"Borin and Merek Ch. 1 - The Journey's End" - (M/M)

Here's a first draft of a fantasy-erotica thing I've been working on, this one with a lot of help from my husband. It's a high-fantasy-style tsundere story about a wolf and a fox.

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Chapter 1 - The Journey’s End

Routher’s Landing was a long ways back. Merek couldn’t be sure just how many times the sun had arced through the sky, how many freezing cold nights he’d endured, how many times he’d felt gnawing dogs in his stomach, barking at him to eat something. The plains, valleys, forests and hills between Routher’s Landing and the seemingly mythical Scourthsway were full of vegetation, but the snow-white fox had no idea how to light a campfire in the bare woods to cook roots, and so many of the berries were treacherous. Animal life was completely verboten, as Merek ran squealing from anything that so much as chiittered harshly at him, and lacked the strength to hunt if he ever could bring himself to kill a poor, defenseless (or deathly snarling) animal.

He had been ousted from Routher’s Landing due to his effeminate ways. The funny way he spoke was one small thing; there were a few other villagers who hissed out their S’s and spoke with a hitch in their throats, but not to the extent that Merek did. He enjoyed wearing his younger sister’s clothing, to her irritation and his family clan’s mortification. He’d also proven himself almost useless to the men of the village; unable to hunt, unable to fight, unable to even dig holes to plant seeds. He could sew and cook and craft jewelry, things largely considered to be the realm of the women in town. When he grew his blonde head-fur out long, and dyed the rest of his fur an ostentatious pink using the colored salts from the hills mixed with bath-water, that’s when the villagers put immense pressure on the young fox’s family to banish him. 

Merek had been oblivious to the true reasoning for sending him out into the wild. Cross-dressing and weakness were poor reasons to banish someone to the tough wilds that made up the interior of the continent. Fornicating with older men was a much better reason, although Merek had no idea that it had not been in shameful secret, nor did he know that the aggressive older boar who indulged his fantasies of being a kidnapped and ravaged damsel would attempt to blackmail his family over those furtive and wet acts.

The Morningstar clan had given him nothing more than a handful of berries and sent him on his way, dooming him to surely die once winter marched into the land. They had planted seeds in him that it would perhaps be a two week trek, knowing full well that it was far longer to Scourthsway. They had urged him to travel northwest towards the massive kingdom near the opposite coast and Merek obliged, promised that he would meet worse ends in any of the coastal villages near Routher’s Landing. Merek somehow managed to spend two weeks out in the elements, drinking water from the Latriesh River and managing to catch a few icky, slimy, squirming fish. Neither was enough, and the starved, ragged-clothed fox wandered helplessly on. 

He emerged from one particularly dark and intense wood near sundown to gaze in simple disbelief at a massive castle nestled in distant foothills, faint whiffs of smoke from a village beneath it. The village and the kingdom never got closer as darkness fell, a hunger hallucination that nevertheless drove him forward towards anything that would give him the strength to approach. By the depth of night, driven by his hunger and vision, he finally happened upon a campsite near a small glade. A campfire smoldered next to a rough shelter, but no one seemed to be present. He staggered forth at nearly a run and burst into the canvas tent. It was empty of life.

The tent was a simple A pitched at an angle from the ground to the opening, but it felt like a grand cavern to the slight Merek. He stood inside and tried to reach the tent’s apex with his middle finger, but he could just barely touch the waxy canvas on his very toes.  After a few seconds of marveling at how someone could have erected a tent - a tent! - for shelter when he had only found dank caves and derelict burrows to sleep in, his stomach snarled and he dug through the inanimate contents. Clothing, useless, but deliriously musky with the scents of Male. Various objects he was unaware of, perhaps tools. Finally, a sack of simple potatoes. He immediately squealed and snatched one, then devoured it with a mass of crunching. It wasn’t the rough, inedible roots he found in the wild, but a standard potato from a farm. While nearly disgusting raw, he ate the entire thing, then grew dizzy with nausea at having eaten so much of something so quick after so long of nothing. 

Merek came to his senses after drooling on the floor canvas of the tent, and realized he was raiding a campsite. A person’s campsite. A person who was not present, but would not have left their food simply lying around for starving foxes to eat. He tried to heft the entire sack of potatoes, but could barely tip it over. Increasingly frantic, he turned the hem of his sackcloth into a scoop and stuffed six potatoes in it, then turned and scurried out of the tent. 

