"Believe in Us" (anthology excerpt) (Patreon)

This is an excerpt of "Believe in Us", which has recently been accepted into Thurston Howl Publication's upcoming furry anthology "Pawradiso". This will be the last installment of "The Divine Clawmedy" (ugh, I hate the puns too), a furry-themed adult trilogy inspired by Dante Aligueiri's THE DIVINE COMEDY.

 Pursued by an angry mob from their village, lovers Dmitri and Niko find refuge in an abandoned church deep in the Russian wilderness. Can they survive and find a place where their love can thrive? 

~*~*~*~*~

 To the victims and survivors in Chechnya: You do exist.

We were about to die. The trees along the kilometer-long path blurred in a mixture of crimson and yellows as we hobbled for our lives. Small branches snapped and whipped against our flustered faces, some of them tearing away at our dirtied clothes and grimed fur. I could hear them a few dozen meters behind us, maybe less.

“You cannot run forever, boys!” someone barked. “Accept your fate in the name of our Lord! He does not tolerate your kind!”

“Fucking stop running from us!”

“You will face justice, perverts! No one can hide from God’s wrath!”

“Keep going, Dmitri!” Nikolayev hissed in front of me. “Hold onto me!”

I tightly grasped Niko’s firm paw the further he pulled us deeper into the mountainous woods, both of us not daring to look back. Eight combined years of me in football and the Siberian tiger in basketball club allowed us to get ahead, but neither of us could run forever. I could hear it from the exertion in Niko’s deep breaths. And my noodle-like legs could no longer keep running, even from all the years of football practice.

Another kilometer and I felt like we were going to die, then have our corpses presented as trophies in the village bar. A rock scraped my shoulder when suddenly, the ground smacked my muzzle, causing me to yelp and black dots to dance. The voices seemed close than ever.

“Sodomites! Soon, you’ll feel the wrath of our Lord!”

“Goddamn perverts!”

“Abominations!”

A strong pair of paws lifted me from the muddied ground. The owner’s feline eyes were a beautiful auburn, the same color as a sunflower, and frantic like a prey on the run.

“Dmitri,” my companion hissed, “this way!”

We scurried past a dense thicket as the voices started to come closer. The sharp twigs and itchy ivory scratched at my face, but I couldn’t have cared less in any moment. I was about to ask Niko why he was having us crouch when the tiger picked up a stone and threw it with all his might. Past the thick branches obscuring my vision, I watch the rock soar past the thinning trees.

Crack! It landed loudly.

Niko immediately ducked down back into the thicket, protectively wrapping his arms around me. I held my breath as is tail nervously twitched against the ground.

“Hey! I heard something this way!”  

Agonizing seconds stretched as their shouts and stomps grew distant in the direction of the stone. Despite this, my heart refused to stop beating against my heaving ribcage. All the minutes of fleeing suddenly caught up to me. Even though my limbs finally relaxed, I felt the stings, bruises and pain building up since this morning.

At long last, several sobbing whimpers escaped my throat. I collapsed backwards into the chest of my Siberian tiger, whose t-shirt had been torn along the right side. His sweat-stained muscles radiated underneath. I couldn’t see his face above my crestfallen ears, but I knew they held the same tired anguish mine did.

“D-Dmitri, are you hurt?”

I shook my head.

“Are you afraid?”

“Y-Yes,” I nodded, unable to stop my paws from trembling. “Oh God, Niko, I-I was so fucking terrified! I-I thought they were going to kill us!”

“Shh. We need to keep running, Dmitri,” he whispered into my ear, then stood up while his right paw held onto mine. “I…I know a place. It is somewhere safe from them.”

Nightfall had finally arrived half an hour later, bathing the forest in a moonless pitch black. Barren oak trees dotted the beaten path we traveled on as their leaves crunched under our footpaws. Each step and distant noise of a wild animal kept our eyes vigilant in the dark, especially me. I didn’t know what creatures were around or in front of us. Although the genes of my Eurasian lynx ancestry allowed me to not collide with nearby trees, Niko’s superior eyesight proved how much he knew these untouched woods.

Meanwhile, I did everything to prevent my tears from swelling again.

My life, our lives, I mourned silently, it isn’t supposed to be like this. Not like this.

Not like this. My parents weren’t supposed to find my browser history. They weren’t supposed to see the search results about the LGBT community in Moscow, our plans to move to the capital, the messages between me and Niko on a chat, or when we professed our love for each other a year ago. I was an idiot for not logging off today!

After my father violently tossed me out the door, I ran off for Niko’s only to find him in the same position. Except his father’s friend got wind of the news as well. Now the village, our home for twenty years, wanted to make an example of our horrible sin. They wanted to follow by Chechnya’s example, and among those who volunteered were a few of our past schoolmates and local hunters of the area. They wanted to murder us without a second thought.

“There it is.”

Niko pointed to a structure ahead of us. At first, I could barely find it through the darkness, or the camouflaging limbs of fallen tree trunks, until we got closer. It was an old church nestled against a row of dying pine trees, with a classic onion dome sitting atop a central spire. And atop the rotting doors stood a wooden cross painted in gold. As we drew closer to the decomposing structure, a myriad of timber and stone built from long ago, I grew weary at the church’s inviting entrance.

My tiger held the door open for me before closing it shut behind us. It was still dark, more so with the absence of the stars, until I heard Niko stumble towards the side of a short hallway.

I momentarily let go of his paw as he shuffled for something in his pockets, until the sounds of a striking match illuminated the tiger’s exhausted face. One by one, he lit the candles resting on a nearby stand, which further revealed the hallway leading to a larger room.

“Is it…safe?” I murmured to Niko. “Are we safe?”

He blew the match out and sighed.

“As much as we are out there…” the tiger clutched a candlestick holder in his right paw, and relaxed into a soft, reassuring smile. “I found this place several months ago. My grandfather once spoke of a church deep in these woods, once part of a larger town that was destroyed by a horrible wildfire. He brought me out here as a cub, once. He told me how it survived the flames, and how it housed my grandmother and him in sanctuary while these mountains burned…”

As Niko lifted the candle outward, I gaped in amazed awe. “Incredible…”

Save for the dust and gathering cobwebs here and there, the larger room of this church didn’t fail in portraying its grandeur. Goluboi wallpaper adorned each side, some of it, though decayed with age, reminded me of photographs of the Mediterranean Sea. Broken windows glinted along the opposite walls, all of it painted in murals depicting saints of orthodox belief, with several rows of empty pews leading to the stone altar.

The floorboards squeaked with every cautious step Niko and I made across the church’s nave, but our focus remained on the majesty.

How could a church like this had been left abandoned, I wondered, when everyone else back home treasures God?