are ovulating. Your breasts are tender, nipples sore.

You are warm. Despite the cool evening breeze, you are burning. You can smell everything.

You can smell me, working in the dirt, the sweat between my shoulder blades, the sandalwood soap on my skin. And as the sun dips over the broken horizon, a shadow looms over the dig site. You no longer hear the sound of bristles on potsherds.

You turn to see me crouched, not fifteen yards away, and the glint of moon in my eye. There is a ritual in Dalarun, and the valley remembers. The locals told you, don't stay out after dark.

You are strong, but your every limb is trembling. My eyes are shining with the same blood-orange glow of the swollen moon above. Your heart is louder than the crickets, louder than the crack of old and towering trees.

You call my name. You know me, but you don't know that look. The valley remembers.

Remembers hard winters and bountiful springs, blood and seed, earth and air, and fire, fire in the veins, fire in the lungs, a compulsion that comes over men, an atavistic instinct to breed, to claim their mate by force if necessary, as the storm claims the sky, as the root claims the earth. I make a sound deep in my throat, and lunge. You run.

Your powerful legs propel you past the fluttering lines of the site, beyond the dirt and into the grass. You know how to move, how to pump your arms and angle your body, but most of your running back home is on blacktops and sidewalks. The ground is uneven and the light is fading fast.

You turn back once and see me coming. You call my name again. Is this a game, a practical joke? There is no reply but my quickened pace, and yes, you see it now.

My blood is pumping, everywhere. It cannot be easy to run with half an erection, but if you stay, no doubt, you will be beneath me when my hot blood fills it to its summit. So you make no more effort to reason with me.

You felt safe enough out here with me. Your professor and the rest of the crew retired to the town an hour ago. No use digging after dark, she said.

She lets you stay because she knows she cannot tear you away from all this, that you would be perfectly content to while away the small hours with a toothpick and a flashlight. So deeply do you love this work, so enamored of Delarune. And as the night approached, you knew, at least, that I would not abandon you.

The ground flies under your feet and the hills reel overhead. You saw it in my eyes, the utterly animal intent, and so you run. The tree line is one hundred feet away, the outskirts of the town five hundred.

You were faster than me at a sprint, but both destinations are uphill, and I am not falling behind. If anything, I am gaining. You don't know what's happening, why it's happened, but if this is not me, if something otherworldly has indeed come over me, will it relent at the point of no return?

Will this mad spirit leave my twenty-first century body if you can just reach the peak of Conception Hill? As you peel off of the tree line, you tell yourself a twenty-first century man needs no supernatural excuse to rape his colleague. Most assaults are committed by men the victim knows, and yet you've seen no hint held, no nagging reservations about being alone with me.

I am the strong, silent type, and for so long it has been nice to simply sift and dig together. You reach the first tree and turn back. I've taken off my shirt.

You freeze. You scold yourself internally. You cannot pause, you cannot let the fear in, but now you see it, finally, see it.

A man, big and hungry, tearing across the open field, muscles rippling beneath the tattooed skin, practically loping on all four limbs, coming at you as fiercely as a wolf. He wants you. I want you.

Your heart is hammering in your chest, and yet your legs still refuse to push you onward. You've never seen a man coming at you like this, like a beast, like a monster. Nothing else matters now.

Not my reputation, not my career, not even my well-being. A man runs differently when he gives no thought to his terrain. I am not careful.

I am not picking my way over the uneven ground. I am coming for you. I am lost personified, and my legs are pumping me closer to you with every breath.

I am going to catch you. I am going to tackle you to the ground and force myself inside you. I am going to fuck you into the dirt.

You are still standing at the treeline, leaning against the first tree, your mouth open and the saliva all but pouring out. Your sex is hot, your nipples screaming as they chafe against your bra. You're not on birth control, and I am going to fuck you hard, raw, and relentlessly.

I won't pull out. You will kick and claw and fight it, but I will pump my seed deep into your fertile womb. There is a ritual.

You push off from the earth, your boots offering less play for your ankles than the tennis shoes now sitting under your bed in town. But they do protect you from the stones and detritus that litters the ground around you. And you can move.

Your legs are sturdy. Your heart won't give out. Your upper body is dwarfed by mine, but from the hips down you know you are superior.

That is the way of women, you think, using branches and tree trunks to pull yourself up and up and up the hill. The way of women dating back to the golden age of Delarune, when women, maybe even naked, rushed up this hill on brawny thighs and thick buttocks. Women built to run, from a people escaping a millennia of darkness and deprivation.

The chase was a primeval tradition, older than the oldest practices of early humans. We were chased by behemoths, chased by Neanderthals, chased by other tribes of our own species, chased by famine and plague and disaster, ice and floods and death itself. And women were the answer.

Women bore the promise of survival. Women raised the men and women who would take up the baton when the last generation tired and fell back. The women of Delarune were themselves warriors.

They could not be tamed, only taken. You stumble, catching yourself on your hands. With a wild cry, you grip a stone and bring it back my way.

I dart behind a tree, you right yourself, and run. As the sun dies and the heat of your body steams against the frosty night, you run. Amongst the shades of darting women leaping in your mind's eye from leaning tree to leaning tree to a point unknown but promised at the peak, you run, harder than you ever have, knowing I am right behind you.

You can hear me. Even over the thunder of your own heart and the rustle of forest creatures, I am there, ready to pounce, snorting and panting like a bear in heat, a wolf nipping at your heels. You know of no gods of Delarune.

The valley's people seem to believe only in the elements and the strength of their own will, so you push yourself harder. Tears squeeze from your eyes as you push yourself beyond your limits, up, up the impossible slope, outpacing the man at your back. You think that until you feel the swipe of my nails at your back.

With a wail, you throw yourself to the ground. You scrabble in the brown pine needle, seeing me whip past and double back. I let out a howl and collide with another tree, and you shoot off behind me, throwing yourself upright.

It was close. In your ears, your blood plays tricks. You hear a drum, drums hard as your heart, steady as your sawing thighs, a tribal drum to score the eternal hunt, predator after prey.

We live in a modern world where I might have approached you any number of ways, with a line, with a drink, with a text, with a message on an app carried by a signal from high above the planet, but all of that is for civilized peoples, the descendants of Delarune that transmuted the chase into a silly parade, a symbol of what is true. This lust is true. As the grade steepens and your legs turn to stone, you hear me just behind you.

There is nothing truer than my pursuit. I am not going to ask for your hand, your time, your smile. I am going to take you.

Take you because I want you. Take you because the sight of you inflames what I am. I am going to take you because I can.

Is that fair? Is it fair when the doe is taken by the wolf, the tree split by lightning? Nature knows nothing of fair.

And is there not a part of you, as primal as the beast at your heels, that respects this cruel chain of power? No self-respecting woman would claim a man deserves to run you down and rut with you merely because he can. But if, once the race is run, I am the victor, would you expect this beast to forgo his spoils? The collar of your shirt shreds between my fingers.

Would you spin out? No, you think, as the breath is blasted from your body and you sprawl amongst the pine needles. There is no man now, only beast, and he cannot be reasoned with.

The only thing he wants is what's between your legs. His prize. Your prize.

But it can only be taken, never given. You feel more than see me descend on you, and you kick with all your might. You look up, up to the darkening peak of Conception Hill, and see the furtive shadows of naked women, your kin's women, leaping and rushing away.

They look back at you, not with pity, but with fire. Now you fight, with tooth and nail, as your ancestors have done for untold millennia, for you are strong. So I must be stronger, if I am to have my way.