Page 18 of Fated in A Time of War

KRALL

T he first thing I know is silence.

Not the battlefield kind, heavy with smoke and blood and the static hiss of comms. Not the haunted silence of after, when the guns stop but the screaming inside doesn’t. This one’s different. Softer. Almost… dangerous in its gentleness.

I blink awake to the fractured light filtering through the jagged ceiling of the mag-train husk. Dust motes drift like lazy embers, spinning in a shaft of pale morning glow. My weapon’s still across my chest, my claws flexed against the grip even in sleep. But the pressure at my side isn’t steel.

It’s her.

Alice.

She’s curled in close, head tilted against my shoulder, her body wrapped small as if the whole war outside could be kept at bay by the cage of my arm. Her breath comes slow, even, brushing faint warmth against my throat.

Something inside me stirs in response. A thing I thought I buried with Lakka in the mud.

Protectiveness, yes. That I know. It’s instinct, drilled deep: guard your flank, cover your squad. But this isn’t that. It’s not duty. Not obligation. It’s heavier. Stranger. A pull that feels less like choice and more like gravity.

Longing.

Not just for her body—though the closeness of it sets my blood thrumming—but for something more dangerous. Something existential.

I want her here.

The thought alone makes me grind my teeth. I force my gaze away, staring at the fractured walls, the corroded steel ribs overhead. I can’t let softness take root. Not here. Not now. Softness gets you killed. Softness gets her killed.

Slowly, I ease my arm out from around her. She shifts in her sleep, frowning for half a second before settling again, and the look of it nearly undoes me. I stand, pulling my rifle into ready position, because motion is safer than stillness. Duty safer than longing.

The wreckage creaks as I slip outside, boots crunching over brittle glass and warped ferrocrete. Morning hits me with a dry slap—sun glaring through the smoke-haze, painting the horizon in bruised reds and sulfur yellows. The air tastes like rust and burnt wires.

I climb a bent strut and scan the city’s corpse.

Ahead, the path winds toward Tanuki’s industrial core, a stretch the locals once called the Graveworks.

From here, I can already see the silhouettes—mountains of rusted mech frames stacked like bones, spires of half-collapsed cranes clawing at the sky.

It looks like the skeleton yard of dead gods, frozen mid-battle and left to rot.

Perfect place to vanish. Perfect place to be hunted.

Either way, that’s where we’re going.

I drop back into the shadows of the mag-train, eyes flicking once more to her. She’s waking now, rubbing at her face, blinking against the light like some half-starved creature finding warmth for the first time. And gods help me, I want to tell her not to move. Not yet.

But instead, I growl, low and practical.

“Up. We move. Graveworks by nightfall.”

She nods without question, gathering her pack, quiet as a shadow. No argument or resistance. Just that strange calm that gnaws at me worse than defiance ever could.

I check the rifle’s mag, sweep the chamber, and take point. The Graveworks await, and with them—whether salvation or slaughter—I don’t yet know.

But I do know this, the danger I feel at my side isn’t just from Kru mercs or scavenger gangs.

The Graveworks stretch out like the carcass of a dead civilization, rust gnawing every surface, silence pressing heavy on the lungs.

The air’s thick with the taste of copper and old ozone, like the ghosts of a thousand battlefields breathed out and settled here to rot.

We move slow, careful, boots crunching on brittle slag and twisted steel. Every step echoes too loud in my ears.

Alice walks beside me, light on her feet, almost too light.

She moves through the wreckage with this strange kind of reverence, like she’s gliding through a graveyard instead of crawling over the bones of dead machines.

She pauses by the husk of a walker—its legs snapped clean, its cockpit ripped open—and lays her hand against the rusted hull.

She whispers.

Just one word. A name. I can’t catch all of it, but the sound of it cuts deeper than I expect. Not a prayer. Not supplication. It’s… respect. For the dead, the machine or whatever poor bastard got torn out of that cockpit when it fell.

