Chapter 33

Stix and Stone had also felt the changes in the shield as they came close to completing the circuit.

Click reported that Jagger was only sixty clicks away and they should meet up with his party within the next two days. They were a good three days ahead of schedule. They had not been pushing hard and once out of the second mountain range they hit more water traps in the plains than they expected, due to run-off from recent rain.

Some of the sections through the mountains had been quite bizarre where the shield had forced the high peaks to flatten down many hundreds of meters to create a more level terrain to satisfy the shield’s spell. The smoother road the zone formed made it much easier for them to travel. In some places, they had massive straight cliffs that towered over their road for several hundred metres.

The blocking of the sun for most of the day made these passages quite eerie. In places, water had also eroded deep gullies to the sides of the path and in some; they had widened to become a stream or even a river that ran beside the path. In many places, there was a steep drop off on one side and the river was anything from tens of meters to many hundreds of metres below them.

The rivers could become quite turbulent after rain and they had to be very careful to stay on the path, as far from the torrents as possible. The spay made the path slippery in places and several times they had to get off and push the trikes or blink them to an area that was safer for them to traverse. Click and Asher really helped them out when they found themselves in this type of difficulty.

Several times, they were lucky to find that erosion had created caverns in the cliffs, in which they could rest. There was evidence in the caverns they found that the local wildlife used these paths to cross between the mountain tops into the valleys in-between the peaks. A couple of times, the long slopes had them carving out a flat rest area to the side. It was odd to see the sides of the path reform to blend in these new short flat extensions.

They had both loved viewing magnificent vistas that few if any humans had ever seen before. Stix was of the opinion that the island she inhabited was the best place in the world to live. The climate was as good as you could get and the variety of life on the island was surprisingly extensive.

She tried not to think too much about the next part of this mission once she met up with Jagger and headed back to Mt Ant. She wasn’t sure if she truly wished to confront a Queen and fight her to the death. That she would win was a foregone conclusion, as far as she was concerned.

It was the job of bringing in the reforms so that the Giant Ant-Shifters could eventfully join their cousins on the other side of the shield in a more modern society, which bothered her. From her readings of the islands histories, she had determined that backward, warlike races didn’t fare well when they had to contend with new technologies that didn’t allow for smash and bash techniques to maintain the rules of a society.

The Giant Ant-Shifters needed to learn how to trade and negotiate with the wider world, as they wouldn’t be able to kill and conquer. The humans on the other islands and the wizards wouldn’t let them. Stix had a feeling that the Ants that already interacted with humans outside the shield were also going to get a shake-up when Gazza’s virus finished infecting them all. For the present, however, they weren’t her problem.

Her problem was that she needed to hurry and get this part of the mission over with. Her biological clock was ticking and it was speeding up. Normally, once a Queen had mated, she found a place to nest and got on with making her new family. She and Stone had consummated their bonding several months ago. She suspected it was only the fact that she was a magical creature that she was able to ignore the desires to lay her first brood for as long as she had.

Stone was also aware that her desire to nest was getting stronger. They had stopped to plant a gem and were getting ready to take off again when he said, “Stix since we are on the plains and our abilities to blink have gotten a lot better, how about we do some jumps and get the next two crystals laid. In the morning, we can do the last one and then meet up with Jagger. He should have done his next drop off by then.”

Stix grinned at her lover and replied, “I really like that idea. I have this desire to get this road trip over with.”

“I know my lovely Stix,” he replied and then shifted his trike so that it was next to hers. He linked hands with her and once Stix had the location set in her mind, he helped her blink the trikes. They placed the next crystal and did it again. Click had picked the next spot so that it was near a wide flowing river and they did the final blink for the day.

They drove their trikes to a nice area near a big tree that was about twenty metres from the shield and close to the bank of the river. They were both feeling the effects of using a lot of magic in a short time and hurriedly set up their tent before putting the shield over their camp.

They still had a couple of hours of sunlight and decided that after they had some nice recharge sex, they would go for a swim and then do some fishing. They had not made love in their ant form since the first time. Stix had this feeling that the next time they did then she would have to lay.

However, Stone had a lot of practice making love in human form, so he had no problem introducing Stix to the fun of having four limbs, fingers, a tongue, and some very sensitive body parts and cavities that can be explored and exploited in this shape.

