The rafters groaned in the grip of a grandfather storm. This was the kind of tyrannical weather that used to wipe civilizations off the map. One day, there would be a village by the seaside. The next, only driftwood and debris. It was a comfort to think that I might be so ephemeral. I doubted that the cabin would buckle, no matter how the gods raged.
Thunder boomed as lightning broke across the sky far above. Rain drummed on the window panes and hammered the roof over my head. Closer still and fiercely enough to be heard over the noise, someone banged on my front door.
Now who could that be? My housekeeper was on vacation with her grandchildren. Anyone I considered family was dead. I had no friends. I was, by any reasonable account, a hermit.
And yet, the improbable knock persisted, so I went to the door.
The big, brown eyes on my doorstep took me back fifteen years, but the body attached to them left me out of place. He wasn't so tall, but he was as broad in shoulder as in brow, with a chiseled jaw made soft by a dark and close-cropped beard. Despite the downpour, he wore his shirt unbuttoned nearly to his navel beneath his long coat, which showed off a long triangle of dark and gently sculpted flesh that made my throat catch. I could almost believe that I beheld the brother of my once best and dearest friend, only she didn't have a brother.
"Tom?" I questioned.
"Hiya, Plum," said the not-quite-stranger. "Been a while."
"Come inside," I urged. "You're soaked through."
Tom flashed a dangerous smile.
"If only you knew," he mused, but he did as I asked.
"There's a coat tree there, by the door," I noted. "You can leave your boots where they are. Do you need a towel?"
He shook his head.
"I only walked the last half mile," he noted. "Did you know your road's washed out? Had to cross the thing on foot. But I can deal with dripping on your floorboards for a bit if you can. Maybe I'll borrow your shower after I've told you why I'm here."
I knew better than to argue with Tom when he was being so direct. Whatever else had changed about him, that was too much the essence of his character. I shrugged and put my hands up in mock surrender, like I used to. We were no longer children—that much was clear—but the old gestures came easily.
"Why are you here?" I asked. "It's not that I'm not happy to see you, but if you wanted to tell me something, you could've sent an e-mail."
"She's back," he said.
I blinked at him, my eyes narrowing.
"That's not possible," I asserted. "I broke her collar."
He sighed as if he'd expected this response and fished a damp phone out of his pocket, unlocking the screen before he passed it over to me. It showed the headline of an article from some local news site.
"Mass Hallucination Incident Leaves Dire Consequences for Arizona Town," I read aloud.
"Swipe through," he directed. "There are more."
I did. There were. Authorities sought criminal prosecution for the participants in a mass orgy in New Mexico. Someone had set fire to a corner of the San Juan National Forest. A Utah woman's sister was dead, despite proclaiming the day before that she was miraculously cured of her chronic depression. Each incident was dated within the last four months. My confidence faltered.
"You haven't sensed her," Tom accused.
"No, I haven't," I agreed. "But why would I have? I haven't been looking for her presence. These events are small-scale and nearly a whole continent away. If it is her, it's not like she's trying to be found. Not like before."
"What if you try, now?" he challenged.
I handed his phone back. He tossed it down on the nearest table and crossed his arms, a nostalgic pose that had a somewhat different presence now that his arms weren't gathered under a heavy bosom. Again, whatever else was different, he was still Tom and I was going to do what he wanted me to, no matter how long he had to wait for me to do it.
I closed my eyes and reached out with my magic. There was a second layer beneath the skin of our world, a substrate that connected it to all the others, and I could feel along its interconnected pathways like a spider sensing across its web. Once upon a time, it had been all but impossible to find her when she wasn't using her magic, but now I knew her presence too intimately for her to cloak it from me. All I had to do was listen for the echo of her heart.
"Fuck me," I swore. "She's back."
Tom uncrossed his arms and took a step closer.
"Good," he said. "Now, breathe. She's been inactive for weeks in-between attacks and the latest one was just Tuesday. We have time to process and prepare—and this time you're taking me with you."
So that was it. That was the reason he had trekked into the wilds of Canada to deliver this news in person. I'd always wondered if he resented me for leaving him behind, at the end. I guess he had. But then again, it was probably more complicated than that, wasn't it.
"So," Tom continued, "how's about that shower?"
"Down that hall, first door on the left," I directed.
He flashed me a smaller smile, a little less dangerous but a little more triumphant. There was some other third thing in there that I couldn't quite make out, but he went to get himself clean and warm before I could dwell on it too long.
I sat myself down in the nearest chair and though the cabin shuddered with each new lash of the storm, no force of wind or water could stop me from tumbling into memories.
////
The Eiffel Tower burned with electric light as the giants rampaged through Paris. They were nearly as tall as the tower herself, their forms spectral but still grotesquely fleshy, everything out of proportion, small where they should be large and ridiculously huge where they should be small, or vice versa. The giants' feet and hand passed through brick and metal and stone like it was water, leaving nothing but ripples in the matter that quickly shook themselves back into place, but where they collided with humans, it was another matter. The damage they dealt was not material, but to the soul.
I'd never seen the Beldame summon anything so large as these, nor in an area so populous. The Champ-de-Mars had already descended into chaos, an orgiastic mass of unchecked sex and violence, a roiling pursuit for the most immediate satisfaction without caution or fear of consequence. It would only spread from here, unless I stopped her.
My senses stretched out along the substrate, seeking the source of this delirium. I found her where I should've looked in the first place: at the highest point, looking down. She perched on the highest antenna at the top of the Tower, motley silks waving like an anemone, lyre in her hand, all silhouetted by the pale disc of the bulbous moon. That was much too far to reach by conventional means, but I had other methods at my disposal.
"I Am Icarus Unbound by Gravity's Yoke," I intoned.
Broad birdlike wings emerged from my back, their feathers cast in gold and tipped with flickering flame. I flapped them and was vaulted into the air, climbing higher and higher with practiced ease, my way unbarred until a giant caught notice and took a swing at me.
I unfurled my whip, but however long I could extend its fiery tendril, it wouldn't be enough to take this monster down. The best I could manage was to loop it around its little finger, giving myself a point to pivot around and thus avoid its clutches. It recoiled from our contact, finger seared and smoking, but that would do little to stop its advance on the crowds below. If I was going to stop this, I needed to stop her, and quickly.
"Welcome, knight-at-arms," she called out as I approached. "You have joined us not a moment too soon, for the festival is well underway."
"I am begging you to stop this," I called back, raising my voice to reach over the thunder of my own wings. "People are suffering, down there. If you won't stop, I will have to stop you."
"Ask the people if they are suffering," she taunted. "They will tell you that they are filled with joy. This is my gift to them. I give it freely and I will never cease."
The Beldame strummed her lyre and all the giants turned their eyes—or the appendages where it seemed their eyes would be—towards me. She had given them a new objective and I needed to work quickly if I was going to have any chance of getting out of this alive.
I cracked my whip to draw her attention, then lashed out at her lyre, striking the strings and snapping the lot of them with a clash of discordant twangs. The giants wailed and stomped, their clarity of purpose shattered and their impulsive drives unleashed. They moved faster than I could have imagined, freed of her control, but all but one of them moved back away from me.
Thinking not to defeat but to disable, I shot down towards that giant's crotch and flicked my whip around its tree-trunk penis, or whatever passed for that. I sent magic down the line, igniting it with new and winding fire, and yanked as hard as I could until the circle cinched closed. The giant did what anyone so severed would do: it fell down.
"You idiot," the Beldame cursed as I returned to her periphery. "You have doomed Paris."
"All the Stars Are Distant Fires," I whispered, casting my final spell.
One by one, and then all in a multitude, the twinkling stars above our heads combusted. They were tiny motes like candles, at first, but the flames grew larger—no, closer—until they blotted out the whole of the night sky and even the moon was forced to defer to their bright glory. Fire fell like rain, a deluge that covered everything, as far as my eye could see.
Like the Beldame's, my magic was a liminal thing, straddling the border between our material world and what lay beyond. It would not burn, but all it touched would feel its heat. Not even I was immune, but since that same fire burned in my veins every second of my transformation, I felt right at home in the conflagration's embrace. I hoped it would prove a balm to the poor bodies below, a chance to slow down beneath the weight of unbelievable warmth, an opportunity to rest and reconsider. To the giants, however, it proved a bane.
They burned like dry pines, going up all at once in a violent explosion of searing light. The shockwave of their sudden ignition was enough to knock the Beldame from her perch and send her hurtling across the crimson sky. I dove, plummeting as fast as my wings could push me, trying not to marvel at her incandescent raiment as every loop of silk flared and turned to ash.
She was naked by the time I caught her, all but for a ribbon of white silk around her throat which I intuitively recognized as the doublet of the band of gold around my finger. That was the source of her transformation. I pinched it between my thumb and forefinger and twisted, snapping it cleanly through.
Another, different shockwave passed over Paris, and we were at its epicenter. It snuffed out my spell in an instant, leaving only the hot-orange glow of the Tower and the listless forms far below as fading reminders of that furnace. The clouds of ash that had so recently been giants were similarly blown away, leaving the air empty and still but for the soft beating of my wings. Once the oxygen returned, sweetly rushing in to fill the vacuum of that terrible sphere, I let myself breathe.
The woman in my arms was beautiful and familiar.
