(2016 Update: Friends, another story from the archives! This one was supposed to become a novel, however, after having it rejected once, I began to re-write it... and never quite finished.

So here's version 1.0! It's a fun little Romeo-and-Juliet story, furrified. No yiff, no extreme content, just good fiction. Read and review!)

Cold.

That word needed no qualifications to describe her reaction to her location, because the only thing she perceived, just then, was how cold it was.  It was cold: so cold that the air’s biting fingers clawed through her jacket and her fur alike to caress the heat her body gave off naturally, just for a moment, before brutally wrenching it away.  It was so cold that though her hair was so thick and strong that it required virtually no care from her, it felt brittle and frail even as the wind stroked it, gently, as a sadistic torturer might to his next victim—right before applying a thumbscrew.

Of course, she knew that torturers didn’t use thumbscrews.  Not anymore, anyway.  Her father had written the book that dictated the way interrogators, as they were now politely called, wrestled information from even the most determined and loyal of humans, and she knew that the way to torture was not to cut or burn or beat.  The real way to torture, he had told her, was to use psychological techniques.

In the past, torturers were forced to use physical techniques to create environments that replicated what just a few well thought out psychological maneuvers could do now.  In the past, torturers had to cut and cut and cut and cut and burn and burn and burn and burn and beat and beat and beat and beat and then they had to coddle and cajole their victims, for a time, anyway, before threatening to torture again.

Sometimes, that forced weak-minded humans to say what they knew.  Sometimes.

But thanks to the research her father had done, desired results could be achieved with much greater frequency with a much higher guarantee of precision.

Of course, he didn’t tell her exactly what they did.  Firstly, such information was shrouded by military secrecy, and secondly, she was only fifteen years old.  Her whole career lay before her, and although she had expressed the conscious desire to be an active participant in the war from the time the humans had killed her mother, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to be an interrogator.  Sometimes, when she watched the instructional videos that were accessible to any tiger with an internet connection, she simply… couldn’t stand the way their faces twisted, or the words they shouted over and over again: “Mom, Mom, Mom!” or “Dad, Dad, Dad!”

Maybe should would fly a helicopter.  Or a plane.  Or maybe she would command a warship, or maybe she would be a boots-on-the-ground soldier with a rifle in her hand and grenades on her belt, and why not?  She was a good shot and she was strong and she was fast.  Maybe she would even make it into the elite special operations unit that her uncle led—although even the name of that group was a military secret, everyone knew that they were the ones who went behind human lines to assassinate or sabotage or reconnoiter or to simply run through neighborhoods to raise as much Hell as possible.

 Her mind was wandering, and, after a moment of thought, she let it.  One of the first thing kittens were taught in school was that focus was a prerequisite for combat aptitude, but she wasn’t in combat.  She wasn’t fighting and she wasn’t going to fight, and she only had an M4 carbine on her back because that was what the law dictated: that every tiger physically capable of bearing arms do so at all practical times.

Then again, she had to wonder if the well-meaning law had a point in all cases.  Certainly, she wasn’t likely to need to defend herself from anything, let alone a human—not while she was over a thousand miles from the front line that gouged a brutal, miles-thick labyrinth of barbed wire, spent bullet casings, and floating orbs of uncompleted spells across the continent.  Why did she need a rifle to protect herself when even then, she only had to look over her shoulder to see Xan-Mai-V, the tower that housed military intelligence headquarters and a research and development group that she wasn’t even supposed to know about?  Why did she need a rifle when there were hundreds of battle groups between her and the humans; when there was a major military base and checkpoint zone not fifty miles from her?

She didn’t know.  But, in a way, the rifle on her back was comforting.  If, somehow, she came across a human—she’d be able to kill it within seconds.  Even if she came across two, or even a squad of them, as long as they didn’t take her by surprise, she would be able to at least hold them off with such violence that the military would come before the humans could react.  And then, even if they managed to vanquish her… then her uncle and her father and all of the soldiers they commanded would come and exterminate or capture every human in the area, down to the last one.

It would be just as devastating as what had happened when, years before, she had returned to her home—then, only a few dozen miles from the front—to find her mother dead with her assassins still branding threats and promises of further violence onto her body.

 Her mind was wandering, and now, it was wandering so much that even as she walked it took her a moment to remember where her feet were taking her.  And then she remembered that she was going nowhere in particular.  She was simply taking a walk in the forests behind her home, and why not?  Though it was cloudy and cold, she truly loved the forests, the ancestral home of all tigers.  She loved the trees and the way they reached up into the sky to blot out the Sun and left dappled patterns of shadow and light on the ground.  She loved the plants and the soft, supple earth and grass under her boots, and she loved the way she could move and run and jump and climb without making a sound louder than the beating of her heart.

And besides… humans hated forests.  At least, they hated forests like the one shared by the community she lived in, because it was situated on terrain so perfectly flat that if she were to climb to the top of a tree, she would be able to see for dozens of miles in all directions.  Humans hated terrain like that—they hated anything the tigers loved, and they only liked mountains anyway: nasty, miserable, frozen peaks with so much wind and patches of open ground that none of her ancestors could have lived there for long before the environment or the humans took them.

She loved forests, and she hated mountains, just as she loved her people and hated humans.  These thoughts were so drilled into tigers that they may as well have been instinctive—and, in some cases, they were.  One of her older cousins was even then working on embedding a genetic hatred for humans and the terrains in which they made their homes into the next generation of tigers, and he had already done so on a small scale.  Even then, as she trekked her way over a few small mounds of rock and fallen leaves, there were at least a dozen kittens of all colorations and heritages running around with hatred for humanity and all that was associated with it built into their DNA.

 She sighed to herself.  And then, she stood on a particularly tall pile of boulders, and looked around.

She knew exactly where she was, of course; all tigers had very powerful senses of direction when they were in the environments that they were born to be in.  She looked to the sky—and immediately, she winced.  A drop of rain the size of her smallest digit splashed against her snout, causing her to snuffle at it before irritably rubbing her nose with the back of a paw, but it was a pointless motion.  Even then, more drops of rain were plummeting down, snaking through the treetops and the leaves and the branches to cover her, and her surroundings, with a sudden layer of moist coldness.

She could run home, of course.  And, really, she ought to.  She had homework and she had to clock in some time at the range, and she wanted to see her father, too.  But then again—she had at least forty eight hours until she absolutely had to take care of some of the responsibilities that were hers, and she was determined to enjoy that precious amount of free time as much as possible.

So, she adjusted her jacket, just a little bit, and put her paws into the pockets to hold in what warmth and dryness she could.  It was a good jacket— it was slate gray in color, just like her flexible combat boots.  Her pants were similarly adept at protecting her from the elements—they were made out of a new, synthetic material similar in texture to nylon but thicker and stronger and warmer and more waterproof and more breathable.

She had other clothes, of course, but she didn’t really like to wear them.  Even on school days when battle dress wasn’t required, she wore it anyway—it suited her, it really did.  As far back as anyone could remember, her family members had been active warriors practically—and literally, in some cases—from cradle to grave.  No one she was related to made a life out of perfecting technology not directly related to the war effort, and she knew that if she wasn’t going to be a boots-on-the-ground soldier, she would be in the air, or on the sea, killing humans personally.

But for now… if she wasn’t going to go home, she ought to find a place to stay warm and dry.  The rain was getting heavier and it had dropped the forest’s ambient temperature in the process, and the last thing she needed to worry about when she was taking a break from school and training was hypothermia or sickness.

And, it seemed, she was in luck.  Under the very boulder pile she was standing on, there seemed to be… a crevice, of some sort, or perhaps even a cave.  Even if there was only room for her to sit down, she’d be lucky, and if there was room for her to curl up for a nap, she’d be luckier still.  But after hopping down and making her way into the crevice, she realized that she was beyond lucky: she had found a cave.

Immediately, her tail began to twitch with excitement.  This was, in a way, an adventure—though she was safe in every sense of the word, there was still an element of uncertainty and unknown about what she was doing.  For all she knew, no one, tiger or human, had ever been where she was going, and that thought made her feel a spike of—not fear, but caution.  Or concern, at least.

For that reason, she spent a moment taking her rifle off her back and instead slung it over a shoulder so that she could fire it from the hip, if needed, or lift it to her shoulder for a more accurate shot.  Although the bullets her weapon fired were not ideal for the larger, more dangerous animals sometimes known to wander the forests close to even the largest of cities, at close range a flurry of bullets of any sort ought to make short work of all but the most daunting of predators. 

And, so, she was able to go on without fear.  She made her way into the cave and now, she did keep her mind focused on where she was and what she was doing.  Within a few paces, the cave seemed to lead to, potentially, some sort of subterranean maze of tunnels.  If she got lost… the risk was just too great for her to trust her subconscious sense of direction to keep her safe.

Within a few moments, she had traveled at least a hundred yards through a winding rock pathway that, fortunately, had no forks or confusing deviations.  The most dangerous things she ran into were parts of the ground where water dripping from grim, broken stalactites overhead made her boots struggle, however briefly, for purchase—apart from that, there was no fear and no concern and only excitement and continued exploration.

Her nose told her that the farther she got into the cave, the “older” the air got—that is to say, the farther she got into the cave, the more stagnant the air became.  That meant that there was only one entrance and one exit… and that meant that she had to be extremely careful.  If she failed to get sufficient oxygen into her system… she might well pass out unconscious before she was close enough to the outside world to breathe normally.

Still—she kept going.

It was as if she was searching for something.  Certainly, the tunnel seemed to lead somewhere, and she doubted that it was simply a dead end.  There had to be something—a cave of crystals, perhaps, or maybe some forgotten scroll written by the race that had existed before tigers and humans went their separate ways.

What she found wasn’t quite as grand as either of those possibilities, of course, but it certainly was nice.  When she reached the end of the tunnel, she found a room—a sizeable enclosure with a smooth floor and a ceiling full of icicles and structures made of collected sediment alike.  It was cold, of course, and so quiet that she could not only hear her heart beating but her blood flowing through her veins, and the various opaque materials that formed the walls of the place were so smooth and sleek and hard that whenever her tail brushed up against them, it would flinch back as if hurt.

Not only was it quiet there, it was still.  It was as if that black room was frozen in time, as if it hadn’t changed in the eons that had passed between its creation and now, when she had entered it for no reason to do anything other than to satisfy her curiosity.  Even the lake adjacent to the ground she walked on was silent and deadly still, save, of course, for the odd, pulsating shape directly below its frozen surface.

A fist punched upward.  Ice and water flew in all directions and then that fist turned into a hand the grabbed onto the ice lid that had held it underwater.  And then, another hand emerged from the black waters and grabbed on, too, and then those two hands held on as tightly as they could and started to pull up a body.

