Of Predators and Prey

Circus Disclaimers

Skip ahead if you'd like to avoid any mention of what's to come.

This chapter contains a few mentions of vaginal prolapse, neither graphic nor prolonged, but keep an eye out if this makes you uncomfortable!

As is commonplace on Derian, this story also contains dubcon.

Circus Notes

I owe a belated thanks to GigglingGoblin, whose influence can be seen most apparently in Spots and Stripes, but who has been my key inspiration for Derian as a whole. If not for the incredible passion and excitement she pours into her work - crafting enchanting worlds, delightful characters, and stories as captivating as they are erotic - I may never have felt compelled to create my own, and Aster, Demeter, Daisy, and Chloe would all be relegated to that faraway land of ideas never born, a tragedy I'd rather not consider.

Though I'd recommend all her works, some of my personal favorites are All Aflutter, Bouncy Bounties, Exposed, Maid in Heaven, Squeezed Soft, Under Her Sway, and Spiraling Coils (the first work of hers I ever read, and a wonderful introduction to her particular flavor of dominance - tender and sweet and deeply insidious).

I'll include an almanac entry at the end of the chapter. I don't want to give away too much up here.

As always, your thoughts and constructive criticism are always welcome and appreciated.

Hope you enjoy!

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Of Predator and Prey

Chapter Three

Fertilizer

Daisy padded quietly along the dry jungle floor, her posture small and her eyes wandering. She'd lost Chloe earlier that morning, the levinpher disappearing silently into the dense foliage above, and Daisy had been keeping an especially nervous eye on the vegetation that enclosed her trail ever since - looking for eyes in thick bundles of leaves or clawing hands dangling from the branches that drooped ominously overhead.

The travelers had left behind the lush, dewy section of Rhind three days prior, the White Wall marking clearly the divide, and entered the slightly drier, slightly browner north. The thirsty landscape made it harder for predators to creep about unheard - even the most cautious unable to keep from rustling a few hardened leaves - but Daisy hadn't yet decided if that was a blessing or a curse.

With her tall, sensitive ears, the defenseless bunnygirl could hear every snapping twig or whispering leaf, and couldn't stop imagining in great detail all the prowling jungle creatures stalking through the forest alongside her. Watching her. Waiting to pounce. Thus far, the jungle had been a far less cruel place than Chloe had described it on so many occasions, but Daisy was bright enough to understand that the safety she'd been afforded was owed to her deadly company.

Now, walking alone, Daisy felt miserably naked.

Her gait swung erratically between small, cowered scampering and boisterous trotting, unsure if it was better to disappear into the dirt beneath her feet or present herself as something bigger and angrier than the helpless prey she really was. Every noise that wasn't the endless trill of jungle insects sent her hand careening to the knife on her belt, where it remained until the pounding in her chest subsided to a dull pulsing. Her eyes were growing fatigued from the darting - every glint or shadow another creature ready to strike.

It was truly exhausting, and though Chloe had assured her that the edge of the jungle waited for them this very afternoon, Daisy wasn't too sure she'd make it to the afternoon at this pace - if not from some carnivorous beast, then from her own heart exploding in her chest.

She longed to return to Thimble, those rolling hills of green where predators had no cover to lurk. Where everything was soft and slow.

Overhead, the faint rustling of snapping twigs turned Daisy's ears, and something in the way the noise sprinkled down told her it had finally come - the moment she'd been hiding from.

The dunpher's hand was on her knife before she'd even turned to face her attacker - a reflex more than it was any measured defense - but it wasn't the lunging predator she raced against; it was her own fear.

The fear was faster.

She'd no sooner tightened her grip around the knife's handle when the cold reached her fingertips and finished paralyzing her, reducing her to little more than a soft piece of meat waiting politely to be slaughtered. She thought for a moment about how pathetic her dunpher body really was, so weak that it would rather freeze and accept its death than fight to prolong the inevitable, but then the cold reached her brain, and her thoughts froze too.

Less than a single, terrified heartbeat had passed before the creature was on her - grip like iron and body no more than a blur of gold in her periphery. Together they tumbled, predator and prey entwined as the jungle turned sideways and Daisy's frozen legs flew out from underneath her.