Of course she was. What other face had I expected? There was no one else it could have been. The circumstances were too perfect for any other arrangement. The map of the last few years of my life unfolded before me, the fog lifted, the connections unobscured. I had never been chasing her—she had always been courting me.
I wasn't sure how the glamor of our magic would shield us from perception when only one of us was transformed, so I made haste away from my orbit of the Tower. Luckily, I knew where she lived. After all, I had lived there for a time, myself. It wasn't close—her castle was out on the coast, roughly 150 kilometers away, to my memory—but I flew as the crow did, and faster besides, and she slumbered all the while. I guessed that the autumn evening air was soothing upon her spell-scorched skin, especially when she was warmed from below by the incessant heat of my raiment.
She had left the doors of her balcony open, either out of habit or in anticipation of her return, so I had to do no more than swoop in like a wren to land inside her bedroom. I laid her down among the silks of her four-poster bed and only then did she wake.
The Comtesse Origine du Monde smiled up at me.
"Hello, Damson," she murmured.
I wordlessly released my transformation. The golden chains that girded my body vanished in a clangor of chimes and bells and the burning wings folded away into a shimmer of sparks. I was now as naked as she was, with nothing more to hide.
"You could have told me," I chided. "Wouldn't it have been easier, that way?"
She shook her head.
"You couldn't know," she said. "I came to know you and that was how I understood. You would have tried to help me and I needed you to defeat me. I tried to keep my incursions to what you could manage, while encouraging your growth. I cultivated you until you had the will and the command of your power to cast a spell like that, a spell to end my reign."
She blinked and looked around us, searching.
"Where is Tomasina?" she inquired. "Surely you didn't leave her behind in Paris."
"No," I confirmed. "I left her behind in America. I wasn't sure how tonight was going to go. I could feel that something was about to end. I didn't want her to have to watch if that something was me."
That wasn't the only reason I had left Tom behind, but it was reason plenty enough.
"That is good," the Comtesse decreed. "I have fought you too many times to want to fight for your attention, now. I want you all to myself."
Her hand found mine and she pulled me down. Just like that, I was on top of her, my lips finding hers, my hand on her breast, my knee between her legs. There had always been an excess of energy that lingered after our battles and was best depleted in a manner just like this, but this was different. She wasn't some grateful bystander who wanted to show their appreciation for my timely rescue, she was the Beldame herself. She was, by any reckoning, my nemesis. She was my greatest and only enemy. She was the very reason I had been granted strength by the spirit of fire—to bring her down and bring her own spirit in line.
And now her hands were on my cock as my tongue tried to reach down her throat and I couldn't imagine us any other way. I wasn't even fully hard, yet, but she had moved aside my knee and now rubbed my head against her vulva, which was as drenched as if we'd been at this for hours, not seconds. She pulled me inside of her and I welcomed my descent into this madness. I had no further hope of separation. My only desire was to join.
She was unbelievably tight around me—so much so that I might think her a virgin, if I didn't very much know better—and only grew more so as I lengthened and thickened. It was no particular point of pride, but many a partner had quivered at the size of me. I sometimes wondered if I had always been that way, or if it had been a gift from the spirit of fire. That was the funny thing about magic: it left things the way they are and afterwards you could never quite remember if they'd once or ever been different. Right now, by the way she moaned as she swallowed up every last inch of me, drawing me into her center, I considered it a blessing, wherever it had come from.
Neither of us said a word as we began to move back and forth. We only broke our long kiss when our breaths began to come too heavily and too quick to maintain our connection, our efforts building as we raced faster and faster towards our reward. She came first, writhing and pumping as her nails dug into my shoulders, tracing the path from which my wings had sprouted, but I didn't last long after. My seed ran free, filling her up and overflowing, soaking our thighs and seeping into her expensive sheets.
"More," she groaned.
Without pause, she toppled me onto my back and began to ride me. That suited me fine. I was still hard and would remain so for as long as she needed me to. Her small breasts bounced with every drop. Her strawberry-blonde hair, turned silver in the moonlight, broke like waves upon the seashore. She anchored her palm against my sternum and bucked like she was the horse and I was the rider. I worried as my cock slipped out of her with the violence of her retreat, but every time she caught it and drove it true, drilling me into her over and over again until I came again, pouring myself in and out of her.
She kept going until my vision began to blur, even my notorious stamina eroding beneath her relentless campaign, at which point I found myself crowned with her ass, her cunt all but smothering me with its needy insistence that it ought to be consumed. I obliged her as I felt her do the same, her other lips wrapping around the head of my cock and treating it gently and with care. She placed both her hands on my shaft, massaging without strictly drawing from my well, keeping me intent and attended-to as I served her.
My hands could find no purchase between her legs, so I reached them back around to her ass, kneading and digging against the rhythm of my tongue inside her. She squirmed whenever I flicked across her clit, and on one such shiver, she left me enough room to slip my thumb between her cheeks and pierce her rear. At that point, she stopped being nice to my cock, and it became a competition, a weird echo of our encounters past, my tongue as my whip and her hands as her summoned menagerie.
That she had never beaten me in a contest of our magics was of little consequence, now that I knew she'd always been holding back. She didn't hold back, now, and I came with helpless abandon, losing our contest but still undefeated. I sat up, lifting her ass as I shoved her face into the bed between my legs, giving myself the space to fully thrust my thumb into her ass as I redoubled my efforts inside and around her cunt. She seemed to appreciate her reversal of fortunes, because she rapidly shuddered to orgasm and did so a second time when I refused to let up.
She dropped onto all fours when I let her go and slid myself out from under her, but then I was on top of her again. My cock landed between her cheeks and I ran it through the crease of her ass, not seeking to move inside but letting her feel the whole throbbing length of me. She curled and raised her ass, but she had only one destination for me in mind. Before I could even think of choosing for myself, she skewered my cock through her cunt, putting it back where it belonged.
So be it. I clambered onto my heels, mounting her ass as my cock stayed locked within her cunt, and gave her all I had. It was brutal. It was breeding. But though her tongue had lost all coherence as she babbled half-formed words in a bastard mix of French and English, it offered nothing but encouragement.
This time, when I came, I knew it would need to be the last for at least some little time, so I plunged as deep as my cock would go. Some tickling animal part of my brain could almost imagine her womb dipping down to drink my precious nectar, a fantasy which filled me with equal parts of joy and dread. But a woman of her station would know to prepare for such things, or she would know better than to play at all. This was a victory lap. What came next would be a conversation for a later time.
I fell onto the bed beside her and wrapped her slim form tightly in my arms. She wriggled, some unquenchable thirst in her still wanting more, but I needed to rest.
"I'm glad it's over," I sighed, without thinking about how true that might be.
The rest of the evening went by half in and half out of dreams. I woke to find her once again astride me, her back to my face, her ass rising and sinking like the moon outside, draining me of my every last drop. I dreamed that there were three of her, one kissing me as I fucked another and the third rammed her tongue up my asshole. I woke and she was curled into a ball upon my stomach, no larger than a cat, but that must have been a dream. I dreamed that there were five of me and we filled her every way at once. I woke and she was crying.
I woke and she was gone.
That much couldn't be a dream. Sunlight streamed in through the balcony curtains. Birdsong and the ocean breeze filled the air. I was in the Comtesse's bed, but she was missing. There was every evidence of how we'd spent the evening, the bed an atrocious mess despite its fine appointments, but the spot where I remembered her lying beside me was cold.
I noticed the letter on her pillow and my heart sank through my stomach. It was folded neatly and sealed with wax that had been stamped with her crest. How many hours had I spent in her foyer, examining the magnificent story-high carving of that crest. I hated to recognize it so easily, here.
For a stuttering heartbeat, I thought about leaving it unopened, but what proper knight—magic or otherwise—could ignore his lady's missive? Not me.
"Damson," it read, "my sweet plum. Our journey ends in lovers parting. You will not see me again. Do not come looking for me. You have stripped me of my magic, so you will not find me in the cosmic layer. You have stripped me of my pretense, so I can admit to myself that I love you, but that love is not always enough. Goodbye, my adversary, my equal, my only true friend. Forever yours, Origine."
I shook my head and blinked back tears.
It wouldn't be long before someone found me in her bed. She had servants, still. I had seen evidence of their comings and goings when I flew over the grounds, last night. Maybe they wouldn't ask questions, but it would be better for everyone if I was gone.
But where would I go? I thought about going back to America, back to Tom, but I had burned that bridge behind me on my way out. My parents had died, one after the other, within a year of me inheriting my powers. I didn't think there was a connection, but it meant there was truly nothing connecting me to that place where I had been born and raised. I had no siblings. My cousins might as well not be. It was just me, now, more than ever.
"I Draw Riches from the Breeze," I said as the canopy fluttered around me.
A thick gold coin dropped out of nothing and into the palm of my hand. I had sworn to myself never to use my magic like this, but my present circumstances were extenuating enough for me to bend my principles temporarily. This and maybe a couple more like it would be enough to get me started over. I put it on her bedside table and went to her wardrobe to see what I could steal.
She had had been one step ahead of me, again. The wardrobe was empty save a single set of clothing, a smart and somber woolen suit that had been tailored precisely to my personal measurements. I made an apology to the gods of fashion and hygiene that I couldn't spare the time for a bath and pulled it on. She'd even left me shoes, sharp-toed leather ones that were, I was quite certain, individually nicer and more expensive than just about anything I had previously owned.
