The Beast King (Royal Aliens 3)

“Sire! I found this… alien slinking around the outside of the ship!”

The king was sitting in a big chair in the middle of the bridge. He turned slowly without rising from the seat, his massive bulk at first making him look merely large, but as the light fell on his front it became apparent that he was all muscle. He wore pants, which were the least interesting thing about him by far. His chest was ridged and scaled, covered in muscle. Leather strapping passed over his shoulders, connected by heavy iron rings. There were armored plates attached to the shoulders. Like suspenders, she guessed. Except sexy, instead of nerdy.

He was blue. Intense blue. Except for his lashes which were white, and his hair which was raven black and cascaded down over his broad shoulders in a way that would have made a supermarket hair dye model jealous. He had a thick, heavy beard reminiscent of a human, but like everything else on his body, it was far more intense.

“Whoa,” she exclaimed.

The king was the most impressive thing in the room, but the rest of the bridge was crazy. She had never been inside a place like this, full of alien soldiers wearing similar clothes to the ones the king was wearing, but less imposing. There were screens and boards of instruments and all sorts of general technological things which might be expected. There was also a tree right in the middle of the whole thing. The bridge felt as though it were set in the middle of some woods, except also inside a warehouse. Except also…

“What,” the king intoned, “is… that?” He gestured toward her with an up and down finger wave, his obsidian pupils giving away no emotion. He didn’t seem happy to see her, but he didn’t seem angry either. She found herself hoping against hope that her sheer unremarkableness might save her.

“A spy!” This guard holding Elizabeth was thoroughly excited. “She was climbing up the side of the ship and attempting to take notes on the integrity of the port holes.”

“Why does a spaceship have port holes?”

“Don’t answer that!” the king boomed, his eyes narrowing at everybody on the bridge in case any of them might dare to accidentally answer her out of reflex.

“I’m not a spy! My name is Elizabeth, and…”

“That’s exactly what a spy would say. Throw her in the cage!”

The king threw a lever and gestured to a cage which rose from inside the floor with a squeaky, screeching sound. It was right next to his throne, a location which suggested he was used to humiliating his enemies in the middle of the bridge, and had constructed accessories which enabled that to happen more efficiently.

There were marks all around the exterior of the cage, a rust and a green moss which suggested it had been used not precisely often, but by inhabitants who were, for want of a better term, leaking. Wounded, most likely. The cage gave her a very bad feeling. Such a bad feeling that all the wonder and excitement she had been experiencing when she first saw the ship sort of drained away into dread.

It seemed that these were not the sort of enchanted woods where you met kind fairies and had wonderful adventures. These were the kind of space woods where you ended up being fattened in a cage. This ship was a living nightmare, a place in which pain ruled supreme. She hadn’t actually been hurt yet, but pain was strongly implied in every single interaction she’d had with these aliens who did not explain themselves, or introduce themselves either, for that matter. She only knew who Konan was because the guard had dropped his name.

“This is a misunderstanding. It’s funny, actually. You’ll laugh when you hear…”

“SILENCE!” the king thundered, his voice making some of the looser rivets shudder loose from their places and fall to the floor in a small tinkling rain. Elizabeth looked around in horror, hoping for someone to save her. But there were no heroes in the foliage bridge. There was just the big blue alien king and his minions who had no interest in doing anything besides laughing at her as she was stuffed into the cage by the guard who didn’t know which way she could bend, and didn’t particularly care.

The bars were thick, and the roof was so low she was forced to sit on hands and knees like an animal. There was no point in complaining about it, there was nobody to listen. Instead, she did what she had always done in times of stress and strife. She pulled out a scrap of paper and a pencil and she started writing.

At first, she tried to recap all she had seen before getting onto the ship in an effort to make her description more complete, but the strangeness of the past was soon overcome by the oddness of the present.