She hit the ground hard, the creature's weight atop her own as they slammed into the hardened dirt trail, and for a startling moment, Daisy felt control over her body again, as though the pain had melted her frozen nerves and freed them to work again. Doing all she could think to do, the helpless bunnygirl slid the knife from its sheath and screwed her eyes closed as tightly as they would go - that way at least she wouldn't have to see the fangs coming.

The cold was already beginning to take her again, tightening around her lungs and stomach, and Daisy used the last of her mobility to draw the knife to her chest, not stabbing or slashing but clutching it like some precious stone, praying that its presence might be enough to ward off death. Or at least keep her company.

But she couldn't even have that.

The last thing Daisy felt before her limbs turned numb was the creature's gentle hand wrapping around her wrist and pulling it slowly away from her chest to pin it to the ground, and even behind closed eyes, she could see the dripping fangs descending towards her throat.

After a length of time too cold and black for Diasy to recognize, she became faintly aware of her own pulse - beating fast and rhythmic in her ears. Fearfully, she clung to the beat, letting its rhythm carry her awareness to the surface where she began to find other, familiar sensations.

Her pack beneath her back, and hard ground beneath the rest of her. Dry air against her thighs. Weight on her stomach, and hands pinning her arms above her head.

After a long, trembling breath, Daisy found that enough of the cold had melted away to crack open her eyes and gaze upon her attacker.

It was Chloe, of course.

"You're getting better," the levinpher said, cracking a smile that glittered in her bright green eyes. "You managed to draw the knife, this time."

Daisy's body went limp with exhaustion, and she let out a noise halfway between a sigh and a wail as her brain tried to understand the liquid warmth of relief now swirling with the cold. It almost hurt.

"I can't keep doing this!" she cried, her voice dry and her eyes wet. "It's too scary!"

Chloe's smile turned something between sympathetic and amused, like a mother to her adorably confused child. "Yeah, dummy. That's the point."

The bunnygirl huffed and pouted, turning her head to blink away the oncoming tears.

"It needs to feel real, Daisy." More sympathy than amusement this time. "That's the only way we can fix your freezing."

"But I never get a break! As soon as you're done pretending to kill me, you go back into the trees, and then it starts all over again. You've basically been torturing me for four days straight!"

Chloe's voice softened even further, as did her grip on Daisy's wrists. "I know, Daisy. I know it's hard. But we only have eight until the high moon, and if you want to be able to protect yourself, this is the first step. If you freeze like this in Mereville, you'll be on the auction block by the time you snap out of it."

Daisy's head stayed turned, and she chewed anxiously on a plump bottom lip.

"Hey, look at me." Chloe's words were less of a commanding hand and more of a gentle finger, tugging softly on Daisy's chin.

Reluctantly, and still pouting, the bunnygirl turned her head to look Chloe in the eyes. Her own were still watery.

"Youaregetting better, Daisy. I meant that."

The dunpher softened a little beneath Chloe's weight.

"What if I accidentally stab you?" she asked, her voice trembling with the whisps of her evaporating frustration. "When you jump at me."

Chloe smiled another motherly smile, though this one was only amused.

"You can't stab me, Daisy. I'm too quick for you."

"But what if I do?"

"You can't." Gently, Chloe released Daisy's wrists and sat up straight. "Try."

Daisy shifted uncomfortably on the ground, but she left her hands above her head and her grip on the knife loose.

"I don't want to."

"Oh, come on." Chloe sat straighter and grinned, then moved an arm behind her back. "I'll even do it with just one arm. That way it's fair."

"I said I don't want to."

"Because you know you can't? What if I do it with no arms?" Chloe's second arm joined her first behind her back. "How about now? Come on, try. Come on, come on, come-"

"No, Chloe!" Though Daisy was shouting, her voice was pleading more than it was angry. Her big, tearful eyes didn't help the glare she was trying to shoot. "I don't want to stab you."

Upright and with her hands behind her back, the levinpher was still, her smile slowly fading. When it had gone completely, and only a faint scowl remained, she slouched in tired disappointment and let her arms fall out from behind her back, returning Daisy's sorry excuse for a glare with one of her own, angry at the dunpher for ruining her fun.