I picked up and pocketed the coin, closed my eyes, and opened a passageway. Halifax was supposed to be nice around this time of year. I'd start there and see where it took me.
////
"Hey, Plum," called out Tom from the bathroom, "can you come here?"
"Do you need something?" I queried.
The shower had started, gone on for a bit, then stopped, so I assumed that he hadn't run into any plumbing issues. There were always clean towels in there—Mrs. Jones made sure of it. Maybe he didn't want to use my comb? I tried to think if I had a spare.
"Yeah," he agreed, "I need something: I need you to come here."
So it was. In all our years of companionship, I'd only gone against his wishes once and it had apparently taken the better part of fifteen years for me to reap what I had sown. Whatever he wanted to take from me, I deserved it, but whatever I had expected when I stepped into steam-laden bathroom, it wasn't what I found.
Tom stood naked on the bathmat, half-dried but still dewy, his back straight and his butt taut. He was gorgeous. His form was more athletic than I remembered, but he hadn't lost the quality of energetic softness that suffused his small frame even in the absence of his most voluptuous assets. I spied his scars, nestled slyly beneath his firm pectorals, but they practically disappeared in this light—and they didn't mar his admirable chest, either way. My gaze followed the path of his surprisingly furry abdomen and went down to his delta, where his little cock was looking engorged and happy above the curly folds of his vulva. Was that the result of heat or arousal? Could it be both?
"What did you want?" I inquired, a little more breathlessly than planned.
"I wanted you to see me, Plum," he said. "I wanted you to know that I'm not afraid of you seeing me, anymore."
I looked away, breaking contact with his sex.
"Why wait so long to visit, then?" I grumbled. "You clearly knew where I was."
"Of course I did," Tom grunted. "I was honoring your wishes. I'm not the one who left you at the proverbial altar. The blushing bride doesn't go chasing after the wayward groom."
I rounded to tell him off, to tell him that wasn't fair, but he'd crossed the space between us while I'd fumbled to mount a sufficiently cutting retort. He was so close that I could smell my lavender soap on his skin. When he leaned up and kissed me, I didn't resist. His lips were warm and firm and also soft. He tasted like honey.
Before I could really process what was happening, it stopped happening. He brushed past me, still naked, and headed straight for my bedroom.
"I'm going to raid your closet," he announced. "You're still a stick-and-bones, but I figure you must have something I can wear without splitting all the seams."
What did one even say to that? For me, the answer was: nothing. Let him have his way. I tried to tell myself that it was an act of grace or maybe even an act of cowed passivity. It certainly wasn't the fact that I was half-hard thinking about Tom wriggling into my trousers.
My stomach growled and when the thunder outside responded to its call, the lights in the cabin flickered. If I wanted to serve him a hot supper, I'd better get to it, or else I'd need to gamble that I'd remembered to fill my generator's gas can on my last trip into town, six or seven months back. I was pretty sure I had, but maybe not.
When Tom found me in the kitchen, I was crouched in front of the refrigerator, letting precious cold out into the house. We didn't lack for provisions, but inspiration was another matter entirely. He took this rare opportunity to lean over me and ran his fingers lightly through my hair, sending a shiver through to my extremities.
"I didn't think you'd changed much," he noted, "but these are new."
He was talking about my grays.
"I don't mind them," I murmured.
"Neither do I," he agreed, with a wry hum.
He spun away to give me space to stand and to allow me to better appreciate his purloined outfit—Tom always did have a taste for fashion far greater than my own. He'd picked a pair of whisper-thin summer shorts, dug out from the bottom of goodness-knew-which of my drawers, and had eschewed anything with buttons to slip into one of my looser-fitting t-shirts, which was tight as a bowstring across his arms. They were, in his typical manner, perfectly complementary in shades of light and dark blue-green. I didn't realize I'd even had such a matching set in my wardrobe. Maybe he was the one with the magic, after all.
But what really set my heart to thumping was his choice of accessory: a brilliantly pink silk scarf, tied around his throat in the Parisian style. It had been a gift from the Comtesse, so long ago. It suited him better.
"How about a carbonara?" I offered.
The pasta would take some time to cook, so we chatted while I sliced pancetta and whisked together the eggs, cheese, and black pepper. I explained how I made my living online, the facts of my existence little more than words on someone's screen outside of the occasional conference call. It suited my talents and paid well enough for my minimal needs.
"And you really don't see anyone, ever?" Tom prodded. "You're just alone out here in the woods."
"Well, there's my housekeeper," I amended. "She comes by twice a week to deliver groceries and tidy and do laundry."
Tom planted his elbows on my kitchen counter and dramatically buried his head in his hands.
"I bet you've got her wrapped around your little finger," he groused.
I recalled the last time I'd had Mrs. Jones bent over that same counter. It wasn't something we ever planned for, but it was nice when it happened. We were two adults in need and worthy of comfort, weren't we? She moaned like she had the devil in her and I was more than happy to cast him out. I paid her no more and no less for this extra service—it was an exchange between friends.
"Not really," I lied. "What about you? Did you blossom into the darling socialite that your mother always wanted you to be without me to hold you back?"
Tom laughed bitterly.
"I got married," he said, as if it was nothing at all. "And then I got divorced. He didn't want me, at least not the me I was after I got rid of these."
He gestured vaguely at his own flattish chest.
"Not the real me," he added. "But that wasn't entirely his fault. I showed him the same mask I showed everyone and he believed it. Everyone did. Even you."
I avoided his searching glance. Had I known all along? Could any two people be as close as we were and still fail to notice something so fundamental about each other's character? Maybe I had seen the truth, I reasoned, but I'd had a lot on my mind at the time. The burden of magical destiny did that to a person, didn't it? Blinded them to the simple truths?
But, no. That was another lie. I had figured it out, I just hadn't known what to do with it. I was barely more than a teenager at the time. I remembered with stunning specificity the day it had all fallen into place—and once I started remembering, I couldn't stop.
////
The elephant charged, tusks lowered, but I stood my ground. My whip flashed and encircled its leading foot, sending it tumbling over itself when I pulled the line taut across my body. I pushed fire through the whip and the elephant burned from the leg up—it wasn't the most elegant or efficient way of finishing off a beast of the Beldame's menagerie, but I didn't have time for elegant or efficient: I was facing a herd of elephants.
I thanked my fortunes that the morning had been unseasonably cool and thus the riverside park was more sparsely attended than one would have expected. Outside of a few clusters of early risers now noisily in flagrante delicto, the casualties of this incursion would be limited, so long as I could keep the herd from charging down the big hill and into the village.
"Watch out for that one!" shouted Tom, pointing at a little elephant that had gone off at an odd angle.
"I see it," I muttered. "Ray of Sunlight, Lance of Flame."
Where sunlight had fallen between the trees, harmlessly illuminating the little elephant, now a brilliant beam of fire shot the poor thing through, sundering its spectral form. I winced as I lost my footing on the stampede-shaking ground. Such spells took it out of me in a way I couldn't yet properly describe, but I would recover. I had to.
I cast my whip like a fishing line, extending it as far as my magic would carry it, and caught it on the stump of a half-fallen tree, forming a long trip-line just ahead of the bulk of the herd. It felt a bit unsporting to use the same trick twice, or close to, but I reminded myself again that these creatures, whatever they were, were figments of the Beldame's magic and not an animal rights concern.
The leading elephants tripped and caught fire, sending their followers into a mad heap. I loosed my whip and rained it down on as many as I could strike, lighting them like fuses, hoping that it would be enough. It was. The whole mound of them went up like a bonfire, braying and trumpeting, their unearthly screams soon drowned out by the roaring whoosh and crackle.
I scanned the treetops just quickly enough to catch sight of the Beldame perched at the crown of an old oak tree. She put away her lyre with her typical air of patient disgust and fell backwards, her silks disappearing among the green leaves. I didn't attempt to chase after her. I knew she would already be gone by the time I crossed the park, especially as sluggish as I felt after expending that much power. I silently willed away my transformation and dropped to one knee in the grass.
"I've got you, I'm here," said Tom, running over and placing her hands supportively on my shoulders. "You did good, Plum. That was a lot."
I vaguely gestured towards the small and still-rutting crowd on the riverbank.
"How are they?" I asked.
"They seem to be having fun, for the most part," she informed me. "Doesn't look like anyone's up to anything that would require our intervention before the Beldame's effect wears off."
There was color in her dark cheeks, as much as she was trying to hide it. You'd think we'd both be used to it, by now, but there was something eternally awkward (and arousing) to the sight of those casual acts of egregious eroticism, at least when they weren't punctuated by acts of terrible violence. Under some circumstances, I might have sent Tom on her way and spent awhile among them, but I was exhausted and we were close to my summer home.
The Beldame had been more active than usual, recently, her attacks coming once or twice a week rather than every month or three. I'd been in Siberia just yesterday, facing down an enormous pair of wooly polar bears, and in Australia not five days before that capturing some kind of misbegotten land shark. Today, of all places, she'd shown up practically in our laps. Tom and I had been out for a morning bicycle when I felt the swell of her magic so close to us that it was faster to ride there than to go by portal.
"I didn't bring a cloak," Tom noted.
My own nudity was something she had grown accustomed to, for better or for worse, although neither one of us tried to make more of a thing out of it than it needed to be. She didn't stare and I didn't preen. My body was just a body and if my assets were appealing to her, she had never let me know, and if that made me feel a certain way, I tried not to dwell on it.