She was shocked.  She was so shocked that she was frozen in place, like the timeless fixtures of ice and stone around her.  She didn’t know herself or who she was—all she knew was the sudden noise and activity, so unwonted and shocking that she didn’t realize that they were the product of human actions.

A human—a human boy, with a face the shade of sandalwood and dark hair and features so fine and polished that they were beautiful despite the fear on his face.  The person pulling himself out of the frozen lake, the person with half his body still stuck in the freezing water, was a human—and even then, he was grunting and struggling and failing to get himself up.

She dropped her weapon—she realized this several seconds after the fact—and then she dove forward and slid across the ice.  She held herself in place as best she could and distributed her weight evenly across the ice surface, and then she offered him her paw.

“Stop struggling, you’ll drown,” she murmured, in a voice that was as deadly and potentially violent as it was focused.  Her ears were perked and on her mind was her goal first, second, last, and only.  She was in a state whose achievement her people had only perfected after generations of endless war with… creatures like the one holding her paw, just then, silently nodding at her, and slowly, carefully, pulling himself to safety.

Her paw twitched the slightest bit, and she almost let him go.  But his eyes—gray, steel gray, not the deep, bluish shade of gray that hers were—locked onto hers and, silently, begged her to not abandon him, and she found that she could not let him drown.  She had to save him—she had to capture him, she quickly told herself, so that her father could pat her on the head and then take him off to one of the grim buildings that he worked in.

And, unfortunately, it looked like saving him would be just as much of a battle as capturing him would.  She was holding onto him as tightly as she could and he was holding onto her as tightly as he could for damn sure, but now the two of them were both slowly but inexorably slipping forward, back toward the black, frozen depths he had just escaped.

Worse yet, she couldn’t extend her claws to effectively anchor them both in place.  The ice was starting to fracture beneath her—she could feel it as well as she could hear it—and it wouldn’t hold their combined weight for very long.  Within just a few seconds, she had to act—and so she didn’t waste time.

Immediately, and with such force that she almost tore his skin, she pulled, hard, and yanked him upward until his shoulders were above the water surface.  When that happened, he was able to catch hold of her body, somehow, and she was able to use her paw to grab his robes and keep hauling him up over her until he was out of the water.  He was safe.

And then, just as the ice started to shatter, she saw the folly of her actions.  He had pulled himself to the side of the lake were the ice was strong and the water was shallow and dry stone was only a few feet away, and she was left to struggle on an increasingly tenuous ice surface.  Even her slightest attempts to turn around and get to safety were met with more and louder cracks and when the ice finally broke, he would not help her as she had helped him—and then she went limp.

He had grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and hauled her to the edge of the lake.  He didn’t stop there, though—he somehow muscled her off the icy surface entirely and then, panting in exhaustion, clambered his way onto the stone floor next to her.

And then, he collapsed, face up on the ground, breathing hard toward the ceiling.  Water dripped off his body, his robes, and his breath condensed in the air above him with each exhale.  His clothes had been thrown askew by the struggle, and she could see his bare chest—he was shivering.  He was shivering hard and as she placed her paw on his neck to check his heart rate, she could feel how cold and clammy his skin was and how rapidly his heart was racing.

He was going to freeze to death right in front of her.

Instinct—or, rather, training that was as good as instinct—took over.

She reached into the survival bag that traveled on her lower back and a moment later saw her manipulating his throat with her paws so that he would swallow the glucose and caffeine tablets she forced into his mouth, but that wasn’t enough.  He was still shaking and shivering too much and he was—

Suddenly, there was a burst of light and heat so intense that she jumped into the air and immediately took cover behind a nearby stalagmite.  He was attacking—she reached for her rifle when she remembered that she had put it down and she was just about to go and retrieve it when there was another explosion.  She ducked to avoid being killed and prepared to look up again when there was another explosion.

And then another—and then another.

There was no noise, though, and there was no concussion.  And so, by the fifth explosion, she peeked out again to see what was going on, lamenting the fact that she had not elected to carry a sidearm.  But the human must have reached the limits of his strength, because he wasn’t attacking anymore—this was her chance.  She drew her survival knife and prepared to jump—

But when she saw him again, her will to violence failed.

He was sitting up, it seemed—and he was apparently no longer as cold and wet.  He wasn’t quite breathing normally, but he had the presence of mind to straighten out his clothes—robes that were entirely removed from anything any tiger would wear—and, most impossibly of all, he was smiling at her.  He was looking right at her and he was smiling in a manner so sincere and uncontrived that it couldn’t possibly be faked or negative in any sense.

And yet… a human, smiling at a tiger?  Without any apparent violent intentions?  His hands were bare, she could see, and held palms-out toward her, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything.  She had studied some of the maneuvers humans were known to make before they could perform one of their spells, and several of them could be done in short order from such a position.

He was trying to lull her into a false sense of security.

She almost snarled, then, before realizing that there was nothing better she could do than to pretend to play into his game.If she pretended to be fooled by his false display of peace, she might get an opportunity to do better than kill him—she might be able to capture him.  If she could do that, if she could bring him back to the city alive and in good health, who knew what information he might have dragged out of him?

So, the tigress forced her face to become blank, neutral, or perhaps shaded with just a little bit of cautious curiosity and trust.  It was easy for her—she was born and bred for combat, and so she was naturally a master at deciding what showed on her face.

She put her knife away.  And, slowly, she stood up, revealing herself from behind the series of rocks she’d used as cover.  She held her bare paws out in front of her, too, just like he was doing—and eyed the position of her rifle via her peripheral vision.  It was on the ground just a few yards in front of her—if she dived, she could grab it and pour fire onto him in a second, but he might be able to use a spell before that.

Well.  At least there was no cover near where he was—his only escape was back into the black mass of shattered ice and water that he had just almost died trying to get out of.   If she could get her rifle into her hands before he could use a spell… then he would be forced to surrender.  Either that, or he would have to die.

The tigress began to cautiously approach the human, who still looked as sincere and peaceful as he had in the previous moments.  He was still smiling, and though he no longer held his hands out so that she could see that they were empty, he had lowered them to his sides—and that made them, she believed, a lot less dangerous than they were when they were raised.

Then again, he could very well be armed.  She discreetly eyed his flowing, black robes and considered just how many weapons they might be able to hide when she remembered that humans didn’t use firearms—they didn’t use technology at all.  Their weapons were their hands and their hands alone, which they used to perform whatever spells their bloodlines enabled them to perform.

He really was no threat to her.  But somehow, she knew that he wasn’t surrendering.  So, she stopped when she was in front of her rifle and slyly slid the toe of her boot under it. In a pinch, she could kick it up into the air, grab it, and fire even more quickly than she could if she dropped to a knee to grab it directly off the ground.

It was rather tempting to simply kill him then and there.  But something about the way that strange, tan-skinned human looked at her stopped her from shooting him, at least for the moment.  For some reason, she was curious, and so she simply stood there with her ears perked and her paws resting at her sides, waiting for a creature she was born to hate to speak.

It was some moments before he spoke, though.  Perhaps he was picking his words carefully—and she couldn’t blame him for that.  Now that she had a chance to look at him more closely, she could see that he wasn’t even a full-grown human—he was a male human kitten, or… a “boy”, she believed they were called.

When she realized that, the natural fear she felt for him diminished almost entirely.  Her eyes narrowed, and the way she stood changed, just a little bit, so that her weight was on one leg.  This would enable her to sprint forward at an instant’s notice and immediately throttle the life out of an enemy who hadn’t yet existed long enough to seriously threaten her.

Then again… he wasn’t truly a kitten.  Not exactly.  He wasn’t really a child, either—he was more like a juvenile.  He wasn’t an adult yet, but he wasn’t a helpless little being, either.  He was a little taller than she was, and after looking at his face for a moment, she decided that though he was still somewhat “boyish” he was also lean and tough.  It seemed likely, after some reflection, that he was actually older than she was…

Her examinations were being reciprocated, she noted, so she immediately stood a little straighter to look bigger, more threatening.  Her eyes remained dangerously narrowed as her tail flickered around behind her in anxiety, but she didn’t need to be so concerned.  His assessment of her seemed to increase the amount of respect—fear—he had for her, and why not?

She was a tall tigress, and not just for her age.  At five feet, nine inches in height and a few years of growing left, she’d likely end up towering over most males, and apart from that, a lifetime of difficult training at the best military academies her people had to offer had made her limbs and her body lean and strong.  She wasn’t big in the same way that powerful males were, of course, but she could hold her own in the weight room against males twice her size and in the sparring ring, she could put them on their backs within moments.

But his assessment of her didn’t stop there.  He didn’t just take note of her height, her build, and the knife on her hip and the rifle on her foot—he seemed to take not of other aspects of her, as well.  For example, her fair, sleek fur; her blue-gray eyes; her dark, perfect stripes and her straight red hair, so long and neat that even then, despite the fact that it had gotten wet when she had nearly fallen into the still tumultuous black lake next to her, it cascaded down to rest against her back without a strand out of place.

He smiled at her in a small, pleasant sort of way—and then, as she watched, he placed a hand on his heart and bowed.

It was not a deep bow, and it didn’t last for a particularly long time.  But there was no doubt about what it was, nor was there doubt about the fact that if she had tried, just then, she would have been able to bite or claw out the back of the human’s neck before he could lift a finger to stop her from it.

But she didn’t go to kill him.  It didn’t even occur to her to kill him, and perhaps it was because she was too shocked by his careless display to react properly.  That explanation left something to be desired, though, so even as the human stood straight again, the tigress toyed with the possibility that, perhaps, she didn’t want to kill him because—despite that he was a human and she was a tigress—she had no just reason to kill him.

“Thanks so much for saving me,” he said, still smiling at her, when he stood up straight again.  “It was so cold in the water… just a few more seconds, and…”  With a finger, he drew a line across his neck and made a brutal ffffst sound through his teeth.

After smiling at her again, he ran his hands through his hair in a fruitless attempt to dry it out.  The gesture succeeded only in making it stand on end in wet, messy spikes, and he looked so silly with his hair like that the she couldn’t help but smile.

He was still cold, though, and that tempered his actions for a moment.  Though he seemed to have unleashed a great deal of energy saving himself from hypothermia just moments ago, he was not out of danger.  He was still terribly wet from his unpleasant swim in the subterranean pool just a few feet away from either of them, and the cave itself was so cold that within seconds he began to shiver again.  Shortly after that, he was coughing—retching, really—and sitting down with his limbs drawn up about himself in an attempt to conserve his body heat.