The fox made just two steps outside of the tent’s opening when something impaled his makeshift potato sack with a firm THWACK! He dumbly looked down at an arrow as it stuck out of the pile of potatoes. A soft fwip sound, and then another THWACK!

He let go of the hem of his tunic and the potatoes spilled out save for the ones impaled by the arrow, and he let out a tremendous vulpine shriek that echoed off the nearby trees, then crumpled down and clutched at what he was sure was a terrible deathly mess of his insides coming out from being struck by an arrow. It was only potatoes, three of them strung through on two perfectly fired arrows, the second having split the first down the middle. Dazed and unharmed, he looked up. The twilight trees fluttered with numerous squawks and rustles of a flock of roosting birds disturbed by the scream. Below them, a pair of ominous reflective eyes lit by firelight, then the glint of bestial teeth.

“The fire. Where I can see you,” the creature growled, and started to approach. Not a mere wild animal, but a bipedal wolf in dark charcoal fur and roughened leather armor.  Merek let out a meek squeal and promptly pissed himself, making a wet mess of one of the stolen potatoes. The wolf lowered his bow but continued to approach, no longer as silent as he had crept up on the campsite. 


Merek hurried forward and almost fell into the fire.  “Pl-please… I’s… so famished…” His voice was weak and hoarse. “I… I’s so hungry, I haven’t eaten in days… I… I wasn’t sure if I could take another step, b-but I saw the fire, and the campsite, and… and thought maybe I could survive for just another week if I found enough food to carry with me… please…”  He could barely speak between wracking sobs.

The wolf strode right up to the fire, then let out a disgruntled huff and slung his bow back behind him. “You, are a poor excuse for a thief.”

Merek looked up, and up, and up, seemingly as far up as the distant hills rose, and even then only saw the underside of the wolf’s muzzle. A sizzling sound broke his reverie and he looked down to see his own piss causing steam at the edge of the fire, one of the potatoes surely roasting in it, a few spatters of his own tears adding to the mess.

The wolf grabbed him by the scruff and crouched down, then held the squirming vulpine as he sniffed. “Thieves always scent their fur. You smell like desperation and piss.” He then let go and Merek sagged back to his worried crouch. The wolf turned and sat down on one of the logs he had pulled up near the fire, then looked Merek over and over. “You are not from around here. I know this because you are a fox, and there are no foxes in Scourthsway.” The wolf’s knees came up high as he sat on the log. 

“They...we’s don’t have wolfs in R-r-r-routher’s Landing, Mister Wolf Sir,” Merek croaked out, slowly gaining confidence that he was not about to be eaten, killed, imprisoned, kidnapped, or even slapped by the hulking wolf. 

The wolf perked an eyebrow spot. “Routher’s Landing…”

“It’s a small village about… two week’s journey west of here. When… when the sun rises over the Latriesh Mountains in the morning, it… it floods our valley with light…” Merek mewled out the words, then cast his gaze down at the ground again for giving the glorious wolf such a useless description. “Sir, I’s so hungry, it hurts…” 

The wolf got up and stepped around the fire, then reached down. Merek immediately recoiled, cowering with ears trapped against his head. The wolf snatched his enormous hand around the arrow that had skewered Merek’s ill-gotten bounty and withdrew it. He sniffed at the pierced spuds, then stuck the potatoes into the fire. “Raw potatoes will make you ill. You already pissed yourself. I won’t bother myself with a walking toilet.”

Merek’s ears slowly rose but stayed mostly wilted and he sank down in relief that the wolf hadn’t struck at him. He watched the herculean wolf through the flames, captivated by the dancing flicks of light on the lupine’s armor and how said armor and hunting gear had to curve over the wolf’s muscles. No one in Routher’s Landing ever wore anything as fancy as the wolf did, no gleaming leather, no polished metal, no swordsman’s gloves. 

The wolf spoke while he jabbed the potatoes in the coals of the fire. “I don’t see how some little fox like you would make it this far without being ravaged, eaten, or carried off by an owl. You’re very lucky that I’m a generous wolf. One learns quickly that battles are only for soldiers and scoundrels. Foreign foxes from unfamiliar lands? You said Routher’s Landing. The one place I haven’t been yet.” After a few more moments of the spuds roasting in the fire, the wolf pulled them free and carried the arrow with him as he walked over to the tent. He returned with a purple-red waterskin and uncorked it, then doused the potatoes with a sizzle. The smell of hot mulled wine filled the air.  Then he turned the arrow around and handed the fletching end to Merek. 