"There's nothing for it," I concluded. "I can still bike like this, so long as I'm a bit careful. We're not far from the castle. Should be able to slip in the back way and get some pants on before anyone notices."
It was a sound enough plan, in theory. If we could make it through the countryside without attracting attention and get back onto the grounds of the estate, we'd be all but home free. The castle, as I called it, wasn't exactly that, but it was as sprawling a domicile as I'd ever had the pleasure to frequent and its land holdings seemed to stretch on for miles in every direction spreading out from the coast. I'd been staying there for some seven weeks, now, on a summer term exchange program. Why it was that my peers had been placed in humble village homes and I'd been granted a room in a noble's chateau, I couldn't tell you, but I couldn't deny that it had its perks—one of them being that there was plenty of room for Tom to come visit me on her own summer holiday.
As expected, the groundskeepers were out and about, but they paid us no mind. We slipped past the outer gates and parked our borrowed bicycles in the little unmotorized garage and darted around to skip up the back stairs, where none other than the Comtesse Origine du Monde, young mistress of the castle, was presently on her way down.
If I hadn't known better, I'd have sworn she was waiting for us to arrive.
"Bonjour," she trilled.
"Ah," I stammered. "Bonjour, madame. I, uh—"
I gave a little bow out of habit, despite it leaving me entirely exposed and dangling.
"Our Plum decided to go skinny dipping in the river," Tom lied for me. "He was out and up to his back when one of your French blustery winds came up and sent his kit over the waterfall. By the time he went running after it, it had washed clear out to sea."
"I see," the Comtesse chirped, neutrally. "Well, we Françaises do believe in la liberté, but perhaps it is a good thing that I found you, and not Mme Durand."
The Comtesse's head of household was not known for her agreeable nature, though she had seen to it that I was nothing but comfortable during my weeks of stay. The Comtesse herself, on the other hand, seemed almost entirely too agreeable. She'd flitted around me like a moth, no matter my attempts to keep my head down and stay out of her notice. It wasn't that I found her or her company in any way unappealing, but she was nobility, for goodness' sake, and I was absolutely nobody—if we discounted my supernatural commission. I was fairly certain that if I was caught cozying up to a countess, they'd tell me to pack my bags and send me home. I was already convinced that my appointment here was a mistake, no matter what the officials on both sides told me. I just didn't want to make things worse.
Because, no, nothing at all about her was unappealing. She was slim and stately, her curves subtle but keenly refined. Her breasts were small, but prim and perky, a fact I had duly observed out of her habit of wearing tight-fitting silk blouses that invariably showed off her nipples. Her hair was reddish blonde and fell over her shoulders in precise ringlets when it wasn't pulled back into a voluminous tail, as it was now. Seeing the two of them together, I realized that she was almost comically Tom's opposite, Tom who was stout and wide-hipped and enormously bosomy and who never let her dark hair grow more than a few centimeters unchecked.
Somehow, while I'd been thinking about how hard I was trying not to think about the Comtesse, she had descended the staircase and drawn within arm's reach. She laid her hand on my bare shoulder and I hoped she didn't notice the autonomic twitch in my delta—though Tom did, based on the way her eyes flicked down and back up again, looking a little more reproachful than they had a moment before.
"Perhaps it was the stress of nature's unfortunate practical joke," she mused, "but your dip seems not to have offered you the reprieve that such things should. Damson, you are wracked with stress from head to toe. I cannot abide it and I know what you need. You are aware of the grand bathroom?"
The du Monde family's grand bathroom was the central feature of the uppermost floor of their chateau, a ridiculous feat of both opulence and plumbing. I was aware of it.
"I had my maids prepare it for my use," the Comtesse continued, "but I dare say that you could use it more than I. Go straight up. There's no one in the halls at this hour. Do not return until you've had a long soak in a hot tub."
Whatever words of protest I might have offered were silenced as she laid two fingers on my lips, gently but implacably shushing me. As if to prove her dominance further, she ran her eyes down my front, allowing herself to unabashedly linger in consideration of my lower parts before she returned her focus to my face with a new and appreciative smirk.
"Go on," she insisted. "I will entertain mademoiselle Tomasina while you are away, worry not."
Tom, who seemed to have no idea how to navigate this off-kilter dynamic, simply shrugged at me. Might as well, she seemed to say, though these words were harder to find than her earlier easy lie.
"All right, then," I relented.
If the Comtesse had lied to me about one thing, it was that the halls were empty. Well, no. The halls were empty, but the grand bathroom was not. Not one but two of her personal maids were stationed there and for some reason neither one of them appeared terribly surprised to see me and not their mistress walk through the elaborately arched door. Entirely at their mercy, I allowed them to walk me to a tiled corner where they soaped me up and scrubbed me down, thoroughly cleaning my every crevice before they would allow me to step into the steaming claw-foot tub that beckoned at the bathroom's center.
Briefly, I thought there might be more to these preparations, as the more jovial of the pair scrubbed circles around my cock, encouraging it to rise for the occasion, but the moment I felt her hot breath on my waking head, her partner emptied a bucket of cool water over my head, dousing my ambitions. They led me to the tub, each one taking a hand that I might not stumble, and directed me to enter it. As one accustomed to heat, it shouldn't have shocked me, but I let out a pleasant hiss as it nearly scalded my toes and then a deep sigh as I sank my whole self into it, inch by inch.
I closed my eyes, letting the sensation carry me away, and when I opened them I was alone. That was okay. I'd never caught their names, but I'd never had a reason to, before. Those two were fixtures of the house staff. Surely I could find them when they were off the clock. I let my eyes fall closed again and tried and failed not to fall asleep.
"...C'est ça la vraie détente," the Comtesse observed. "Are you enjoying yourself, Damson?"
Shaking off a rather nice dream, I blinked my eyes open and searched the room for the source of her voice. The quality of the morning light was mostly unchanged, but it had grown a bit thicker. I couldn't have been out for more than forty minutes, maybe an hour, though I felt like I'd rested for much longer.
The Comtesse stepped into my field of view, wrapped in a plush white towel and nothing else. Tom was with her, standing nervously a couple steps further back, but similarly garbed.
"Oh, I'm sorry," I said. "Did I take too long?"
"Not at all," the Comtesse laughed, waving away my concern. "This bathroom is more than big enough for the three of us. I did send away Claire and Aurelie, so if you were hoping for ménage à quatre—or cinq, perhaps—je suis désolé."
Before I could fully parse her meaning, the Comtesse dropped her towel and cut down any coherent thoughts that might have been springing up in the garden of my confusion. I thanked my instinct to not embarrass myself by looking away. The Comtesse did nothing by accident. If she let me see her naked, it was because she wanted me to, and I'd have dishonored her to do anything less than drink her in.
She was just as beautiful as I'd imagined, her skin the kind of truly pale pink that my olive undertones could never match, all the better to contrast the pink of those rosebud nipples I'd so often ogled out of the corner of my eye. My gaze dropped immediately to her delta, where her ruby-mauve vulva was garlanded by a dense and fiery-golden bush, a strange reflection of my magical raiment. I wondered why she might need a bath at all, as every corner of her from her fingernails to the gaps between her toes was immaculate, but perhaps it was more about letting go than sloughing off.
"I decided that since the both of us have seen you fully exposed," she said, "it was nothing less than fair that you should see us in the same manner."
At this comment, she reached back and tugged Tom's towel out from her white knuckle grip, spinning her around and leaving her equally unguarded. Tom had apparently neglected to mention that this wouldn't be the first time I'd seen her naked, but it was true that it had never been as intentional as this. I'd figured out a long time ago that, no, she did not want to participate in the post-Beldame orgy. She didn't seem to want me to ever see her more exposed than shorts and a t-shirt required, let alone in any sexual light. That didn't stop me from thinking about her when I touched myself, if only sometimes, but the one-sided nature of that transaction was more than plain.
Or it had been, before the Comtesse turned it on its head.
For a few beats, Tom tried to cover herself, one arm across her chest and the other over her crotch, but then she shivered and let her hands drop to her sides. The jig was up. She might as well come clean. She had what one might describe as an obscenely womanly body, all thick and round and ripe, like some ancient fertility goddess turned from stone to luscious flesh. Damn me, but I wanted to touch her. The journey that the Comtesse had kickstarted, Tom ushered to a rapid completion, and I became very aware of how painfully hard I was beneath the meager obscurity of bathwater.
The Comtesse took a few steps forward and leaned over the tub, dangling her tits in my face and shattering whatever mystery I had hoped to maintain. She shifted close enough to brush her lips across my cheek before she retreated out of reach.
"C'est bon," she said, with a chuckle. "We're going to make sure we're clean before we join you. You do your best to make a little room for us between you and your fauchard."
"There's no way we'll both fit in the tub with him," Tom grumbled as she followed the Comtesse over to the same nook where the maids had washed me.
"in that case, we'll have to take turns, won't we?" the Comtesse suggested, glibly.
Unsure whether I was or wasn't supposed to wash them in their ablutions, I did a little of both. It was hard to ignore the way the Comtesse ran her soap-laden hands across Tom's broad back and under her heavy breasts, eschewing a washcloth, the better to feel her subtle work. It was even harder to ignore the little gasps and moans that Tom let escape when the Comtesse's fingers passed over her dark nipples or between her legs. I'd thought I was painfully hard before, but now I found myself questioning whether the effect that hot bathwater had on my cum wasn't worth risking, if only to take the edge off.