She knew what was happening.  His adrenaline had worn off and now, shock was starting to set in.  Again, he was in imminent danger of freezing to death right in front of her—but she had spent her whole life learning how to survive and so she began to act before she knew what she was doing.

First, the tigress took out a thermal blanket and handed it to him, knowing that he would instinctively use it to warm himself up to the greatest degree.  After that, she gave him more glucose tablets, but no caffeine—that much stimulant might make his heart race and fail to pump blood as effectively as it had to to stop his extremities from falling off.  After that, she checked his vitals again—but they weren’t good.  It was far too cold in the cave, and his fur—or “skin”, or whatever they called it—simply wasn’t enough to keep the elements out.

He was running out of time, then, but she knew there was something she could do—there had to be something she hadn’t thought of.  She couldn’t start a fire; she couldn’t carry him out of the cave quickly enough to matter and even if she did, conditions were even worse outside.  She didn’t have a better blanket or any other means of providing the human with heat—ah.  Ah.  Yes, in fact, she did have another means of providing the human with heat, but when she thought of it, her flesh crawled under her coat.

True, this human didn’t seem like a particular threat to her—in fact, just then, he seemed like nothing more than a pathetic child, shivering on the ground with his eyes tightly shut as if that would keep him any warmer.  It was also true that he had been oddly polite to her, despite the fact that she was the enemy of his race—but he was still a human and she was still a tigress.  Even being around him made her feel very potent, very real fear, she realized, and even her tail was twitching and spasming rapidly, indicating her anxiety to do neither more nor less than get away from him immediately.

She wanted to leave him to die.  She truly did—either that, or she wanted to put a bullet through his brain herself so that she could be sure that no humans were anywhere near her home.  She wanted to see that terrifying human boy dead, somehow, and yet she saw herself walking toward him, slowly, and then kneeling so that she was sitting next to him.

And then she felt her arms wrap around his trembling body.  Her torso pressed against his and when his hands made their way to her core—the warmest part of her body—she did not stop him.  True, she winced, but she treated him with the physical intimacy that was otherwise reserved for members of her own species or perhaps their feral cousins.  Without a trace of hesitation, she did her absolute best to envelope his weak, shivering body with her marginally smaller, furred form—and, in time, he began to get better.  He began to stop shivering, and the arms that had wrapped around her grew less cold and clammy and more warm and alive.

It took time.  Perhaps it took an hour in total, but eventually, she had used the heat of her own body, and the protection offered by her fur, to wick the cold and the wet away from him.  By the time she was complete, his body was as warm and safe as hers was, and, in fact, she found that the embrace offered by a human—a real, live, human—wasn’t actually that bad.

What kind of a human was he, she wondered, to allow a tigress like her to hold him in such a way that she could claw him to pieces in seconds?  Beyond that, her jaws were right next to his neck, and his own natural weapons were in no position to offer him protection—was he insane?

Somehow, she doubted that.  He was far too calm to be a lunatic—so maybe he was suicidal.  Maybe he was hoping that she would kill him for some reason—but that explanation didn’t make much sense, either.  If he wanted to die, he would have allowed himself to drown in the miserable black pool, still churning with activity and malice not ten feet from the two of them.

Slowly, the tigress sat up.  Then, she stood up, gradually peeling herself away from the human’s form, though her eyes remained on him if for no reason other than to ensure that he wasn’t doing anything dangerous.  He wasn’t, as far as she could tell, but that didn’t stop her from standing in such a way that she could attack, defend, or duck, dodge, dive and run at a heartbeat’s notice.

When he smiled at her, though, her form faltered a little bit.  He was a human, there was no doubt about that, but thinking that he would harm her somehow seemed to defy logic.

A few strands of her hair had fallen in front of her face.  With a stroke of her paw, she corrected them, and then offered her furred appendage down to the human without thinking about it.  He accepted it and she helped him to his feet—and then she stood back, again surprised by what she had done as if instinctively.

Again, he placed a hand on his heart, and again he bowed.  This time she was prepared for it, but still, she simply could not find it in herself to even take the human in a chokehold, let alone take his life.  He stood up straight and began to thank her, but she was far too curious to acknowledge his gratitude.

Her eyes locked onto his with such intensity that if he was lying, she would know it.  She had learned how to see when someone was lying to her; her uncle had taught her how and she knew for a fact that what he taught her worked on humans as well as tigers.  It didn’t matter that his eyes were an exotic, steely shade of gray and so warm that they practically shone—if he lied to her, she would realize it and act on it as necessary.

“How… did you get down here?” she asked.

After a pause, he answered.   And in doing so, he lied to her.

“I don’t know,” he sighed, and if she didn’t catch that distinctive glint in his pupil before he spoke, she would have interpreted his tone as a reluctant sort of admission, as if he didn’t want to seem stupid or naïve to her.  He was a good liar, she had to admit—after speaking, he smiled in a shy sort of way and then continued.

“I think… I’m lost,” he said.  “I can’t remember much.  Just…”

Exactly what he “just” remembered would remain a mystery, it seemed, and she knew why.  He knew that it was easiest to maintain a lie if it was simple.  He could always clarify details later as he “remembered” them as he would have the time to fix them in his mind and keep them consistent.

Her eyes narrowed.  He saw this, and turned away, as if he felt guilty about lying to her.  As if a human could feel guilt about doing anything to a tigress.  But, after a moment, he looked back at her and gave her another shy smile—and then, he began to question her.

“So… what about you?” he asked somewhat vaguely.  “That is to say… how did you get here, in this cave?” he clarified.

She blinked.  It was such an innocent question, apparently—but he was a human.  He had to have some sort of motive for being curious about her, and that she couldn’t guess what it was was not good for her.  So, in the end, she ended up telling the truth, though her answer was even more vague and useless than his.

“I walked here,” she replied.  “From the forest.”

That was all she said.  She ended on a curt, abrupt note, but that did not stop him from smiling, nodding, and following up with another question.

“That’s nice,” he said.  “So, um… do you… come here often?”

She didn’t reply to that.  She just looked at him oddly—his question was so bizarre.  It was as if they were both five years older and at a canteen at the end of the week, celebrating and relaxing with friends and mingling with the other gender in order to find mates.  And even if they were in such a situation—even if he was a tiger and not a human—she would have found his question boring and inane to the point that she would have simply left him to go and speak to someone else.

He seemed to realize this, too.  He grinned, shyly, and flushed, and tried to think of something interesting to say and ended up simply stuttering and looking at his sandals.  Sandals—not boots, like any sensible tiger would wear, but real, Honest to God sandals.  In so many ways he was utterly bizarre and strange, and yet, even as she looked at him, the tigress couldn’t help but smiling.

“Hey,” she said in a friendly, light-hearted tone, “come on, let’s get out of this cave.  It’s too cold in here… if I stay here much longer, my blood might freeze in my veins.”

He looked up at that somewhat grim joke, but smiled when he realized that she was just kidding.  Then, he walked forward so that the two of they were side by side on their way into the tunnel that led to the cave’s mouth.  They only stopped for a moment so that the tigress could collect her rifle off the ground—after that, the two of them kept walking.

She stayed at his side so that he would not get behind her.  He stayed at her side so that he could follow her.  And for a few moments, they walked in silence.

“By the way,” the human eventually queried, making the tigress glance at him and perk her ears, “I never got your name.”

She looked forward again.  She thought of lying or denying him that knowledge or simply not answering at all, so that the only sounds in the cave would be those of their feet, endlessly pacing through the darkness.

Then, though, she saw that he was still smiling at her.  She felt her tail flicker just a little bit closer to him as if it was going to brush up against his leg, and she found herself wondering what harm might possibly come of telling him her name—after all, it would do him no good.  The moment she got the chance, she would tell her father or her uncle and the human would be captured and taken away from her forever.

As long as that was going to happen… it didn’t matter what he found out.  It didn’t matter at all—so why did she feel herself blushing when she willed herself to speak?

“Sameera,” she said quietly, perhaps a full moment later.  “Sameera Khan.”

“Sameera,” he repeated, as if to test how her name felt when it rolled off his tongue.  He paused, then—and seemed to decide that he likedit.  He liked it a lot, and he showed this to her by smiling at her for a long moment.

And then, he stepped a little closer to her.

“My name is Alex,” he said.  “Alex Kralik.”

She didn’t repeat his name.  In fact, she didn’t say anything at all, nor did she allow herself to look up at him to return the smile he had given her.  She simply willed herself to walk forward, continually, so that they could be out of the cave sooner rather than later.

And she failed, in a way.  Because after he told her his name, she stepped a little closer to him.

“I remember these forests.  I mean—I remember them as if they were from a dream.”

He was lying again, and she didn’t have to look at him to know that.  The excitement originally in his voice was suddenly and not at all smoothly replaced by concern and then a weak attempt at clarifying his admission into something vague and harmless.

She wasn’t fooled by him at all.  But she couldn’t blame him for being so enthusiastic about leaving the cave for the forest.  The rain had stopped by then, but hazy clouds of mist now seeped through the endless clusters of trees, creating a semi-transparent background to the harsh dark greens and browns of the trees themselves—but why on Earth would a human appreciate such an environment?  How on Earth could he enjoy it, when this sort of environment in this sort of landscape was where her people had killed his for generations and generations?

She stared at him even as he began to stretch.  He lifted his arms into the air, grabbed his fingers and contorted his body to work all the tension out of it.  It took him a few moments, and the relieved expression on his face seemed to suggest that he had needed to stretch for a long time… for a long, long, long time indeed.

A question was on her lips.  But then, she saw him stretch his legs—and then she raised her rifle and leveled it at his head.

When he looked at her, it was as if he was confused, at first.  But then, he seemed saddened.  No—he was more than saddened, he was hurt.  But then he seemed to look right through her weapon.  He simply smiled at her and did a few rows before dancing on his toes, briefly, and hyperventilating to flood his lungs with oxygen.

“What?” he asked.  “Is something wrong, Sameera?  You know, I used to be very good at running when I was younger.  I was at the top of my class,” he mentioned, before looking back into the forest and hyperventilating again.  He grinned, then, and gave the tigress another brief smile.

“Let’s see if I still have it.”

He took off.  And he still had it—he was fast.  When he moved his feet seemed to barely touch the ground; his sandals didn’t slow him down at all.  The cold didn’t bother him either, because his robes were too thin to matter and his skin didn’t protect him at all—and, certainly, her demands that he stop immediately or be shot didn’t even register to him.  If anything, they made him run faster.

And that left her with no option.

Sameera dropped to a knee.  She rested her rifle in her paws and carefully aimed through the finely-adjusted iron sights, tracking Alex’s increasingly distant body as it flit through the trees until she had a clear shot.