Something in my chest shifts sideways, hard enough to make me growl under my breath. She’s the enemy. She shouldn’t care about our wrecks. Shouldn’t touch them like they mean something. But she does. And it gets under my scales worse than shrapnel.

I keep moving, rifle up, sweeping the heaps for motion.

The Graveworks are a labyrinth of steel corpses—walkers piled on grav-trams, bombed-out haulers slumped against each other like drunkards.

Shadows coil in the hollows, too many places for mercs or gangs to hole up.

Every gust of wind sets some loose panel clattering, a sound sharp as a blade in this silence. My claws twitch against the trigger.

By late afternoon, the haze thickens, smoke-stained sun hanging low. My gut says we need cover before night falls. Too exposed here, too many sightlines. That’s when I see it—a collapsed drop tank, half-sunk into slag, its cannon sheared off and its hull cracked open like a ribcage.

“Here,” I grunt, jerking my chin toward it.

Alice slips inside first, crawling through the split armor plating into the hollowed belly.

I follow, crouching low, weapon always ready.

The air inside is stale but dry, thick with the musk of old oil and scorched composites.

Safer than open ground. Safer than sleeping under mech skeletons waiting to topple.

We settle. Rations come out—two protein bars, the last of the filtered water. Supplies running thin. Too thin. I chew without tasting, jaw tight.

Alice sits cross-legged across from me, eyes reflecting the last flicker of daylight through a crack overhead. She eats slow, deliberate, like she’s stretching the moment more than the food. Then she speaks, voice quiet, but steady.

“We’ll run out in two days. Maybe three.”

I grunt. “We’ll make it.”

Her gaze doesn’t waver. “Not without a resupply. There’s an old shopping complex a few clicks east. Some of the refugees swore the med dispensers there still work. Maybe food printers too.”

I scoff. “That’s a gamble. Complex’ll be stripped bare by now. Or worse, crawling with gangs.”

Her hands fold in her lap, but her eyes hold mine. Calm. Always calm. “It’s a gamble, yes. But a calculated one. And you know it.”

The growl rises in my throat, automatic, ready to shut her down. My first instinct is to refuse outright. March forward, deeper into the Graveworks, away from anything that smells like risk.

But then I remember. The child.

The one she’s trying to save. The reason she’s out here at all.

And damn it, the image sticks—small hands, too thin, clutching at her skirts. A face pale with hunger or sickness. A kid who doesn’t know about Kru mercs or Alliance betrayals. A kid who doesn’t deserve to die in this rusted hell because I was too stubborn to bend.

My claws drum against the rifle grip. The silence stretches long between us, broken only by the faint creak of the tank’s shell in the settling heat. Finally, I let out a breath that tastes like ash.

“Fine.” My voice comes rough, unwilling, but the word’s already out. “We’ll check the complex.”

Her shoulders ease, just barely. She doesn’t smile. Doesn’t gloat. Just nods once, solemn, like she knew I’d come around eventually.

And that pisses me off more than anything.

I lean back against the cold wall of the tank, closing my eyes for a heartbeat. The Graveworks hum around us—distant groans of metal, the whisper of shifting slag. I should be thinking about the route, about angles of approach, about all the ways this could go wrong.

But all I can think about is her hand on that walker’s hull. Her whisper of a name. And the way it moved me, damn her.

The enemy isn’t supposed to move me.

Yet here we are.

And I’ve already agreed to follow her lead.

A mistake or something worse.

The Graveworks settle into night slow, like the world itself is holding its breath.

Outside the tank’s broken shell, wind drags metal across metal, screeches and groans like the earth remembering its pain.

Inside, it’s dark—just the faint orange glow of a chem lamp between us. Not warm, but warmer than the cold.

We lie close, because there’s no room not to. Armor plates shoved aside, packs stacked in a corner, our bodies pressed shoulder to shoulder on the warped metal floor. At first, we don’t speak. Don’t even look. Just listen to each other’s breathing.

I’ve shared foxholes with soldiers before. Spent nights huddled under blast shields, blood sticking my back to the man beside me. But this feels… different. Like there’s more weight in the silence than in the whole Graveworks piled outside.