In the end, I mastered myself, aided in large part by the Comtesse's subsequent entrancing display. She knew I was watching her and she apparently decided to put on a show. All the care and effort she'd put into washing Tom, she did doubly and twice as overtly to herself. She caressed her peaks and valleys. She polished her nipples like precious stones. She spread herself open and cleansed every fold. I couldn't be certain, at this relative distance, but I was pretty sure she made herself orgasm when at last she rinsed her body clear of suds.
And then, like it was nothing at all, she crossed the grand bathroom to the tub at its center, to me, leading a visibly reluctant Tom by the hand.
"Did you make room for us?" she inquired.
She reached her free hand into the tub and wrapped it around the head of my cock, as if to confirm that my apparent hardness was no trick of refraction. I flexed from my base and she squeezed me back, satisfied that my article was genuine.
"I think there's room for one of you, if you don't mind getting close," I said, my words slurring a little—perhaps I'd been in the water too long. "But Tom's right, I don't know how all three of us can fit in even as big a tub as this."
"Hmm," the Comtesse pondered. "I think I have an idea, if you'll be patient with me for a minute, Tomasina, ma chère."
Tom pursed her lips, but eventually nodded in assent.
The Comtesse climbed into the tub opposite me, one manicured foot at a time, bracing herself on the sides as she slid down into the water, careful not to displace more than a few small splashes over the side. I adjusted as she guided me, which ultimately left us all but ass to ass, our knees steepled together like folded hands. More pointedly, that left her vulva pressed against the base of my cock, and with every appearance of forgetting herself, she began to grind herself against me beneath the water, rubbing as far up and down my shaft as the tub and her flexibility would allow. I certainly didn't mind the delay, and neither did Tom, by the look of her.
A small part of my mind took note, now that I could appraise her from this distance, that the Comtesse was not entirely naked. She still wore a ribbon around her throat. It was an unbleached, milky white color that only slightly clashed against her skin and was curiously seamless, not tied, as if it had been formed in place. Something about it made me think of the gold ring that I still wore—that I could similarly never take off—but then words spilled out of her mouth and drove any further contemplation far, far away.
"Oh, Damson," she moaned. "Fuck, you feel so good against my cunt."
She stopped speaking and moving both, sensing the shift in timbre as both Tom and I tried to process her shift into courser language.
"What?" she protested. "My parents named me after a cunt. Why should I be afraid of the word, let alone what it signifies? I love my cunny dearly and I'll see to it that it is treated so."
I could tell that Tom wanted to say something, but then the moment passed and the Comtesse took control again.
"Stand up," she instructed me. "Careful, now."
Like she had, I used the edge of the tub as a railing, but unlike she had, I wobbled precariously, wavering in my balance and nearly tipping over until Tom grabbed me by the shoulder and held me steady. I tried to show her a gracious smile, but she wouldn't make eye contact with me, her eyes jumping between the Comtesse, my cock—which was, as a consequence of this position, slapped against the Comtesse's cheek—and the decorative tile floor.
"Your turn," the Comtesse said to Tom. "Climb in behind him. There should be room, now."
I really didn't think she would, but she did, showing nearly as much poise as the Comtesse had as she lowered herself into the tub, albeit displacing considerably more bathwater in the process. She only slipped at the very end, as her legs tried to find a comfortable angle to fit between the Comtesse's and mine, and in doing so she planted her face right between the cheeks of my ass. I might have fallen if the Comtesse hadn't caught me by the cock, anchoring me within her fist as Tom subconsciously dug deeper into my cleft before remembering herself and pulling away.
"What now?" Tom coughed, as much a distraction as a real question. "Congratulations, we all fit in the tub. Sort of. Is that it? Are we done playing your silly games?"
The Comtesse tittered amicably, seemingly impossible to offend, at least by one like Tom who supplanted shyness with brusqueness and who intended no meaningful harm.
"I suppose that depends on you," she answered. "I have an absolutely delightful cock in my hand that I am, very soon now, going to shove down my throat. I can't say I've made further plans beyond that, but I intend to figure them out as I go along. As for you, it seemed to me that you liked the feel of Damson's ass on your lips. Perhaps you should indulge yourself with a less accidental taste?"
She didn't wait for Tom to answer before she proceeded with her intent. The Comtesse leaned back far enough to get her lips around the head of my cock and then she began to practice the fine art of cocksucking like few I'd known before or since could. I figured there was no way that she would get the whole of me down her throat, especially at this angle, and I was right, but not for lack of effort. She took her time, sliding me a little further past her lips with each progressive stroke, her fingers moving on my shaft and beneath my balls the whole time, her tongue never ceasing its constant attack, but however gradual it took me, my consumption was inevitable. I nearly came when I felt her throat constrict around my head. I did come when I felt Tom's tongue enter my asshole.
Thank all that was good that they had four hands upon me, or else I think I would have fallen completely out of the tub. The tension that had been building since that morning's encounter with the Beldame flowed out of me all at once. Marvelously, the Comtesse swallowed every drop of it, moaning in delight around my shaft, louder with each successive shot.
Neither one of them stopped. The Comtesse took advantage of my brief flexibility to shove me somehow even further down her gullet while Tom took the same opportunity to shove her tongue as far as it would go up my ass, pumping it like a little cock. I fought to keep myself from drowning beneath the waves of overwhelming sensation as I found myself not an object of their adoration but their pliant plaything. That was okay. I didn't mind being their toy.
The Comtesse finally came up for a deep-chested gasp of air just as I was rounding the corner of my second climax, as I suspect was her design. Rather than taking me back into her mouth, she took my cock squarely in both hands and pressed it against my own belly as she jerked it up and down, leaning me just a little back into Tom's tonguing grip so that when I came—somehow even harder than the first time—my semen shot up into the air like a fountain spray and all came raining back down onto me, spattering me from chin to delta. A little even made its way into my own mouth. I tasted as I knew myself to: strongly savory and a little bitter, an acquired taste but not an unpleasant one.
It took Tom a few more seconds to stop, at which point I realized she'd been frigging herself beneath the bathwater the whole time she tongue-fucked my ass. She shuddered and roared around me, then finally, if a bit petulantly, extracted herself from me.
"Ce n'est pas mal for round one," said the Comtesse as she leaned up and began to lick my cum off of my belly.
"Round one?" scoffed Tom. "What the hell else did you have in mind?"
"It is almost entirely for my voyeuristic satisfaction," the Comtesse explained, "although I'm certain Damson will not mind, but I would very much like him to shove his cock between those magnificent tits of yours. I adore my mes petite nichons, but they're no good for a tit-fuck."
Once again, the mood in the grand bathroom shifted as I felt Tom tense behind me—and not in a good way.
"Ma chère?" the Comtesse pressed.
Tom nearly leapt out of the tub as the tension within her broke. I braced myself against the Comtesse, shielding us both from the attendant splash and the pull of the void.
"I'm sorry," Tom grunted. "I can't do that. I can't do this. I'm going to go. You two have fun. I'll see you later, Plum."
She practically ran from the grand bathroom, moving as quickly as wet feet and tile could manage without sending you ass over teakettle.
The Comtesse tried to say something in apology or reproach but this time I silenced her, placing my hand over her mouth and holding her in place in front of me in the tub. There was nothing sexual in it, for the moment. I was pretty sure I knew why that had gone the way it had and I knew there was nothing she could do to solve it. It wasn't my place to tell Tom what she needed to figure out for herself, but I could at least protect her from well-meaning efforts that would hurt more than they helped.
She kissed my palm and moved it aside, intuiting the reason for my restriction after some brief consideration.
"Will she be all right?" she asked, looking up at me with wide, sad eyes.
"She'll get there, I'm sure," I replied. "She just needs time."
"And she needs a friend," the Comtesse added. "How many more days did she plan to stay?"
"Just through the end of the week," I confirmed.
The Comtesse stood, sloshing more water out of a tub that was now barely half as full as it had been when I first got in. She leaned in close, lapping up a few more globules of my seed from where they dripped along my chest. Despite the change in circumstances, I was already well ready for whatever the new version of round two might be, as evidenced by my cock grinding rigidly against her stomach.
"And how much longer does your program last?" she inquired further, in-between licks.
I grit my teeth to suppress a surprised hiss as she bit into my nipple.
"Five more weeks," I grunted. "But my next term doesn't start for another month, so I can extend my stay if I have a place to live."
"C'est bon," she murmured, suckling. "If that is the case, I want you to spend the rest of the week close to her. I won't intrude unless invited. And after she goes back to America, we'll move you out of the guest room and into mine. What do you say?"
She laid her teeth into the nape of my neck as she wrapped a hand firmly back around the base of my cock, between us. It was ominously menacing, even if she didn't mean it as a threat. I took her by the chin and tipped her head back, moving in to kiss her properly for the first time. She didn't resist, her lips parting to invite in my tongue, her hand absentmindedly beginning to pump my cock as she sunk into the pleasure.
"That sounds wonderful," I told her, breaking the kiss. "I'll stay with you as long as you'll have me."
She subtly shifted her grip on my cock, rotating it down between us and then bringing it back up between her legs to bump against her vulva. It was soaking, and not at all from the bathwater.