And then, she took it.  She fired a bullet at his legs and watched as—nothing happened.  Nothing happened at all.  He didn’t even slow down.

She must have missed, so she quickly lined up for another shot—but this, too, had no effect.  So, breaking past sudden locks that had somehow formedin her mind despite a lifetime of training to kill humans, she aimed at his chest, at the center of his mass, and fired several short, staggered bursts.

And nothing happened—no, not exactly.  Something was happening—her bullets were striking something, but not him.  Every time a bullet approached him, some sort of white field would appear in the air and shatter her shot to pieces, leaving him unharmed and able to run as if nothing in the world was wrong.

She had expended all of the ammunition in her magazine.  So, she reloaded—but stopped halfway when she heard him laughing and calling to her.

“Come on, Sameera!” he said.  “Catch me if you can.  I haven’t run like this since I was a boy!”

He paused.  And then, despite how fast he was running, he managed to call to her in a questioning, purposefully condescending tone.

“What’s the matter, Sameera?” he asked.  “A tigress like you can’t catch a slow little human like me?”

When he said that, her eyes narrowed.  But they didn’t narrow with the terrifying malevolence they would have if she had been chasing with the intent to kill.  Even as she took off her rifle and her jacket—after all, he was very, very fast indeed—she knew that she wasn’t going to kill him.  She was only going to pounce on him and hold him down… until her father or her uncle came and did what had to be done.  After all, no matter what… he was a human.

She started to move.  She took one step forward—then another.  And then, she launched herself forward with a leg toned and trained and defined by a lifetime of hard work, so that within seconds she was not only flying between the trees—she was flying off of them.  She ran with a speed and a liquid grace so great that she would have caught him immediately if he hadn’t looked behind him, laughed, and then left the ground entirely.

He could fly.  He could fly several feet off the ground, roughly, with such a speed and agility that for a moment she was shocked.

But then, she kept chasing him.  She would catch him and she would pounce on him and wrestle him to the ground and hold him—and that was all.

After all, she was a tigress—she didn’t hurt who she played with.  And, just then, she couldn’t lie to herself—she was playing with a human.

Eventually, she did catch him.  But by that time she was so tired that she couldn’t do more than pounce on him, declare victory, and laugh as he declared a truce.

After that, the two teenagers had sat, apart from one another with their backs against two trees, simply breathing hard and sweating and smiling at one another.  He fixed his robes and the meager amount of hair on his chin with one hand and a few seconds; she took two paws and a moment to obsessively stroke her hair until it behaved enough for her to tie a small elastic cord around it.

He looked at her for a moment when she did that.  He seemed embarrassed when she caught him, and briefly looked away—and when he did that, she did the same.  But only for a moment.  Shortly, she made her way to sit at his side rather than across from him, simply so that she could enjoy his company and so that he could enjoy the heat of her body and the warmth of her fur.  After all, he had to be freezing in just robes and skin.

Certainly, he smiled when she sat down next to him.  He made as if to rest his arm over her shoulders, but he must have seen the concern on her face when he did that, because he reconsidered and placed his hands in his lap—good.  She might have just spent over an hour playing with him—roughhousing, even—but he was still a human.  The last thing she wanted was for him to have access to the back of her neck.

He took the fact that she didn’t trust him entirely in stride, though, and simply gave her another smile.

“You’re very fast, Sameera,” he said.  “And I don’t just mean for a tigress.  I swear, you must have broken the sound barrier a few times.”

She couldn’t help but smile at his little joke.  He had such an odd sense of humor—it was like nothing she had ever heard before.  Though her people were known for being straightforward and serious, there were a few jokers—but none of them were like him.  None of them could make her smile as much as he did.

“Well, I have a lot of practice,” the tigress said humbly.  “There’s training, and I play outside a lot.  I chased down a deer… just an hour or two before finding you, actually.”

“Sounds exciting,” Alex said, duly impressed. He searched for something to say, briefly, before simply taking a deep breath and looking at the forest around them.

It was still early in the afternoon, by then, so despite the clouds and the mist that defined the region surrounding Xan-Mai-V there was enough light that Alex didn’t need to strain to look at anything.  Sameera knew that since he was a human, his vision was frightfully poor, especially at night—but for the moment, he seemed more than capable of walking around without tripping over every upturned root or stone.

Somehow, the two of them mutually came to the decision that it would be nice to take a walk.  Not a run—just a relaxed stroll through the forests.  Neither of them was exactly leading the other, but Sameera did manage to adjust their course until they passed by where she’d ditched her rifle and jacket—she recovered them both but left the firearm on her back and the jacket folded neatly over her arm until Alex insisted on carrying it for her.

Walking with him was nothing like walking with another tiger.  She loved her people, of course, but they weren’t just straightforward and serious—they were often silent.  Sameera had gone entire weeks without saying a word to her father.  When he got home, she would get up and help him with his bag and his coat and she would affectionately nuzzle his shoulder before going back to her homework or else going on to make dinner for the two of them.  She had friends in school, of course, but they didn’t exactly talk much.  They sat together and ate together and played together, but they rarely shared more than a few sentences of conversation.

There were advantages to this, of course.  Being with tigers was peaceful, always, and private thoughts and interactions stayed private.  But there were also disadvantages—sometimes, Sameera needed to talk but wasn’t even sure if her own father wanted to hear what she had to say.

On the other hand, humans—or at least Alex—seemed to love to talk.  Somehow, he made interesting conversation out of nothing—how beautiful the trees were, how pristine the forest was despite its proximity to the city, and how nice it was to make a new friend and go for a walk with her all in the same day.

And he wasn’t the only one who was talking.  Somehow, he had her talking back to him—mostly, there was nothing important in what she said, but a few times she let little facts slip that she really shouldn’t have.  For example, she once mentioned how much she and her classmates trained with firearms; another time she mentioned that there were plans to teach kittens the fundamentals of piloting aircraft from the age of ten instead of twelve.  Every time she told him something potentially damaging like this, she would bristle and reach for a weapon—until she remembered that even though Alexwas a human, he somehow seemed to be no threat to her.

Or any other tiger, for that matter.  He seemed curious about Sameera’s father, and when she told him that the two of them had an excellent relationship he said that he was glad to hear that.  He mentioned that he’d lost his own father to the war when he had been too young to even create any memories of the man that should have been there for him throughout his childhood.

He didn’t say anything about his mother.  She didn’t say anything about hers.  And so, for some time, the two of them walked in silence.

Alex seemed to have said all that he wanted to say; in contrast, Sameera’s curiosity towards him was only increasing.  She couldn’t for the life of her work out how he had gotten so deep into tiger territory, let alone how he had gotten into the pool when it was clear that whatever shield protected him from bullets offered him no protection from the cold and the dark and the wet.  He couldn’t have swum there… could he have teleported there somehow?

That seemed probable, compared to the rest of the potential explanations for Alex’s presence.  Sameera knew how deadly teleporters could be on the battlefield; she’d lost a cousin to one of them some weeks before.  But as far as she knew, even the most talented of teleporters could only move twenty or so feet in any direction.

Maybe Alex was a superhuman of some sort.  Maybe he had found a way to expand the magical talent built into his genes to the point that he could teleport across entire nations.

Sameera shivered at the idea of a human with such power.  Looking at Alex did not make her relax immediately—it was only good luck that he seemed to be a human who did not hate tigers, though the idea that such a being even existed was almost too much for Sameera to accept.

And yet the two of them were certainly getting along.  Alex was kind to her, and a lot more gentle than any tiger Sameera had ever met.  When she shied away from his touch, he didn’t force her—he just stood back, gave her her space, and let her decide if and when she wanted to let him bump his shoulder against hers or caress her striped paw in his tanned, human hand.  In contrast, even the most polite tigers Sameera met got their way when and how they wanted it—even she was known to force kittens, friends, and adults to share physical interactions with her even if they didn’t want to.

In time, he wasn’t the one to initiate physical interaction with her—she was the one who wanted him to rub her shoulder with his hand or rest his head against hers or hold her paw so that she could lead him somewhere else in the forest.  The way his human fingers felt on her fur was nothing like anything she had ever felt before, so when he learned to stroke her cheek or her arm properly, she was rapidly induced to purring, quietly, to nonverbally let him know what a good job he was doing.

She was still curious about him, of course, but that didn’t stop Sameera from exploring the entire forest, never more than a few feet from Alex for even a moment.  Sometimes, he was wary about climbing up a pile of rocks and certainly he was frightened of climbing trees—he had no claws with which to grapple onto their trunks—but she led him and showed him how much better the forest was than the terrible mountains that he surely made his home in.

“You know,” Alex said, as he carefully, slowly followed Sameera up a tree that she would have been able to climb before she had learned to speak, “I’ll never say a word against forests, but mountains aren’t that bad.  Why are you afraid of them?” he asked.  “I’d have thought that a big, strong tigress like you wouldn’t blink at heights and cold—oops!”

He slipped, then, and would have taken a fall that had the potential to break his back if she hadn’t caught him.  Sameera snagged his forearm with her paw, using the rest of her limbs to anchor herself in place and allowed him to haul himself upward until he was able to sit in place, panting, and give her a rueful grin.

“At least it’s easier to climb mountains.  I can’t believe you got me to do this,” he complained, looking down at the ground—before promptly hugging the tree, and Sameera, as tightly as he possibly could.  “We must be fifty—sixty—a hundred feet off the ground!”

“I’d be surprised if we’re twenty feet off the ground,” Sameera replied with a friendly grin.  She squirmed out of Alex’s grasp, then, and daintily hopped to the ground, landing on her feet without a problem.  She then scrambled back up to where Alex was within a second or two and planted an affectionate nuzzle on his shoulder to show that she wasn’t trying to embarrass him.

“But don’t worry.  If we were in the mountains, I’m sure I would be much too afraid to do anything but run to the nearest forest.  I can’t stand mountains,” she said—and then she continued to climb.

After detaching himself from the tree and apparently psyching himself up for a few moments, Alex managed to follow her.  He did so rather slowly and uncertainly—after all, he was a human and it was a miracle that he was able to tolerate being in a forest for so long at all—but he did follow her.

“I think you’d be surprised,” Alex replied.  “I admit, it can get pretty cold in the valleys and at the peaks, and when you’re higher up, the air gets very thin… but when you’re up there, you feel like you’re at the top of the world.  And then, there are the activities—when you fly down the mountains, if you do it just right, you really can break the sound barrier.”

He smiled after that.  She would have known it even if she didn’t look down to see it, because that was just the kind of person Alex was.  He was always smiling and talking and happy, even around her: a tigress, a being that had been born and bred to kill him.