But as the moment lingered, the two traalphia taking slow, deep breaths of the jungle air that surrounded them, Chloe slouched further, almost appearing to soften. And though the twinkle of excitement she'd earlier held didn't return to her eyes, a warm understanding had taken its place.

Slowly, silently, the levinpher fell forwards to loom in Daisy's vision as she had before, but instead of resting her hands on the dunpher's delicate wrists, she planted them firmly on the ground. Then, tenderly, she used her right to take the blade from Daisy's left, and, without breaking her gaze, reached down to Daisy's waist to sheath the implement of death.

"You don't have to worry about me, okay? I can take care of myself just fine."

"But...you're my friend. I have to worry about my friends."

"You have to worry about yourself first, Daisy. You're too kind. It will get you killed."

Chloe's words were quiet, dripping slow and warm like sap from an open wound onto Daisy's waiting lips below. They tasted sweet, and it gently occurred to the dunpher how close her would-be killer lingered.

From here, Daisy could make out the details nobody but Chloe's mothers could know. The quiet yellow that outlined her bright green eyes. How the very tips of her fangs peeked through barely parted lips. Her scent, different than it had always been before, like rain on hot stone.

Her heartbeat, not yet felt, but seen - thrumming along a vein in her neck.

Chloe seemed to be noticing Daisy's details, too, as the slits of her feline pupils slowly widened. She hadn't moved away.

Slowly - ever so slowly - Daisy began to draw her hands along the dirt trail atop which they lay, searching blindly for the place where Chloe's were planted.

With every breath she took and every pebble beneath her knuckles, Daisy felt a familiar heat welling between her legs. Ter and her friends had quenched the dunpher's thirst more thoroughly than most stallions in her small, hometown village ever had, but four days had passed since then, and Daisy had begun to feel the itch again in the rare moments when fear wasn't dominating her attention.

Now, with the warm relief of safety and the weight of Chloe's body pinning her down, Daisy was feeling more than an itch.

What she'd first disregarded as a consequence of her pent-up arousal and isolation from her fellow dunphia, she had since accepted to be a very real - and very urgent - attraction to the levinpher.

All her life, the only bodies Daisy knew were those of her fellow rabbitkin. Soft, squishy, curved. Daisy loved the dunpher body - loved to watch it jiggle as it bounced, loved to use its squishy breasts as pillows or its wide hips as handholds - but she hadn't known until meeting Chloe that a body so different could be just as alluring.

Where Daisy bounced, Chloe was firm and limber. Her chest was small, and her rear - currently seated on Daisy's stomach - was little more than sculpted muscle. Her thighs were tight where a dunpher's curved, her face wasn't rounded but sharp, and though she stood a head shorter than Daisy, the thinness of her body almost made her appear longer.

It was a body without the things Daisy liked to rest on and hold, yet the dunpher found herself transfixed by everything the absence of jiggle revealed. She'd stare at the sinuous muscles in Chloe's thighs as she walked, imagining how tightly they might be able to wrap around her head. She'd stare, when she occasionally got the chance, at the lines of muscles on Chloe's stomach, imagining how gently they might lead her wandering tongue. She'd stare, unabashed, at whatever skin Chloe was willing to reveal, enthralled by its tanned tightness, imagining its heat against her own.

Daisy longed to see how it all might look as Chloe twisted and writhed and bucked, her muscles stretching and flexing into intricate designs, her skin rippling with new anatomy to trace.

But the levinpher's hardened body wasn't all Daisy thought about.

She also thought about her fangs. And her claws.

And her vicious, predatorial ferocity.

Mary was violent - biting and slapping and dragging Daisy around by her hair - but she, just like Ter, was limited by the softness of her own body. Dunphia weren't meant to be ferocious. They could only squeeze so hard. Toss around so much.

Bite so hard.

Daisy ached to feel a pair of fangs sink into her flesh - scarring her, marking her as something owned - and it was Chloe's that she ached for the most.

Chloe, the violent, carnivorous levinpher who'd taken a soft, tasty thing like Daisy into her home not as meat, but as a wounded creature to be tended to. Chloe, who protected her and warded off evil, guarded her against peering eyes and drooling mouths, kept her dry when the jungle was wet, and warm when the jungle was cold.

Chloe, who, in spite of all her furious lectures and insults, cared for Daisy more than she deserved.