"Let us mark the occasion of our compact with a joining of another kind," she purred.
The Comtesse went up on her tiptoes, confident that I wouldn't let her slip and fall, and mounted my cock.
"And then, I think," she pondered aloud as she brought our deltas closer and closer together, "I will recall my maids. That is, of course, if you can spare a few more hours for me."
"There's nowhere else I'd rather be," I lied.
////
"Did you keep his name?" I asked.
Tom laughed again, a little warmth returning to his cheeks.
"I told him he could have it back," he said. "But I didn't want to keep mine, either, so I picked a new one. I'm Tom Sorrow, now. Mother was furious. Something about the end of a storied lineage, blah blah blah. I reminded her that she wasn't getting grandchildren, either way."
I wondered if anyone else would have been able to hear the pain in his voice. Tom had always wanted children. More specifically, Tom had always wanted a child. Just the one. He'd described that dream to me many times when we were children who didn't know any better the ways that life could turn you upside-down and inside-out. Still, whenever he'd told me that, I'd always imagined myself as the child's other parent, even though today was the first time we'd ever even kissed. What a thing that was.
Was there any doubt that I'd always loved him? Maybe not. Maybe that was why I'd left him behind. But he was here, now. He was here with me.
"Pasta's ready," Tom noted, snagging a noodle out of the pot.
We didn't speak much while we ate. The food was good and the company was better, whether either one of us were willing to fully articulate it. Outside, the storm went on, fueled by some distant vortex that left it unable to slow or tire. I put on some music, to soften the noise. When we were done, I cleared our plates and offered him a brandy. Glasses in hand, we took up our places in easy chairs at either side of the fireplace, which would be roaring and gold if it were winter, but now laid as dark and cold as the skies outside. Night had fallen. We were still here.
"I think I got it wrong," I announced.
"Oh, are we making apologies, now?" Tom scoffed. "I'll go first: I make none. Your turn."
"Not that," I said, wounded. "I mean, that, too, but that's not—Jesus, Tom. I'm sorry. I wish you could know how sorry I am. I won and I lost everything. I saved her and she disappeared. I was afraid that if I went back, you'd disappear, too. I couldn't accept that. So I took myself out of play, for everyone's sake."
"I wouldn't have disappeared," he muttered.
"You can't know that," I countered. "Would you have married me if I'd come back? Would you be Tom Plum, now, or would you have divorced me, too?"
"You wouldn't have rejected me," he swore.
"You didn't give me the chance prove that, one way or the other," I said. "You pushed me away long before I left you behind."
"Okay, fine," he snarled. "I'm sorry for that."
"I don't—I didn't," I stammered. "That's not what I want. And that's not what I got wrong, whether I did or I didn't. I said before that I won—against the Beldame—and that's what I got wrong. I didn't win. It was never about winning or losing. I've had more than fourteen years to think about this and what I've concluded is that making any of it a battle was a mistake from the very beginning. That's why it ended in tragedy. That's how it all went wrong."
There were tears in Tom's eyes. I could feel their sting from across the room. But for everything else he was, he was never incurious.
"Explain," he demanded.
"She as much as confirmed it, that last night," I told him. "Her attacks were a compulsion. She didn't want to cause harm. In fact, she tried to stem the tide, wherever she could. To make it easier for me to locate and contain and collapse."
"Did this revelation come before or after you fucked her?" he asked, darkly.
"Jealousy does not become you," I chided.
"And celibacy does not suit you," he shot back.
I winced. He wasn't wrong, of course. Spirit of fire. Libido came with the territory. These past years had been a special kind of hell, even with Mrs. Jones to occasionally break up my doldrums. If I were kinder to myself, I'd have found some friends or taken a regular lover or simply made the effort to drive into town and hire someone whose business that was. But I wasn't. This was my hair-shirt. The suffering was the point.
"I did fuck her," I admitted. "It was lovely. It was hot and fulfilling and everything I could ever have wanted from you. But you weren't there. You shut me out and I left you behind. I tore her down from the sky and she welcomed me. I'd have been a fool not to accept her gratitude. I won't apologize for that, even with all that happened after. I won't tell you I'm sorry for loving her, even if only for a single night."
"Do you still want that?" he whispered.
The lights in the cabin flickered and went out, leaving us in darkness and radio silence. His question hung in the air, tossed back and forth by the sound of the wind and rain outside our walls. I knew what he meant, but I had to be sure.
"Do I still want what?" I asked.
"That," he repeated, without hesitation. "With me."
The truth spilled out before I could come up with a safer or more convincing lie.
"More than ever," I rumbled.
There was a soft rustle of silk as he untied the scarf from around his neck. I heard him set down his glass and exit his chair, though I couldn't see him move until the lightning came again and painted him, ghostly bright, suddenly right in front of me. He knelt at my feet and laid his head upon my lap. The touch of his skin was unexpectedly cool, though a raucous heat spread out from our meeting place and through my loins.
"I can wait," he whimpered. "Tell me what you figured out. I promise I won't shut you out, again. Just let me stay."
I thought of reassuring him, but he would've bristled at the overture. This was already more vulnerable than I'd ever known him to be. He was not mine for the taking, but for the wanting. I did want him, but more than that I wanted him to understand. I needed him to know why whatever happened next, it would be different than what happened before.
"I've been working on a new spell," I explained. "I've been going through everything, all of it, all the way back to when it started, and I think I have it figured out."
And there it came. My last and first memory of my days as a magic knight. My one and only congress with the spirit of fire. The beginning that was key to our new ending.
I let it wash over me, once more, and I took Tom with me.
////
The red rocks practically glowed beneath the noonday sun. It was already getting too hot for comfort, even on a relatively cool spring day, but that suited me and Tom just fine. We had traded low temperatures for low attendance, and were glad to only be sharing the vista with a few dozen other tourists rather than several hundred.
Our trip had been pretty but uneventful, which was exactly what we'd both been looking for. I'd completed my freshman coursework early and didn't have to be back on campus until my end-of-year exams, so I'd stolen Tom away from her gap year, the whole of which had been occupied by her mother's attempts to convince her to join the family business. It wasn't going well for either of them and we'd all needed a break from the stress. A week among the painted hills would do for the two of us, and Tom's mother could do whatever it was that rich women did to get themselves off—a thought I tried not to consider in too much detail.
Something caught my eye as we passed through another natural archway. I thought it might be a mirage by the way it seemed to flicker in and out of substance, but the longer I focused on it, the more it coalesced into a clear if ethereal shape. It was a cloud of butterflies, their wings shimmering with every and all colors, and it was growing.
I tried to find where they'd come from, but was distracted from my search when the cloud passed through—not around, not over, but through—a cluster of fellow hikers. The three of them stopped where they were, dazed for a moment, although none of their eyes followed the butterflies as they moved on. It was like they hadn't seen them in the first place. Then, they began to strip, tearing off their clothes in a disjointed frenzy. Before the woman was even fully naked, the two men had fallen upon her, pushing her down to the sandy path, their cocks out barely long enough for me to register them before they were buried inside her.
It had all happened so quickly that I was still processing it when the sense of alarm began to build in my chest and throat, overtaking my shocked amusement, but however gratuitous their display, it didn't seem to be anything but consensual, based on the way the woman dug her hands into the men's bodies, moaning and loudly urging them to take her harder and deeper.
"Are you seeing this?" I asked, nudging Tom.
"That is definitely against park regulations," she remarked, blinking at the trio, "but I guess they're not hurting anybody? Not our business how they get their jollies."
The thing was, it wasn't just them. As the butterflies grew in number, they split off into many smaller clouds, moving in every direction and colliding with more groups of tourists. Each of them began to exhibit similar misbehavior, although each in their own way. Some didn't bother to strip before they started pounding each other. One older gentlemen fell to his knees and started begging for cocks to fill his mouth. A pair of heavyset women mounted a ridge of particularly phallic rocks and let nature take them.
"Okay," Tom amended, "that's not normal. Either something's wrong, or we missed a notice for Swinger's Day."
I was only half listening, because I'd started to realize that the name of the game wasn't sex, but excess. A wiry young man in too-tight clothes and a bad haircut sucker-punched his burly companion, knocking him to the ground and mounting him, not to rain down kisses, but punches. His fists came away bloody and he didn't stop. I glanced back at the first three and however happy they still seemed in their activity, the woman's moans had stopped. At this distance, I couldn't tell, but I didn't think she was even still conscious. Her partners didn't seem to care.
"Watch out for the butterflies," I warned Tom, as a cloud wended our way. "Don't let them touch you."
"What butterflies?" she asked, mystified.
"So you can see them," a husky, disembodied voice whispered into my left ear. "Can you see her, too?"
However strange this interlocution was, my sense of reality had become too warped for me to question it. I resumed the purpose I had been distracted from. What was the origin of these butterflies? I didn't find it on the ground, so I started looking higher and higher until I found her, perched at the top of a great boulder.
I couldn't say it was a her, except that the voice had told me so. The distant figure was clad in a fantastic gown of overlapping mismatched silks, excessively voluminous and swaying on the breeze, even though the air around me was entirely still. She held something in her hands. A harp, maybe. She moved her fingers over it and I could hear soft strains of far-away music. I didn't know how I knew, but I could say with absolute certainty that whatever these butterflies were, wherever else they had come from, she had brought them here.