Within a few moments, they had reached the top of the tree.  If they had been any older or bigger, it might have been too dangerous for them both to be up there at once—but as they were, they were just safe enough to cling to the treetop, gingerly, and peer out at the forest all around them.

Now that it wasn’t slowed by other trees, the wind was strong.  It was so strong that Sameera’s normally perfect red hair was thrown about her face—and Alex’s—to form a tumultuous sea of red until she held it down with a paw, but she didn’t mind.  The air was so fresh and pure and cold that she didn’t mind that it was starting to drizzle again, and neither did Alex.

From where they were, they could see everything—the seemingly endless dark green swath that surrounded Xan-Mai city, the broad waterways that allowed for transport and commerce and fishing and defense, and, of course, the grim black tower of Xan-Mai-V itself, not  ten miles away from them, rising out of the ground like a hate-filled scar.

Alex looked at it for a long moment.  And then he turned to Sameera, grinned, and adjusted how he was sitting so that the two of them were side by side again.

“Tiger architecture is much different from human architecture,” he observed.  “I’m… not sure what to think about your tower.  It’s so… foreboding.”

She couldn’t help but to agree with him.  Xan-Mai-V was a massive, black tower constructed entirely from metal and the finest of obsidian stone from all territory tigers controlled.  It was too far away for either of them to see the sayings and prayers that were etched into its outer surface, or the numerous weapons stations that made it a bristling hedgehog practically begging for human attack—but even without those two terrifying features, Xan-Mai-V was certainly intimidating.  Certainly, it was foreboding.

“What is human architecture like?” Sameera eventually asked.  The two of them had torn their gaze from the tower and were even then climbing down the tree back into the forest.  Alex found this extremely difficult, at first, but he was quickly catching on.  At least this time, he didn’t fall again.

Within a few moments, they were on solid ground again, and though Alex looked relieved at that, he also seemed somewhat disappointed.  It was as if he had enjoyed climbing, or learning how to climb, and wanted to do it again—but he didn’t say as much.  He just smiled at Sameera, allowed her to wrap an arm around his waist, and continued to wander through the forest.

“As you might guess, it’s a lot less technological than your people’s,” he explained.  “Mostly, we live in homes that are cut into mountainsides.  We do have larger buildings, but they’re never more than three stories tall and they’re generally built by hand out of stone and logs.  There’s no glass, or metal, or anything like that at all…”

He grinned.

“We humans really don’t like technology at all.  Everything we use is as natural as possible.”

Sameera wasn’t sure what she thought about that.  Certainly, she appreciated the wilderness, but she liked technology, too.  From her boots to her clothes to the weapon still strapped to her back, many of her possessions—many of the things that made her such a deadly warrior were a direct product of science and research and careful, painstaking construction.

Then again, she did like to go camping with her father and her friends.  She did like to sleep under the stars, and certainly nothing beat simply doing what they were doing—wandering around the forests for hours on end until they couldn’t wander any more.

It took a long, long, long time—but eventually, the two of them had seen all there was to see in the forest.  That is to say—they had seen everything there was to see in that particular part of the forest, because the forest itself was much too big for any two-person team to explore in under a month.

Sameera said that she would love to keep exploring with Alex—not just the next day, but after that as well.  She said the two of them would go back to the forest every afternoon and evening after school and after Sameera had finished her homework and extra training—and every weekend, the two of them would have forty eight hours to themselves and the wilderness.

She even admitted that she was curious about mountains.  She mentioned that if he was with her, she might not mind going to visit them, someday.  When she had said that, he had smiled for a full minute and held her with the physical affection that she had thought only tigers could show.

And then, of course, she remembered the war.  She remembered that he was a human and that she was a tigress and the very fact that he was there, so deep into tiger territory, was a miracle.

She didn’t suspect him anymore, of course.  He’d had more than enough chances to kill her throughout the day, but he had never raised a hand or a spell toward her.  He didn’t even cuff her or flick her nose like another tiger might for some reason or for no reason at all—he was only ever affectionate and kind and tolerant toward her.  He even let her be as physical with him as she wanted, though she knew that humans weren’t very physical with one another at all.

So, by nightfall, Alex was sitting down and Sameera was literally right on top of him.  She was loosely holding him around his torso with her head rested against his chest in a manner that she reserved for only relatives and very close friends.  It put him in a position to caress her head, her hair with his impressively dexterous human fingers and pet her so perfectly that she was purring within minutes.  She looked up with her with her almond-shaped blue-gray eyes and he looked down at her and it was so peaceful and perfect between them that Sameera barely remembered that they were outside, in the cold and the dark.  It was as if her world consisted of only her and him at that time.

And yet… she still didn’t understand him.  That is to say, of course she understood that Alex was a very affectionate, sincere, playful person with sleek tanned skin and dark hair and gray eyes, but she didn’t understand how he had come to her.

In fact, the more she thought about it, the more uneasy she got.  Shortly, she shivered and turned away from his gaze even as she curled up against him so that the warmth of his body could protect her.  He raised a hand to run through her hair again, but she flinched a little bit and that did not miss his escape.  She curled up even more and pressed herself against him even more securely, but at the same time she opened his eyes and looked up at him so that he could see the unspoken question on her lips.

For a moment, he avoided her gaze, and that made her sad.  She didn’t know why he didn’t want to be honest about this with her—she didn’t mind that he was a human and she didn’t mind that he was extremely powerful to boot.  He hadn’t hurt her once and he never would… so, why couldn’t he just tell her who he really was?

Eventually, Alex sighed.  He looked down at the tigress—stroked her cheek—and then began to speak.

“Sameera, when we first met, you were… let’s say, wary of me.”  He paused, briefly, so that they could both recall the now painful moment when she had aimed her rifle at his skull.

“But… did you notice that I never was?  I treated you like a good friend, or a sister, from the moment I met you.  Even though I’m a human—even though you’re a tigress.”

“How did you do that?” Sameera suddenly interjected.  She sat up, a little bit, so that her womanly form no longer pressed against Alex’s body as much as it had before.  “You trusted me, and were kind to me right from the very beginning.  Humans and tigers haven’t been like that since before the war.”

Alex looked at her meaningfully.  She looked at him and for a moment, she did not understand.  And then, just as Alex began to speak again, Sameera began to see why there had been confusion in his eyes when he had looked at her rifle for the first time.

“Biologically, I’m sixteen years old,” he said.  “But judging by how much your technology has progressed, I was born a long time ago.  I was born a very, very long time ago.”

He paused again.  And then, in a tone that made it clear how much he dreaded what Sameera might say in response to his question, he asked her when the war between humans and tigers had started.

She almost didn’t want to answer.  But, after a moment, she did.

“About… five hundred and ten years ago,” Sameera said—and when she said that, the expression on Alex’s face brought her physical pain that she only overcame by pressing her face against Alex’s chest and snuggling him until she felt his arms wrap around her.

Then, the two teenagers looked at one another again.  But after a moment, Alex seemed to look past Sameera and into the forest beyond her.  She could see that he wanted to know how many had been killed in the war… but he didn’t voice the question and so she didn’t answer.  She didn’t want to answer—she didn’t even want to know the answer, just then, and that she did made her snuggle into the comfort offered by Alex’s body again.

It was a few moments before Alex spoke again.

I was born before the war,” he said.  “Back then, humans and tigers didn’t always get along, but we never fought.  We never hated one another… there were even interspecies marriage here and there,” he mentioned.  “But… in about a year, it all went downhill.”

I’m still not sure what caused it,” Alex sighed, after pausing for a brief moment.  “Supposedly, your people invaded a town, or polluted a stream.  That’s what I was told.  And there were rumors, too, that some tigers had raped a young female—I’d be surprised if any of it was true at all.  What were you told, Sameera?”

“That the humans had destroyed a factory because they thought it was blasphemous,” the tigress replied.  “That’s what we learned in history class… but the Professor said that no one is really certain.  He pointed out to other possible causes for the war… he said that there were stories, or rumors, that a kitten was killed by your people.”

Alex smiled.  It was not a pleasant expression—it made him look five hundred years old; it had all the pain and the quiet sorrow of a silent, grim, solemn stone forced to watch two peoples that had once been brothers massacre one another for half a millennium.

“I guess no one is sure what really happened.  In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if nothing at all started the war,” Alex said.  “First, I had thought the problems between our people would be quickly and peacefully resolved.  But two weeks passed, and the war was going badly for our people.  There was a draft, and society was militarized almost immediately.  Even then, I hoped that the war would be over within a few months or so… but I looked into the future and saw only devastation for a hundred years.  Then two hundred years.  Then three hundred years—and then I decided that I wanted no part of it.”

He held her close, as he never had before.  He had held her before to be affectionate, but now, he was holding her the way she might hold her father or an uncle or a trusted friend—he was holding her to feel safe, or comforted, when his perception of reality demanded anything but safety and comfort.

“So, I went into that cave,” Alex said, in a surprisingly bitter, almost harsh tone.  “I used a spell only known to my family—a very old, very powerful spell.  I used it to shut myself inside, away from the world… and the war, and the killing, and the cruelty and the depravity.  I didn’t want to come out, ever, but the way the spell works… I had to pick an ending condition.  A… boundary, so to speak… when my escape from the world would end.”

He paused.

“I looked into the future again, and at that moment, right when I had the full power of that spell with me, I could see very far and very clearly.  I saw that I would end the war, with someone else.  So, I set the spell to end… when the other one who will end the war comes to me.”

He looked into her eyes for a long moment.  And then, it clicked—Sameera was about to ask him to confirm what she simply could not believe, but he smiled and ran a hand through her luscious red hair.

“When I first saw you, Sameera, you have no idea how happy I was just to… be around someone else.  But I don’t think it’s quite hit me that you’re not only the first person I’ve seen in five hundred years and the one who will end the war with me, but you’re also the most beautiful woman that I have ever seen.”

He smiled at her again and then patted her on the head like she was a kitten.

“But I won’t tell you that.  I’ll never tell you that.  They could hang me from the ceiling by my toenails, but they couldn’t drag it out of me.”

He smiled at her and then he let her use her velvety paws to press him to the ground.  He also made no motion to stop her from resting herself on top of him, curling her striped form up the smallest amount.

Slowly, his arms made their way around her.  He breathed easily after a moment, as if he was surprised that such a powerful, agile tigress could weigh so little, and planted a single, tender kiss on her forehead.  And then, he again held her so tightly that she couldn’t breath—and then he let go when she looked up at him with her steel-colored eyes.

“So… all this time, when you were in that cave, in the pool… was it like being asleep?” she asked.

For a moment, Alex thought.  But then he shook his head.

“No.  I was… conscious, but not completely.  I could… feel, but I couldn’t think, if that makes sense.  I could sense emotions but I couldn’t use logic or control my thoughts.”