Stix was quite sure that she was addicted to having sex with Stone, in human form. Having a partner who had been genetically designed and then trained to provide satisfaction to his Queen didn’t hurt either. He had this way of looking at her that made her feel loved and cherished and his very touch fuelled her addiction to him.

For Stone making love to Stix and educating her in the arts of carnal desire was a labour of love. The way she responded to him fed his own addiction to her. He knew deep in his heart that if she ever put him aside, he would simply pine and die.

The first time they had made love after Gazza had given him his magical items, had tied him, both body and soul to Stix. Not that he wasn’t already bonded to her but the magic had tightened that bond to the point he couldn’t exist without her.

They had spent so much time in their human form over the last couple of months that on some days, Stix had to think about being an Ant. It was just as well they woke in their original form to help remind her. After some very satisfactory lovemaking and a magic recharge, they had napped for an hour.

When they awoke, they headed to the river and using their long slender ant legs, they had stood in the stream at thorax depth and used their mandible to catch fish. They both caught several excellent sized silverfish. After tossing them ashore, they had washed off and then waded out of the stream, as they were more than hungry for a decent meal.

They both changed to human, as it was easier to clean the fish and get the fire going in this form. With practised ease, Stix soon had the fish that Stone had prepared, steaming under hot coals. While she fussed to get their dinner ready, Stone gathered the canteens to go and fill them. He was just about to step out from the shielded area when he felt the danger and looked up.

He stood very still as his heart started pounding in his chest. He was staring into the large amber eyes of a huge female catalo. He knew she could smell him as the wind wafted his sent into her face but he could also detect her confusion as to why she couldn’t see him. His brain catalogued the facts that she was well muscled and in her prime.

“Stone,” Stix said before she looked up from the fire. The catalo’s head swivelled at the sound of her voice. It bared it’s very large teeth and growled at the noise that had no source that she could see. Stone felt his bladder void as its fetid breath blew into his face from only thirty centimetres away after she stepped even closer.

Ant’s had a deep and very real fear of catalos, as the cat-like creatures loved to rip their legs off one at a time and suck out their flesh, while the ant was left alive. They would leave the de-limbed ant’s bodies for the eagles and the carrion birds called crows to peck at, until they finally died in horrendous pain.

The creature sniffed at the sudden, pungent smell of urine. She knew that meat was close by. She could smell the fear in the urine. The meat smelt strange as she also detected ant and even stronger, the fish that made her even hungrier. She tried to step forward but found herself being turned from the smells.

She found this confusing, as no matter how much she tried she couldn’t get any closer to the smells. She roared in frustration as she paced outside the shield. Once she had moved away from the shield a little and broken eye contact with Stone, he was able to stumble back to Stix.

Stix not taking any chances threw a stronger ‘Go away’ spell at the shield. She then created a spell to disperse an obnoxious odour, attached it to a rock and threw it at the catalo. This spell was designed to mask their odours and upset the catalo’s senses.

The catalo was not happy to have a stink bomb tossed at it. The smell where the rock had hit her fur was so foul to her nose that she had to plunge herself in the river to try to clear her nose and get the stink from her coat. She soon forgot about the food smells as she tried to rub the bad smell off herself.

She tried rolling in the grass and then rubbing against a tree but this only seemed to intensify the evil smell. She ended up back in the river again. Each attempt to eradicate the smell took her further from the tent. Stix and Stone were just glad to see the back of her.

It took Stix a little while to settle Stone down. It then took a little bit of time for them to realise that this camp was the furthermost they had been from the big shield since they had been following it around from Two Rivers. They hadn’t had any trouble with predators until now. Being immune to the effects of the shield, they were unaware of just how far its influence went.

It was a sombre pair that crawled back into their tent that night.

End of term was upon them.

Jenifer had been a big hit. She was surprised at how many friends she had made at the university. Her new friends were of the opinion that she would be ushering in a new era. The talk of the term was the influx of people, namely the Ant-shifters.

Many of her friends told her of the changes that had been happening on their parent’s properties if they had a nest on their land. The ants being able to communicate with the humans better had forced many changes in how they were treated.

One of the most interesting developments had been that the old Ant Queens had not been able to shift to human form even though some of their people had. With two weeks to go before the ball, the latest babble was generated by the fact that the Queen of the Soldier Ants at the Palace nest had declared that on the night after the coronation ball, her princesses would fly.