The fox regarded the arrowed potatoes with a dull look, actually pondering whether the wolf meant him to shoot the- then his hunger took over. “Oh please sirs, thank yous sirs!” Merek squealed, and took the arrow, then quickly nibbled at the potatoes. He squealed again, this time from the heat, and the wolf handed him the waterskin. Merek took a few swigs and sputtered a mouthful out onto the potatoes, unaccustomed to such strong liquors. He then continued nibbling and swigging.

“Perhaps that wine was a poor idea, but I am not in a good frame of mind. I was asleep. If you had come upon me in my slumber, you would be the potato.” 

“Oh no, I’s not a potato,” Merek said.


“But,” the wolf continued, sounding weary to even have to speak, “I had to wet a sapling.” The wolf stood again, and walked over to a sack that hung from a tree branch. Merek would never be able to reach it even if he jumped straight up, but the wolf took it down with ease and withdrew some roasted leg of an animal and took a lazy tear from the cooked flesh. He then came back to the fire and sat upon the log with a huff. 

The fox looked up over his simple - and alcoholic - meal with big eyes. “Why would yous wet a sapling, wolf sir?”

For the first time since almost murdering Merek, the wolf made a slight twitch of a grin. “Perhaps in a rough village such as yours, you piss instead of making euphemisms.”

Merek looked back to his food and continued nibbling. He needed less wine now as the potatoes had cooled, and already felt alarmingly warm in the ears. “I’s don’t know how to make a youfemin.” The fox got a funny feeling in his stomach, like something was scaring him, but he didn’t know what. He stared dumbly through the flames, spurred on by the influx of something strange called A Meal, and tempered by the influx of Wine. While he stared, the wolf gnawed and tore at his own snack, shifting about on the log. His leather pants had a front closure for modesty, and it was currently wide open. As the lupine moved about, his cock flopped out into the open. Merek’s ears perked and then flipped back.  “Wolf Sirs, it fell out,” he meekly pointed.

The wolf looked down between his legs and huffed, then tucked himself back up inside and secured the buttons. “Hmf. I should have guessed where you were from. I have heard the stories about the salt dyes in the fur. Pink? Are you mad? Are you hoping that some brazen adventurer will capture you as his wife?” He punctuated his speech by licking his chops free of salted meat.  “Borin Stormbringer does not take wild vixens for wives.”

Merek just continued eating, mostly oblivious to the wolf’s words. Every few bites, though, he suddenly saw the wolf’s big, black organ in his mind’s eye. He freshly salivated against the potatoes, but said nothing. After devouring two potatoes faster than a hummingbird beats its wings, his hunger changed to a pang of cramping and he hunkered down against himself. 

Borin finished gnawing the scraps off his bone and tossed it into the fire, then turned and headed into the tent. “I suggest you join me in here unless you want another hunter to come and skin you for your rare, colorful pelt.”

Merek paused, but then bolted up as soon as Borin looked over his shoulder and narrowed his eyes. The fox scurried over and climbed into the tent, instantly crowded against one side. Borin was massive and there was hardly room for a second person. “Boring? That’s a nice name. Kinda strange, I guess. Do… do you really think someone would skin me f-for my fur?” A moment passed, and then the fox felt over his stomach. “Uhnf… think… think I ate that potato too fast… I have a tummyache…”

Borin grabbed a spare rucksack and spread it out. “You will have to sleep in here.” He then stripped out of his hunting gear and boots, and climbed into his own bed sack. “If you are sick, go back outside.”

Merek cowered for a few more minutes, and the cramping slowly subsided. Dizzy from the dregs of wine that he’d consumed, he wedged himself into the rucksack. He opened his muzzle to speak again, but Borin’s breathing had already slowed to a deep huff and a light grunting snore. The fox sighed to himself and pulled the rucksack closed until just his black nosepad stuck out. “I’s okay,” he eventually murmured. The rucksack was not meant for sleeping, but Merek had spent so many nights out in the wilderness that it was like sleeping next to a fire. He nodded off to enjoy the first deep sleep of his journey.