The bunnygirl's fantasy filled her with shame. It was selfish. An insult to all the sleepless nights and scars Chloe had accumulated while defending her.

Thank you for risking your life to protect me. Please hurt me now.

But it was on that sticky, pink morning, after being awoken by a palm across the face, that Daisy realized it was precisely Chloe's care for her that warmed the pain from a lovely simmer to a raging boil.

To be treated like a compostable toy by the woman who treated her as something valuable - something worthy - was a thrill Daisy couldn't even fathom, and a desire she felt deeper than bone.

Suddenly, the leftover fear in Daisy's body didn't feel quite so cold anymore. Warmed by her arousal, it was melting into something hot and sticky that seeped into her muscles and made her soft. Made her wet.

A morning of being hunted through the jungle no longer felt like a cruel game, but like foreplay. The pain she'd been gifted - scrapes where she'd fallen to the ground, a remembered tightness around her wrists - no longer ached and stung but hummed pleasantly beneath her skin.

Chloe's fangs, so near to her throat, reminded Daisy of her pulse. Her heartbeat.

The gentle thrumming in her clit.

Daisy could already feel the wetness between her legs, and her core was beginning to ache with unexpressed need as she strained to keep her hips from thrusting up and down. It physically hurt to keep this still, but Daisy found a small bit of peace in Chloe's striking green eyes and stayed there, relaxing herself further beneath the levinpher's graceful weight.

So lost in her protector's feline beauty that Daisy had almost forgotten she was dragging her hands along the ground, drawing them closer to the spot where Chloe's were, moving so slowly that a bystander might assume the levinpher really was a predator and the dunpher was doing its best to avoid detection.

Their fingers were the first to touch, and though it had been a slow, gentle approach, the immediacy of contact startled both the weary travelers. Chloe's, cold and slender, sent a distant shudder through Daisy's bones like a long-held breath finally released. Daisy's, warm and kind, caused Chloe to flinch as though pricked by a needle, her fingers pulling away.

Daisy froze herself in place - intentionally this time - the fear of discomforting Chloe bracing her against the molten heat in every muscle demanding she pull the levinpher into a frantic kiss then and there, but Chloe didn't move any further. She stayed straddling Daisy's stomach, hands on the ground where she'd left them and eyes caught in Daisy's where she'd lost them. A chorus of long breaths and short heartbeats filled the small, fragile world only they occupied.

When Daisy touched Chloe's fingers a second time, moving just as slowly as the first, the levinpher didn't flinch. Daisy still shuddered.

Delicately, the dunpher began to lace her fingers beneath and between Chloe's - parting every pair with care before sliding her own in between, losing herself more completely with every tender caress of Chloe's skin against her own.

So soft for a jungle cat.

With every finger Chloe sank a little closer to the ground, her hands sliding forward from beneath her shoulders - scraping the backs of Daisy's along the dirt as they moved - demanding she fall to her elbows.

She did.

As Daisy's final finger slid between Chloe's ring and pinky, the levinpher lost whatever will had been keeping her propped up, and with a humid breath, she collapsed. Daisy could feel the heat of Chloe's body through her clothing, the stiffness of Chloe's nipples against her breasts, the swell of Chloe's cock against her stomach. Such an enormous bulge for such a lithe predator.

Past the green of Chloe's eyes, she could see what almost looked like need.

Daisy was quickly losing control of herself, her needs overpowering her strength as Chloe's hardened body gently lapped at her own. Her head was turning fuzzy and taking her thoughts along with it, and her pussy had soaked entirely through her undergarments - threatening to show through her pants next.

The weight of Chloe's body atop her stomach was all that kept the dunpher from frantically humping at the air, and the hands woven delicately within her own were all that kept her from grabbing at Chloe's body and groping the muscles she'd admired for so long.

Her skin felt hot and her muscles felt weak, as though she was melting onto the jungle floor, and though her fear hadn't gone away, it had mutated into something entirely unrecognizable. Pinned beneath the oppressive weight of a predator, overheating with arousal, fear no longer chilled Daisy's blood, but throbbed in the depths of her twitching pussy.

She wanted to feel the claws against her sensitive flesh. Wanted to hear the snarling of a beast who saw her as nothing but a cute, tender meal.

Ch. 03 - Fertilizer

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