Her hand shifts in the dim, fingers brushing against mine. Barely a touch. A whisper of skin on scale.

I should pull away. I don’t.

She lingers. Then she does something I don’t expect—she reaches. Slow. Deliberate. Her fingers sliding over mine, twining.

My heart kicks in my chest like a war drum.

I let her take it.

Careful. Gentle. Like if I squeeze too tight, she’ll break. Like she’s made of light and I’m nothing but shadow. My people don’t value gentleness. Vakutans don’t cradle, don’t stroke. We grip, we seize, we hold with force. But with her… gods help me… I want to be soft.

Her eyes find mine in the glow of the lamp. Wide, unguarded. She doesn’t smile. Doesn’t smirk. Just looks. And it’s enough to burn the breath right out of me.

I lean in first. Or maybe she does. Doesn’t matter. Our lips meet in the dark, and it’s like static ripping across raw nerves. The first time had been tentative, accidental almost. This—this is fire. It deepens fast, charged with hunger, with need I didn’t know I was carrying.

Her mouth is warm, alive, tasting faintly of the ration bar we split hours ago.

Her fingers clutch my jaw, and I growl low, not in warning but in want.

My hands find her waist, then her back, pulling her against me.

The rusted hull around us echoes with our breathing, harsh and ragged, like the Graveworks themselves are eavesdropping on our sin.

She gasps my name. Soft. Desperate. And it nearly undoes me.

I’ve touched women before. In barracks, in cities, in the blur between deployments.

But never like this. Never with patience.

Never with reverence. I trace the curve of her spine like it’s sacred.

Memorize the shape of her shoulder, the slope of her neck.

She shivers under my claws and presses closer, and I realize—for the first time—I’m not touching her like a prisoner. Not like a soldier.

But like something else.

Something I don’t have a word for.

I shift over her, positioning my massive frame with slow, deliberate care.

Her thighs part for me, welcoming me in with the kind of trust I never expected to earn.

I brush the length of my cock against her pussy, feeling the slick heat of her.

Her breath catches—sharp and sweet. She arches under me, small hands gripping the thick scales at my back like anchors.

“Krall,” she whispers, voice trembling, “please…”

That word nearly breaks me. I line myself up, grip her hips firmly—but not hard—and begin to push inside.

Her pussy stretches around my cock, tight and hot and so achingly human.

I go slow, slower than I’ve ever gone, until I’m buried in her to the hilt.

Her cry is part pain, part pleasure—and all of it trust.

I still inside her, letting her adjust, letting me adjust.

She feels right around me.

I move. Slowly. Each stroke long, measured, deliberate. Her nails drag across my back, and I shudder. I brace one hand beside her head, the other cradling her thigh as I thrust again—deeper, harder now. She moans, head falling back.

“You feel like you were made for me,” I growl.

“Don’t stop,” she gasps. “Don’t ever stop.”

I don’t.

We fuck like we’re rewriting something—every thrust a declaration, every breath a vow. Her pussy clenches around me as I speed up, hips rolling into her. The sounds she makes—raw, honest, *mine*—ring in my ears like music.

When she comes, it’s not silent. She cries out, body seizing beneath me. I hold her through it, still moving, chasing my own end. It takes only moments more.

With one final thrust, I bury myself deep and come—roaring low, teeth bared, every scale burning. It feels like the war breaking, the world splitting open—and then quiet.

We collapse into each other, tangled and slick with sweat. The Graveworks groan in the distance, but in here, it’s quiet. My chest heaves. Her head rests against it, hair damp, cheek pressed to the place over my heart.

I expect the old tension to crawl back in. The regret. The walls. But nothing comes. Just… stillness.

Her breathing evens. Sleep takes her fast, like she trusts me to guard her dreams.

And me?

I stare up at the cracked metal ceiling, waiting for the nightmares—the fire, the screams, Lakka’s face. But they don’t come.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I don’t dream of war.

I dream of peace.

And of her.