Sameera didn’t speak for a moment.  She wasn’t quite sure that she believed Alex—what he said… it didn’t seem to violate any laws of nature, but it was so unlikely—she would end the war?  The idea that the war would end itself was almost beyond her perception.  No one ever spoke of victory anymore; there was only winning the next battle or taking acceptable losses here or there or managing a sudden human offensive or mounting a sudden offensive.  The idea that the war would end peacefully was almost crazy—but Alex sounded so certain of himself.  It was as if he—a human—was an embodiment of the Prophets her people had worshipped since before anyone could remember.

Well.  That would explain why she felt safe enough around him that she was willing to sleep on the ground under the stars rather than higher up like any sensible tiger.  She intertwined her digits with his incredibly dexterous fingers and with a soft, pleasant sigh, she shut her eyes.

“Alex?”

“Yes, Sameera?”

“You said you could sense emotions when you were in the cave.  So... what did you feel, usually?”

…

“Loneliness…”

Five hundred years had not given him a crick in the neck.

But one night sleeping under the stars had.

Half-conscious, Alex managed to haul himself to his feet.  It took him a few moments to blink and rub his eyes and yawn and run a hand through his close-cropped hair, but after that, he was able to think, at least.  At the very least, he remembered where he was, what he was doing, and how he had gotten there—and that prevented him from acting on the instinctive concern all humans experienced with they were alone in forests.

After all—even though humans and tigers had lived side by side for millennia, tigers could still be terrifying, terrifying beings.

Yet, they could also be friendly, even loving beings.  Alex’s people expressed themselves verbally without hesitation, but being affectionate physically was a social taboo.  His own father hadn’t held him since his fifth birthday, and Alex had learned quickly to regard couples with less than eight children who held hands as odd.

None of these constraints applied to human-tiger interactions.  Everyone knew that tigers were physical beings by nature, and so no humans were confused or annoyed when human-tiger couples held hands or hugged, even in public. After all, as frightening in appearance as the striped felines could be, they were just like that—they had to be held, or petted, or physically cajoled in other ways to make up for their almost off-putting silence.

From the time he had been fourteen—over five hundred years before—Alex had known that when the time came for him to find a wife, he would find himself a nice tigress… maybe a golden tabby, but he really had a soft spot for white tigresses.  A nice, sweet white tigress with long red hair and gray eyes—but not hawkish gray eyes like his.  Ideally, Alex’s future wife would have bluish gray eyes.

Alex sighed.  He was thinking about Sameera and he knew it.  Immediately, he tried to clean up his thoughts—but there was nothing really wrong with what he was thinking.  So what if he liked her?  Certainly, she seemed friendly with him, at least, and when the war ended… well, certainly, it was possible that they could be together.  At least as friends.  At least to start off with.

Come to that… where was Sameera?

…

Now Alex was awake.

He began to look around rapidly—but he could only see foreboding, misty forests for miles in any direction.  There were hills, too, but they were so low and sloping that nothing stopped Alex from looking directly at Xan-Mai-V, if he wanted to—and when he did that, he immediately regretted it.  He tried, for a moment, to be optimistic, but he failed and then he started to panic.

“She’s gone.  I’m stuck behind tiger territory in the middle of a war—she’s turning me in.  The war won’t end, and they’ll capture me and torture me and—”

She intended not to surprise Alex, but apparently she had snuck to within twenty feet of him without noticing it—so, really, she couldn’t blame him for jumping out of his skin and almost flying away then and there when she announced her presence not with a word, but with a low, questioning mrowl.

It took him a moment to calm down.  When he did, he gave Sameera an almost exasperated look—until he saw why she had left him in the first place.

She had brought him breakfast.  A large covered tray of foodstuffs rested in her arms—she must have carried it all the way from wherever she’d gotten it back into the forest.

That much Alex seemed to understand, but despite the shy, almost embarrassed smile on his face, Sameera could see that he wasn’t quite familiar with tiger cuisine.  So—blushing, though she couldn’t guess why—she had the tanned human sit down so that she could explain what each eatable was.

Stereotypically, the meal Sameera had brought them was meat based.  There were a few vegetarian sauces and flatbreads, but apart from a very small fruit salad to finish things off, every dish was centered around some sort of meat.  There was fish, lamb, chicken, and goat in the several small dishes Sameera had brought—and of course all were spicy and aromatic and very tigerish indeed.

Briefly, she was worried that Alex might be a vegetarian—some humans were, she had learned—or that the food wouldn’t be to his taste.  But after she slyly watched him take the first few bites without a negative reaction, she smiled in a satisfied, relieved sort of way.  He seemed to like her cooking.

It didn’t take them long to eat.  After all, tiger meals were traditionally very small, save for the communal feasts that came at the end of every week.  When Sameera told Alex this, he smiled and said that he had been invited to a few when he had been younger—and then he had laughed at the shock on Sameera’s face and affirmed that yes, there was once a time when humans were welcomed into tiger feasts, and not as the main course, either.

At first, that clever little comment had made Sameera laugh.  But then, it made her turn away and try to clear her face of any regret that might have come over it.  The last thing she wanted Alex to know was that decades ago, it had become very popular for soldiers and their families to consume human flesh either raw, or roasted on a spit.

Somehow, though, he read the expression on her face.  He didn’t guess precisely why she was sad—she hoped—but the low, husky, almost solemn tone he used to address her then made it clear that he was more serious than any sixteen-year-old ever ought to be.

“It’s time, Sameera,” he said.  And when she tilted her head at him in order to encourage him to clarify what he meant, he looked away from her and he looked at Xan-Mai-V.

“It’s time to end this war.”

Getting close to the city was not difficult.  The security measures taken so far from the front lines were minimal, if not non-existent—there were air-defenses, sure, and any number of aircraft could be scrambled in a matter of minutes should a hyperspeed squadron of fliers come to attack—but there were no foot patrols and next to no boots on the ground.  The few guards that stood near Xan-Mai-V or the several other military structures in the city were armed, but no more heavily than the law mandated that all tigers be armed.

Still, there were risks.  There was a chance, however slight, that someone testing out the new heat-vision goggles being developed by the wisest among Sameera’s people might catch a glimpse of Alex if he left the treeline.  And then, there were kittens at play, schoolchildren training, and scientists like her father doing calisthenics to keep fit, and almost all of them were armed and none of them were likely to hesitate to shoot a human at first sight.

So, Alex stayed about a hundred yards from the treeline, allowing Sameera to go on without him.  The two of them had formulated a plan on their way to the city that demanded a way to smuggle him in—and she knew just how to do that.  She had access to the means to get him in, too.

He wasn’t alone for long.  For five minutes, Alex hid behind a series of bushes, using another spell to make himself almost invisible to the naked eye—then, he stood up and showed himself to the world again when Sameera returned.

She was carrying something in her arms, he observed—no, some things.  And when she got closer, she set all of them on the ground, except for one, and then she unfurled a set of combat trousers identical to hers.  She handed those to Alex—and then she handed him a cotton undershirt, a jacket, gloves, and boots.  All of them ought to fit him, she said, but she didn’t have a very good eye for size and he was so tall and lanky anyway—and why did he look so skeptical that the disguise would get him into the city?

“Sameera,” Alex said patiently, “I can dress like a tiger as much as I want, but I still have a human face,” he pointed out.  “These clothes won’t get me into the city.  We’d better think of another way…”

His voice trailed off as Sameera reached into a pocket and took out a final article of clothing—one that she didn’t wear.  This length of camouflage cloth seemed like a sock, or something, that was oddly large and misshapen, as if it was meant to go on something many times bigger than a foot.

“It’s a mask,” Sameera explained, when she saw Alex looking curiously at the unfamiliar article.  She held it up so that Alex could see that some sections of the cloth were more sheer than others, so that anyone wearing it could see and breathe without a problem.

“We give these to soldiers with bad injuries.  So that they can walk around in public,” Sameera said.  Alex seemed to regard that very strangely, so she continued.

“Our people are a lot more… judgmental than yours,” the tigress admitted.   “Physical attractiveness is very highly valued.”

“Ah,” Alex said noncommittally.  Then, without missing a beat, he accepted the mask, tried it on, and mentioned that Sameera must therefore be a practical celebrity in the city.

She blushed at that.  And then she turned away so that Alex could dress in privacy.

“Well… how do I look?”

Alex’s posture told Sameera that he felt awkward in tiger clothes.  But the slow, almost hesitant way in which he spoke made it even more clear that he wasn’t sure if he had even put them on properly.  The tigress could tell that he was looking down at himself and willing his body not to fidget despite how uncomfortable pants and a shirt and jacket were in comparison to his robes.

She smiled at him and spent a few moments straightening out his clothes.  After that, he looked a bit more presentable and stood a bit straighter, and then Sameera could brush up against his side and honestly tell him that he looked stunning.

She gave him another once-over to ensure that no square inch of his very human skin showed.  As far as she could tell, he looked convincing enough.  True, his gloves and his mask would attract them a little bit of attention… and his almost conspicuous lack of a tail would certainly get them a few stares.  Then again, Alex was supposed to be a crippled veteran—in a way, it was perfect that he was tailless naturally.

Sameera took Alex by the paw—hand, she corrected herself—and began to walk him out of the forest.

“Remember,” she said quietly, “you’re a disabled soldier, and I’m showing you around your retirement home.  So, don’t stand so tall, pretend you’re hurt… hunch over a little bit—that’s much better.”

Alex was taller than her when he stood up straight, but by leaning over just a little and adjusting his normally confident gait to an almost deadened shuffle he was able to imitate the sad, tired manner in which an old man might walk.  He clung to Sameera’s hand and hung his head halfway as if out of shame, just the way she’d seen other wounded veterans do—and then she knew that no one would question him.  After all, no one wanted to bother with an old cripple.

It wasn’t long before they emerged from the forest.  They entered the streets, and Sameera was immediately glad that they had timed things so well.  It was just that time in the morning, after everyone had finished calisthenics.  Kittens were in school, scientists like her father were in the laboratory, and soldiers were all off doing whatever their jobs demanded that they do.  True, there were a few foot patrols through the city, but everyone knew who Sameera was and no one would make trouble for her if she was taking a disabled old tiger through the city.

With that in mind, the two of them made their way onto the outermost street of the city and started to walk, paw in paw.  The moment they left the relative safety of the forest, Alex grew nervous—Sameera could tell from the way he held her paw more tightly for a moment—but nothing happened.  Nothing happened yet.

So, they continued along that road, for a moment, in order to make their way to a main road that led right to the heart of the military town itself.  Only a few other tigers could be seen, here and there, and they were so far off and few in number that though Alex surely saw them he displayed no fear.