The noises of the small crowd grew both louder and sparser as various gatherings fell either into greater acts of debauchery or deeper acts of violence. Someone needed to put a stop to this before somebody died.
I pointed to the figure on the boulder.
"She's the one causing this," I announced. "I have to get up there, somehow."
"She?" Tom questioned. "I can't quite make her out. It's like I know there's someone there, but I can't make myself look at her. What the fuck is happening, Plum?"
"You will do nicely," said the voice in my ear.
I felt myself come untethered from solid ground. Whatever this voice was, it was tugging on me, dragging me through to somewhere that was here but also somewhere else, somewhere close but also far away. I desperately grabbed Tom by the hand—I didn't want to face this without her—and she screamed as we tumbled through light and sound and dimension before landing exactly where we had been in a landscape that was entirely new.
The red rocks were replaced by dunes of glittering blue-white sand from which sprouted twisted crystal trees laden with plump fruit that glowed from within with hazy ember-light. The sky above us was all black, but I could sense that something was out there, something more vast than the stars I knew. This place was the stuff of dreams or nightmares, but though every hair on my arms and legs stood on end, no part of it felt anything but terrifyingly and inescapably real.
"Holy shitting fuck," gasped Tom.
She'd found the source of my mystery voice. I would have echoed her sentiment, but there was no point in being redundant. Tom had got it in one.
The creature had a human shape, more or less, but no one would mistake it for one of us. It was nearly eight feet tall and black as obsidian. Just beneath the surface of its translucent skin, a network of fiery veins pulsed and glowed, suggesting the appearance if not the presence of a skeleton, though what precisely lay at the core of its being was hidden from my view. At its extremities, I half expected to see its hands tipped with claws or its feet end in hooves, but its long fingers and wide toes were shapely and elegant and entirely in the human mode.
As my eyes adjusted to its brightness, its other features came more easily into focus. The hair-like strands that wreathed its head were gathered in woven ropes of deepest dark. It had four eyes in two stacked pairs and they cycled through flares of color, shifting from amber to gold to silver to blue and back to amber again. It had only the one pair of breasts, but they were perfectly swollen teardrops, their peaks frosted like snow-capped mountains. That might be enough for me to assign it womanhood, except that the object that dangled from its delta was most certainly a cock and it had nothing else besides, no slit, no sack, nothing that might make its gender less ambiguous.
"I am the spirit of fire," it announced as I completed my examination. "I welcome you, Damson Plum."
Both pairs of its eyes were directed to me, as if I were the only one who had come through from the other side, a fact which was not lost upon my companion.
"What about me?" Tom snarled. "Am I not welcome?"
"I see you, little brave one," the spirit observed, "but I do not name you. This is no insult, for the taste of your plumage on my lips would be less sweet than you imagine."
This odd counterargument mollified her, though if I knew Tom, it wouldn't keep her quiet for long. Difficult situations made her acerbic, sometimes unnecessarily so, but I couldn't exactly blame her for her coping strategy because those same situations made me uncommonly contemplative. Sometimes I needed someone to do the talking for me and she did the job well, if abrasively. That she had a habit of making things more difficult than they needed to be in the process did little to undermine my gratitude.
"It is a time of crisis for your world and mine," the spirit of fire announced. "The spirit of joy has come undone. They no longer comprehend the limits of their vocation, that surfeit of anything is havoc for the mortal condition. A little fire warms, but too much fire burns. A little joy keeps a heart beating, but too much joy can lead that heart to cease."
"Was that what caused the butterflies?" I asked, finding my voice. "Was that who I saw on the boulder?"
"Yes and no," it confirmed. "The spirit has chosen a vessel and inhabited her with its power. She summons forth the joyful menagerie that does your peers such harm. Few can even see her or her magics and none can stand against her unless they are similarly possessed. Thus I offer you this power mine, that you may be my champion and bring joy to heel."
"Why the spirit of fire?" poked Tom. "Shouldn't we be talking to someone like, I don't know, the spirit of sadness? Wouldn't that make more sense?"
"Joy killed sorrow and returned them to the soil," the spirit sighed. "We are not so transient, but we are beholden to time in our own way and it does not align well with yours. Sorrow will grow again and be returned to our number, but it may take many of your lifetimes to see that growth take hold. Our world can afford to wait that long, but yours cannot. Too many of you will suffer. I will not have it."
A peculiarly human expression crossed the spirit's chiseled features. It resembled embarrassment, tinged with pain and regret. It closed its four eyes and when it spoke again, its words were softer than they had been before, as if it didn't quite want us to hear.
"There is another reason," it admitted. "We were a constellation, the spirit of joy, the spirit of love, and I. Our passion caused every world to shine a little brighter. But time is a cruel mistress, even to those who are timeless, for nothing in everything is without flaw. Flaws, given time, become fissures and fissures, given size, can sunder bonds even as unbreakable as ours."
Was it a comfort to know that unfathomable godlike beings could have jilted lovers? Maybe. The impact of that quarrel on humankind made me find the whole thing a bit less equalizing or endearing than I would have liked it to be. All the same, I felt as though we stood on slightly more even footing now, the spirit of fire and I.
"Okay," Tom grumbled. "So, why him? Why not me?"
"You are a poor fit for my power," the spirit lamented. "You are unhoused from your truest self, and no such pretender can wield this fire."
"What, and Plum has it all figured out at nineteen?" Tom scoffed.
"Do not mistake simplicity for virtue," the spirit warned, "nor strength for reward. But I can see that you are determined to stay by his side, so I will do what I can for you. I will grant you a sliver of my power, that you may see what he sees and go where he goes."
The spirit shivered and an afterimage of her detached and became its own whole. It was red in all the ways the original spirit was black, like queens of opposing suits. The red spirit had slightly altered properties, as well. It was a little shorter and more stout and its breasts were a little smaller and more scooped and its cock was much thicker all around. I wondered idly if it had formed itself to Tom's preferences in the way the black spirit seemed tailored to my own, but then I remembered that I would trade every raven-haired giantess I'd ever courted for a chance to be with the one who was standing next to me right now.
"What do I need to do?" I asked.
Tom shot me a panicked, half-angry glance, but I shrugged it off. There didn't seem much point in questioning any of this further. I was never going to say no to the spirit of fire and I sensed that it knew that, or else we would never have come this far. That it pulled me here at all meant the deal was already done and my fate was already sealed.
"I will embrace you," said both spirits, obsidian and vermillion, in disquieting unison. "A part of me will become a part of you and I will stay with you until the end of your days. There is nothing more and nothing less to it than that."
The two spirits advanced. Their footfalls were light but they still caused the ground to tremble beneath us, or maybe that was just my own body betraying me, unable to contain either my excitement or my fear. I had never let go of Tom's hand, but I squeezed it, now, in a vague attempt to reassure her and myself in the process. She squeezed it back and then let it go as the red spirit overtook her.
Whatever thoughts I'd had of keeping an eye on Tom were banished as the black spirit's form filled the corners of my vision. Its presence went beyond the physical, as if it exerted a strange gravity on the fabric of space and time alike. It became my world, my sun, and I a mere cold hunk of rock in its orbit, waiting to be reborn into a planet with its fiery touch.
It laid its hand upon my chest and my thin cotton summer shirt burned away, vaporizing in a puff of smoke. No sooner had I realized how literal its intentions to embrace me were than its other hand alighted upon my shorts and blasted them away, too, and my boxers with them. Its long black fingers wrapped around my cock and I was instantly hard, an awed arousal that I'd only begun to acknowledge now inexorably present and out of control. The spirit ran its thumb along my shaft and I came, spraying unchecked seed wherever the wind and gravity might take it.
Somehow, this sudden climax energized me, rather than enervating me, and I leaned into the spirit with unabashed need, wrapping my hands around its tits and sucking one snowcapped nipple into my mouth. Its skin, however stone-like it appeared, was wonderfully soft and pliant, it seemed almost to draw me in as I dug into it. The spirit's nipple was hard and hot in my mouth and then it opened like a flower at morning, filling my mouth with a sweet nectar, more like honey than milk, which I greedily swallowed.
Half-consciously, I noticed that the spirit was still working my cock in its hands, coaxing forth another immense orgasm, but once again my release filled me rather than emptying me. I tilted my head back, something throaty and wordless rising up from deep within my chest, reluctantly releasing the spirit's teat. It tilted down and covered my lips with its own, filling my mouth with a searing, snakelike tongue that filled my orifice and pushed further, entering my throat. I felt its fingers below run along the head of my cock to gather sticky strands of my semen and relocate them to my backside, rubbing them around my asshole. My ass parted as easily for the spirit's fingers as my throat had for the spirit's tongue. I had no barrier, I had no need to protect myself, I had nothing but acceptance of its overwhelming love.
The spirit dipped me and spun me around, letting me catch as much breath as I could as I twirled. I caught a sweep of red body and dark flesh and I knew, innately, that whatever Tom was receiving from the red spirit, it was much the same as what the black spirit gifted me. I felt giddy at the thought that she might be feeling such unbridled bliss. Tom deserved that, more than I.
But I could no longer think of Tom when I felt the spirit's cock press against my rear end. Once again, I felt no fear or repulsion, nor any sense of violation. I was a vessel eager to be filled to my brim. The head of its cock passed over and around my hole, adding a viscous excitement to my own seed's contribution, making me pulse and ooze, so slick, so ready.