If anything, he seemed curious.  Sameera could see him discretely shooting glances at the buildings, marveling at how much and how little tiger architecture had changed through the centuries.

“Your people still can’t stand sleeping too close to the ground,” Alex murmured.  He stepped a little closer to Sameera, then, so that she could see him subtly nod toward a nearby mansion they were passing.  “Five hundred years ago, tigers would only ever make their homes in the trees.  It doesn’t look like much has changed.”

“Everyone has a tree-home or two,” Sameera replied softly.  She glanced at the large, metal and obsidian structure Alex was still staring at and leaned closer to him so that she could thank him for being so impressed by her home.  Tigers always loved it when their homes were complimented.

Soon, they would pass other houses.  And then, there would be a few stores, the communal temple, several training facilities… and from there until they reached their goal—Xan-Mai-V itself—everything they saw would be blatantly military.  There would be barracks, anti-aircraft weapons, helicopters, armories, and the latest in cover military technology.

Sameera still bit her lip when she thought of all the unknown unknowns there were for the two of them to cope with—things they didn’t know that they didn’t know.  They didn’t know what sensors her people may have developed to help them detect and eliminate human incursions into their territory, and although Alex said that his shield spell would be nearly impenetrable after five hundred years of gaining power, she still worried about him.  After all, he was just a boy.

But they continued through the city without difficulty.  Although a few people Sameera knew and was friendly with saw her and smiled at her and waved at her, the moment they saw that she was leading a disabled veteran by the paw they turned away and left her alone.

Still, as they approached Xan-Mai-V, she grew nervous.  She couldn’t help it.  She had tried not to think about their eventual goal—ending the war—because doing so seemed so difficult and improbable that the warrior in her told her that it was a goal simply not worth pursuing.  She had kept her mind on immediate, short-term goals, but as they drew closer and closer to the tower, she couldn’t help but think of all that could go wrong—all that had gone wrong in the over five hundred years of total war that had ravaged her people, and Alex’s.

It might just be best to turn around and give up before something bad happened.

And then, Sameera looked at Alex.  He was behind her, somewhat, and his posture was shaky and so were his steps.  His face was downcast, and yet when Sameera looked closely, she could see through his mask—she could see his eyes, focused intently on Xan-Mai-V not a trace of hesitation or fear or uncertainty about them.  He believed in himself—he believed in what they were doing.

“And besides,” Sameera thought to herself, “if we can’t end this war… we can’t stay together—at least, as friends.  At least to start off with.”

Sameera couldn’t look into the future as Alex could.  But she didn’t need to know that she wanted a future where she and Alex could be together.   

“Sameera… what can I do for you?

“I’m showing Mr. Nawaz around his new home.  We’re going to meet my uncle.”

To Alex, the way Sameera and one of the two guards posted at the main entrance to Xan-Mai-V spoke to one another was gruff, abrupt, and curt, if not rude altogether.  Humans never spoke to one another like that under normal circumstances, but tigers always did.  After all, why not, when most of their communication was nonverbal?  Certainly it was clear, even to Alex, that there were no hard feelings between Sameera and the guard when they began to hold paws for a few moments simply to hold paws.

He felt some jealousy when that happened.  But it seemed that the brief physical intimacy that Sameera and the guard shared was enough to convince the latter to let the two of them inside without so much as asking for identification.

It was the first time Alex had been inside a tiger building in quite some time… over five hundred years, in fact.  But the basic stylistic themes that had defined the way tigers made buildings seemed not to have changed at all.  Sure, there were more advanced materials, and sure, cleanliness standards were extremely high, but the entire place was still shadowed, dimly lit, and extremely simplistic.

It wasn’t his style.  Not really.  But at least it was easy to get around, and at least tigers were still industrious and focused.  As he followed Sameera up successive flights of stairs, he saw endless corridors and dozens of rooms packed with military officers, but no one was walking around.  Few were talking.  All were too busy working to notice a young female and an old cripple making their way right to the very top of the tower—right to where their boss kept his office.

Starting at one of the higher floors, the stairways that spiraled around the tower and its rooms abandoned the sleek, metallic walls that protected them from the outside world and swapped them for floor-to-ceiling windows that allowed in enough light for Alex to see properly—and look outside.

When he did so, he smiled.  His people prided themselves on being closer to nature than their feline friends, but no one could pretend that tigers didn’t love wilderness also.  Sameera mentioned that although Xan-Mai-V was one of the most important population centers in the region, her people still maintained a 500:1 ratio of developed land to nature whenever they possibly could.

He told her he was proud of them for that, and soon, he was sure that there wouldn’t just be peace between tigers and humans.  They would be understanding, compassion, and true friendship between them all.  Within a year or two, he went on, no one would care about interspecies dating, or marriage, and so the two of them would have no problems whatsoever by the time they were in their twenties.

Alex literally didn’t realize that he’d said these things.  He simply continued to walk up the stairs towards the top floor, where Sameera’s uncle and the way to end the war waited.

Sameera had heard what he’d said, of course—she was a tigress.  But she didn’t respond, of course—she was a tigress.  She simply continued to walk up the stairs towards the top floor, where her uncle and the way to end the war and the way to be with Alex forever waited.

It wasn’t long before they were at the door to her uncle’s office.  She’d been there before, a hundred times, but she’d never been so nervous to push against those monolithic obsidian surfaces and go through.  After all, no matter what Alex said, there was so much that could go wrong.  The odds were against them, and they had been for over five hundred years.

And yet, when Sameera thought of all the death and the devastation that the war had given to her people and Alex’s, and when she thought about all the friendships and relationships that would never be if she and Alex didn’t do what they were supposed to do, she knew that she had no choice.  She had to go forward, for her sake, for Alex’s, and for all the other tigers and humans who would have a chance to be together because of them.

So, she held Alex’s hand tightly enough that despite the glove he wore, she could feel the heat radiating through his skin.  She placed her free paw on the door—and then she pushed.

It was a nice room.  It had a bird’s-eye view of the city below and the surrounding forest, and it was adorned with the latest, most fashionable of fixtures—wooden panels on the walls; sleek, ultramodern chairs made only of curved, formed glass; diffuse, dim lights overhead; several fountains mounted on brief outcroppings from the walls that let their results pour down miniature hills of smooth, multi-colored pebbles; more floor-to-ceiling windows; and a single, large desk paw-made from the finest wood tigers had access to.

The entire place was neat, and the high ceilings made it seem much bigger than it actually was.  It had been carefully thought out and fabricated with even more care—after all, Sameera’s uncle was one of the highest-ranking officers in the entire intelligence branch of the military.

He didn’t dress like other soldiers.  Of course, he retained the trousers and boots that any tiger, any combatant proudly wore, and certainly he had a pistol at his side.  But instead of the tough jackets other tigers tended to wear, he was permitted to wear a simple, long-sleeved tee shirt.  It was black in color, so the plain white text and logo on his left pectoral that displayed his name, rank, and service number could be read from a distance.

Dieter Khan was not a boots-on-the-ground soldier by any standard.  He was too old and to be deployed in offensive operations, but that wasn’t why he worked in military intelligence.  He worked in military intelligence because his frighteningly sharp mind would be wasted if he was in any other position, and he had done so from the moment he his now decades long career in the service had started.

For the past week or so, work had demanded that he put in long hours and sacrifice what little free time he was normally allotted.  His ruff was overgrown, but apart from that, he looked as sharp and clean-cut as he ever did.  His hair was neatly styled and his clothes were washed and freshly pressed, and when he saw that his young niece had entered the room, his smile was as lively and welcoming as it had been when he had been a teenager.

Sameera greeted her uncle not with words, but by cleanly vaulting over his desk to rub her cheek against his.  He reciprocated her affections and then held her back, for a moment, so that he could look into her eyes and then touch his nose against hers.

“Sameera,” the tiger said, after she took a seat on his desk, next to the papers he was working on, “what are you doing here at this hour?  Shouldn’t you be in school?” he asked.

“Not until tomorrow,” the tigress replied happily.  “I still have about twenty hours left in my weekend.”

“Good, good…” Dieter replied generically.  He looked up at her, smiled again—and that was all.  That was as long as conversations between tigers tended to last.

For a moment, the tiger occupied himself by holding paws with Sameera, but after that, he could ignore the third body in the room no longer.  He looked at the masked figure standing obediently just in front of the door with his legs apart, his head half-bowed and his paws clasped behind his back in an at ease position, and then he looked at his niece and tilted his head.

Sameera’s smile faltered the smallest amount.  She slid off her uncle’s desk and took his paws into hers so that she could persuade him to stand up and walk forward until he was across from the injured veteran, and then she left him to go and stand at the other tiger’s side.

She held the cripple’s paw tightly.  And then she introduced him.

“Uncle, this is Alex Kralik.  And he and I both want to talk to you… about ending the war.”

Immediately, Dieter was interested.  He stood up and greeted the other male with a curt bow, before moving his paw in a manner that prompted Alex to tell him about whatever intelligence or idea or strategy he had to crush the humans once and for all.

And then, Dieter tilted his head.  The veteran, the cripple, was reaching up to his mask—then, he took his mask into his gloved paws with an odd, almost chilling degree of dexterity.

And then he began to take it off.

When Alex showed his face, Sameera’s uncle—Dieter Khan, judging by the embossed nameplate sitting on his desk—froze up so completely that even the eternally alive tip of his tail ceased to move.  His paws curled into tight fists, but he made no motions to attack or run or call for help or anything, and so Alex held onto Sameera’s paw tightly and began to speak.

He tried not to be too verbose.  He knew that tigers were naturally wary of those who used more words than were necessary, and being anything more than monosyllabic might have frightened Dieter into acting hastily.  And yet, he had to use a certain amount of language to convey who he was, how he had gotten there, and what he was doing.

Alex was completely and entirely honest to Dieter.  He was emotional, too, and sincerely used rhetoric when he asked Dieter to consider how many had died in the past—and how many might die if the war were to continue.  He didn’t ask for much—only that Dieter either force tiger leadership to talk to his people, or, failing that, that he open up communications with the humans on his own.  Alex somehow knew that his people, too, were tired after five hundred years of total war, and he was sure that if one of the two races represented in that room stepped forward with an offering of peace, the other would respond.

“And that’s all I’m asking,” Alex said.  He was almost panting, he realized, and he was still pacing rapidly across the room in front of Dieter.  Sameera had let go of him so that she could stand off to the side and look, nervously, between her uncle and the only human she had ever been around in her life.  Dieter hadn’t moved a muscle still, and although he had calmed, somewhat, as the minutes had ticked by, he wasn’t quite standing at ease.  He still stood up perfectly straight and his eyes still bore into Alex’s, and he did not say a word and so Alex continued albeit in a more careful, measured tone.

“All I’m saying,” the boy said slowly, “is that we should give peace a chance.  That’s all.  And… if you sincerely reach out to my people and they don’t want to talk… then you can do whatever you want.”  He finished on an exhausted tone and looked away.  “All I want is to give peace a chance.”

Alex didn’t have anything more to say after that.  He stopped pacing and simply stood still with his gaze on the floor near Dieter’s feet and his hands so tightly clenched into fists that it took him a moment to notice that Sameera was at his side and trying to intertwine her digits with his fingers.

Eventually, the boy managed to relax.  He looked up at Dieter and willed the muscles in his hand to relax so that he could offer the tigress at his side the physical intimacy she desired—and when that happened, Dieter finally did more than stand and wait and stare.

He looked at Alex.  Then, slowly, he looked at his niece in such a way that Alex knew he was observing him through the corner of his eye.

“You believe him?” Dieter asked calmly.  More than calmly—his voice was soft and soothing and patient and tolerant and so when Sameera looked at her uncle, she smiled.

“I do,” the tigress said.  “Every word.”

She smiled again, and then she wrapped her arms around Alex’s body and held him close.  In doing so, she rested her head against the boy’s shoulder, and if Alex hadn’t turned to look at her, then, he might have had a chance to stop Dieter.

But he didn’t.

And so, one moment, Alex was looking into Sameera’s eyes, warm and blue and open and loving and alive.  And then, he was looking into Sameera’s eyes, cold and black and shut and silent and dead, because Dieter had just drawn his pistol and shot her through the head.

Alex’s mouth opened and he moved to cover Sameera with his arms—and then he began to scream.  By this point, Dieter had fired several more shots and pressed a hidden panic button that was even then calling Xan-Mai-V’s crack defense troops into the room, but even after dozens of the heavily armed and armored tigers had poured in and fired hundreds if not thousands bullets at Alex, the boy remained unharmed.

His shield was too strong.  It kept the bullets out and kept him and the body that had once belonged to Sameera in, so that he could caress her and cradle her and beg her to come back to life and weep in utter sorrow and loss when she did not move.

Eventually, Xan-Mai-V’s defense group stopped firing.  Eventually, Dieter stopped firing, too, and lowered his pistol and his hackles just enough to be stunned by a sight that was, by any rights, impossible: a boy, a human boy, holding a tigress’s body and crying.

There was a waterfall that had long been greatly valued and respected by world’s two greatest races.  Although the war had threatened to destroy it, at first, fighting quickly drew away to other parts of the world, leaving that area alone, lost, and forgotten—until, at long, long last, it was needed again.

To the east lay massive, foreboding mountains, so tall and grim and freezing that they blotted out the sky.  And to the west lay endless expanses of forest, so dense and dark and solemn and strong that the Sun did not touch the ground.  In the crux of these two seemingly contradictory environments lay a brief swath of rockland forged by lava that had frozen into obsidian an age ago, and it was through this treacherous that a river flowed.

It was fed by both melting snow from the mountains and innumerable smaller rivers from the forests.  As a result of its multiple sources, the volume of water that cut through the rocks was great.

This was why, over the centuries, the river had cut a deep, sleek path through the environment.  The force of its erosion was such that by the time the river met the falls, it was allowed to move so fast that it didn’t just fall.  It flew off the cliff and met the ground again some dozens of yards displaced from its original location, only a hundred or so yards off the ground.

Yet, the great roar one might expect to result from such a phenomenon was conspicuously absent, and no one, human or tiger, knew why.  When the ancestors of both races had first found that location, they, too, had been struck by the peace that existed despite the tumult and violence that ought to have defined the place, and for that reason, that waterfall had always been where the leaders of tigers and humans came to resolve problems between their races.

For five hundred years, the falls had been forgotten.  But that day, the falls were remembered again.  And again, the leaders of tigers and humans came to resolve problems between their races.

Each side took no chances, however.  Stony-faced humans with the ability to manipulate rocks and water and electricity solemnly stood guard on the human side of the falls, and on the tiger side of the falls, hundreds of armed soldiers waited, in the shadows, to turn that sacred area into a warzone.

But for hours, nothing happened.  No one blinked or put a toe out of line, but not a shot was fired and not a spell was cast.  And so, in time, human leadership approached, flying down from the mountains at a careful, measured speed, and tiger leadership approached, creeping forth from the forest with SUVs and helicopters and tanks in tow.

Still, nothing happened.  And so, after several moments of simply staring at one another, the leaders of both races approached the waterfall and then looked at one another from each side of the river.

No one said a word.

But, after a brief spell of time, the human leaders signaled that their spellcasters were to stand at ease.  And then, the tiger leaders signaled that their soldiers were to lower their weapons.

And then, the tiger leaders signaled that their soldiers were to disarm.  And then, the human leaders signaled that their spellcasters were to release all the magical power they had collected over the hours.  And, slowly, the warriors of both races did as they were told.

Still, no one said a word.

But then, eventually, one human leader took a step forward.  He placed his foot on the surface of the water before him, and then he began to walk, slowly, toward the leaders of the race on the other side of the river.  His friends joined him, then, cautiously making their way to the striped felines across the water, so silently and solemnly that they could have been phantoms.

Eventually, they arrived.  They were on the tiger side of the river, not ten feet from the race that they had warred with for over five hundred years.  They stood… not quite at ease, but not quite prepared to fight or run or hide or die.  And the tigers stood not quite at ease, but not quite prepared to fight or run or escape or kill.

For some moments, no one said a word.  And then, one tiger, the commander of all ground forces on the front line, took a step forward.  He bowed, curtly, and then stood up straight—and then he bowed much lower and remained in that position for a moment.

“I am sorry,” he said, “for what I did last week.  I should not have ordered the attack on your medical facilities.  It was wrong.”

The humans didn’t reply for a moment.  But then, as the tiger stood up straight again, a human bowed.

“I am sorry for what I did last month… I should not have ordered the burning of your school complex.  It was… very, very, wrong.”

He did not stop bowing.  In fact, after a moment, he descended to his knees and placed his head on the ground in submission, begging for the forgiveness of the striped felines only a few feet from him.

His forgiveness was given nonverbally.  Because, after a moment, he felt a warm, furred weight on his shoulder, and looked up to see his sworn enemy kneeling right in front of him, trying to smile despite the tears in his eyes.

The humans spoke several more apologies then.  By the time they were completed, all of the tiger leaders had gone to hold the hands of their former enemies, and lick and caress them in their own feline manner of apologizing.

There were tears, of course, and there were times when it seemed that though the races might be able to forgive one another, they would never again be as they once were.  But, in time, it wasn’t just the leaders of tigers and humans who were apologizing and forgiving one another for five hundred years of violence—the soldiers, the warriors of each race had crossed the river and were even then standing among one another as if they were brothers again.

The war was over.

There were no residual bursts of violence, and there was no disagreement.  Across the land, there was disarmament, and within hours, many tigers had gone to human-controlled territory to see the descendants of people their ancestors had been friends with, and many humans had gone to tiger-controlled territory to do the same.  There was some disagreement about how best to merge the governments and industries of the two formerly separated nations, but no one resorted to violence.  No one even thought about violence.

There would be problems between tigers and humans in the future, of course.  And… the discoveries of dozens of mass graves all over the continent might temper positive energy for some periods of time.  But the tigers’ Prophets and the humans’ Gods were in complete agreement: there would never be a war between the races, ever again.  From then until time itself ended, tigers and humans would be brothers and sisters once again.

A week after the war ended, the final fatalities of the war had been cleaned and prayed for and prepared to be buried, in the case of humans, or burned, in the case of tigers.  Cremation for tigers was commanded by the law, and the Prophets, but for the first time in over five hundred years, an exception was made.  After all, it was the first time in over five hundred years that a tigress who was spoken for by a human had died.

Sameera’s family had been waiting at the waterfall for hours before Alex arrived.  They had been praying for her, and remembering her, and trying ever so hard not to think about her lovely blue eyes, her brilliant red hair, her laugh, her smile, or how it felt when she snuggled close and purred. 

But when Alex arrived, not one of them could prevent the tears from coming to their eyes.  Because when he came, he was carrying Sameera’s body in his arms.

Her face was hidden, of course, and so was her fur.  She had been gently wrapped in the ceremonial cloth that tigers used to ensure that the cremation of their dead went smoothly, and this meant that all that really differentiated her from just another dead body was her hair, long and red and lovely, tiredly cascading back from a head that would never rise again.

They wanted to go and see her one last time.  They wanted to be able to touch her one last time, but tradition demanded that they didn’t.  And so, they only watched as Alex passed them by, slowly, and began to walk across the surface of the river.

His gait was slow.  His gait was so slow that he seemed to float more than anything else, but regardless, he eventually reached his destination: the very center of the river, just feet from where water cascaded off the lava cliffs and fed the river below.

It was there that he knelt and held Sameera tightly.  He pressed her head against the crook of his neck and pressed his head against the side of her precious, beautiful face, and then he began to chant.

He did not use the tongue common to tigers and humans.  Instead, he used an ancient language, so harsh and removed from modern speaking that listening to it was like travelling back in time.  Alex’s lips barely seemed to move as he spoke, but it was clear that his words were having effects on his surroundings… and himself.

Broad, shimmering arcs of energy gyrated in the air around the boy.  The water he was standing on pulsated and froze and melted in strange, unpredictable patterns—the spell was set.  Alex was ready to do lock himself away from the world again; all that was left was for him to set his end condition.

He looked up.  Looked around—at the forests, the mountains, Sameera’s family… and then Sameera herself, still cold and dead and limp in his arms.  His shut his eyes so tightly that it hurt; yet he could not prevent a lone drop of wetness from making its way down his face.  He now knew when he wanted the spell to end.

“I will return,” he said softly, “when… I don’t have to be lonely anymore.”

Alex held Sameera to him more tightly than he ever had before, more tightly than anyone ever would again.  His body curled around hers and if he’d had a moment more, his tears would have made his back, his shoulders, his chest violently shake.

But he didn’t.  Just as he plunged into the darkest depths of sadness, Alex turned to stone, and so did the tigress in his arms.  As the spell ended, a splinter of rock connected him and the woman he would have loved to the bottom of the lake, forever locking them in place.

And so Alex and Sameera would always be there to memorialize the war between humans and tigers.  They wouldn’t erode, ever, and the spell certainly wouldn’t end, ever.  After all, there was not even the slightest chance that with Sameera dead in his arms, Alex would ever feel anything but total, complete, eternal loneliness.