It entered me and my heart stopped. That wasn't hyperbole, either. I felt my pulse cease to tap out its lively rhythm. I felt the blood go still in my veins, its vital momentum halted. My vision blurred and darkened. I imagined that this must be what death felt like.
And then there was a shower of sparks, like steel striking flint, and some idea of life flickered within me. Another shower burst forth and I began to believe that this might not be my end. Sparks flew a third time and my existence resolved.
The spirit was fucking me. Its cock was the steel, my ass was the flint, my soul was the tinder. New life began to burn in the pit of my heart. Blood flowed again through my veins, but now it was laced with fire. I rose again from amongst the ashes, more than I was before.
There was a shifting of things in the moments that followed. What had been mystic became material and what had been ritual became revelry. The spirit of fire had done as it came to do, inoculating me with its ineffable distillation, and now that its work was done, all that was left to us was play. We were outside of time, I could feel it with my new senses, so we could take as long as we needed.
I reached back, cupping the spirit's neck, and ground myself into it, willing it to take me deeper and harder. It wrapped one hand around my cock and pumped me with every thrust. There was no more magical quickening, no unexpected orgasm. If anything, I felt like I could go longer than I had ever gone before. Maybe it was just my imagination, but it seemed as though my cock was growing as the spirit stroked me, swelling beyond its previous limits to become something larger and meaner that more closely resembled my host.
It filled my guts with what felt like magma, a substance I imagined would have killed me if I didn't have the spirit's essence to scaffold my own. We parted, but only long enough for me to turn around and climb back into its arms, eagerly mounting its cock again and laying my own member between its mountainous tits, to plunge myself through its soft valley every time it dragged itself out of me. My teeth sank into its throat, praising and begging and thanking it in equal measure. We became one writhing, monstrous creature beyond comprehension, a binary supernova.
I looked across the non-space and saw that Tom had been similarly transformed. She was bent like an arch, her palms and heels both upon the ground, as the red spirit took her from behind, its cock plunging in and out of either her cunt or her ass, I couldn't tell, her tits swinging madly. Her back was drenched with sweat and splattered with a milky, luminescent syrup, suggesting that she could only take the spirit's offering externally, though that didn't seem to dampen her enjoyment of the sacrament that had turned to debauchery.
The spirit of fire came again in my ass and I erupted between its tits, squeezing them together as I pounded out every last drop and spraying myself with two gouts of its honey. We heaved and swayed, dripping with the rewards of our lust. It gingerly took my left hand in its right and brought my fingers to its lips. With as much reverence as it would have given my cock, it slipped my middle finger all the way inside its mouth, tight between its pursed lips. When it returned my hand to me, it was ringed with a band of hot gold. I hadn't wanted our union to end. Now I had a reminder that it never would.
I gasped as I tumbled between worlds, landing catlike on my feet back under the arches, among the red rocks. Tom was there beside me. The sun hadn't moved from its place in the sky. The butterflies that were heading our way had come no closer. It was if we hadn't left at all, except that both of us were newly naked—if, mercifully, cleaned of all strange fluids. Given the activities of the humans nearby, that didn't make us stand out as much as you would think, but it was an unexplainable alteration, just the same.
The spirit of joy's vessel was still standing on the boulder, but I felt her magic zero in on me. I had a feeling she'd been watching us and had noticed the change.
"Speak the spell-words and be transformed," the spirit of fire commanded, its voice a whisper in my ear.
It didn't tell me what the words were. It didn't need to.
"O My Prometheus, Lend Me Thy Fire," I boomed, "I Am Thine Oath Made Manifest."
A great clamor of bells began to chime somewhere in the space between our worlds. My left hand leapt as its golden ring erupted with lines of golden chain. They wrapped around me, encircling my arm, then my chest, then my delta, and so on, until I was clad in a golden raiment from circlet to sandal. Where the chains overlapped and knotted, they bloomed into rubies and garnets and other precious red and amber stones. To me, it felt weightless, though the heft of all that metal would make a stronger man cry, and though it crossed me all over, it was a gossamer web, buttressing my form but leaving me all but naked to any observer's eye.
If our quick change hadn't caught the vessel's eye, this new transformation certainly did. She strummed her instrument and all the butterflies in the vicinity turned towards me, joining together to form a massive wave of scintillating, joyous and deadly chaos. Perhaps my armor would be enough to protect me from them, but I needed a weapon if I was going to drive them out.
I opened my right hand found within it a whip, its handle made of braided gold, its thong a tongue of flame. That would be enough to tame the menagerie. I tested it, unfurling it and giving it a crack. The motion came naturally to me, or maybe my hand was guided from beyond, but it thundered in the air.
"You good?" I asked Tom, glancing her way.
She had already half-dressed herself, throwing on an emergency rain poncho—one of the bright orange ones, not the clear ones—that she'd stashed in her hiking pack. The look in her eye was one I'd never quite seen before. There was a deeper understanding in it, but also a greater distance. We shared something, now, something that could belong to no other but us. But the spirit of fire had been right: strength was as much pain as it was reward, and sometimes more the former and none of the latter. The spirit of fire had bound her to me and that meant she had to stand back and watch me stand alone. My heart broke a little, but I was shamefully relieved. I didn't want to face this without her.
"Go get her," Tom said, with a smirk.
I charged at the tsunami of butterflies, brandishing my whip. Where it touched the cloud, they shimmered and burst like firecrackers, exploding into smoke and sound. More butterflies flowed in to plug each gap as I blew them apart, but my whip was relentless and they were finite. With every fiery slash across the sky, their numbers dwindled and their mass more threadbare, until only a few scattered wings flapped around me, aimless and erratic.
My confrontation with the butterflies, however, had given the vessel time to draw close. She stood now only a few meters away, atop a ridge underneath which five or six woebegone tourists still fucked each other with perilously tired limbs. I gathered my whip and readied it for another lash, but she made no indication of further aggression and instead regarded me curiously.
"I am La Belle Dame sans Merci," she declared. "Are you a wretched wight or my knight-at-arms?"
Her voice was soft and pleasant. From this distance, I could see that she didn't appear much older than me, though her features were hidden beneath a shimmery mask that played tricks with the light. Her gown was even more elaborate than I'd guessed, an almost organic mass of motley patterns and textures that seemed not to be so much stitched together as grown into place. There was something fairylike about her, although it all the ways that my own raiment left me exposed, hers left her entirely covered. The sleeves were so voluminous that she had to pull them back to play her instrument—a lyre, I noted, not a harp—and her skirt spread out along the ground like sea foam. It could have been anyone, under there, and I feared she would always be a stranger.
I considered her question, as best as I could parse it. Under my present circumstances, I supposed I was a sort of magic knight, but the term fit uncomfortably when I tried it on. I was a vessel for the power of the spirit of fire, but what did that really mean outside of the armor and the whip? My patron had only described the curse, not its cure.
"I'm Damson Plum," I told her, feeling a bit naive. "You're hurting people. I need you to stop."
La Belle Dame—the Beldame, I decided—laughed at me. It was an awful thing, simultaneously innocent and cruel. She was entirely aware that she was hurting people and she did not care.
"You are a wight, then," she concluded, "reanimated by misplaced valor. Do you not see how I have opened their hearts to joy? Do you not understand how I have liberated them from fear? I make no possession of their will. How they celebrate their newfound freedom is no business of mine—why should it be any business of yours?"
"I have been given power to stop you," I asserted. "I don't want to use it against you, but I will. Please don't make me. Let's find another way."
She didn't laugh, this time. The Beldame strummed her lyre with a short and furious stroke, producing not music but noise. A great swarm of butterflies erupted from the air around us, blotting out the sky and shielding her from my view. I struck as swiftly as my arm would allow, but found nothing but her menagerie in the place where she had been standing.
"I cannot stop, wretched knight," she called out from somewhere within the cacophony. "My heart drives me, the same as yours, and I shall not sever this connection. Chase me, if you will. Fight me, if you must. But I will not cease to rain joy upon this forsaken world."
It was easier to disperse the butterflies, this time around, but I still wasn't fast enough. By the time they were burned away and the skies were clear, the Beldame was nowhere to be seen. It was victory, of a sort, but it didn't feel at all like winning. I sensed for the spirit of fire's presence, that whisper in my ear, but it was gone, too. Whatever opening had bridged our worlds was closed. I was empowered, but I would have to figure the rest out on my own.
Or not quite on my own. I waved over Tom as I released my transformation, letting the chains of my raiment retreat into my ring and letting the whip fade from my grasp. She handed me the other emergency rain poncho and I pulled it on, although it didn't do much to hide my unmentionables from view.
"Is that it?" she asked me.
I looked around, feeling blindly with whatever new insight I had been granted by the power beyond my world. The Beldame's presence was gone and the residue of her menagerie was fading like dew beneath the morning sun.
"For now," I said. "I think. I'm pretty sure the compulsion has ended, but it's still going to take everyone some time to spin down—and they're all going to be pretty banged up, after. I don't think this is the sort of thing where everyone just forgets and feels better, afterwards."
"I was afraid of that," Tom muttered, wincing. "So much for fairy tales. I'm going to go phone for help. Maybe they can helicopter in some paramedics or something. Will you be okay keeping an eye on everyone? Try not to get yourself hurt, but maybe help where you can?"
"What exactly do you mean by help?" I challenged.
"Not what you're thinking," she growled. "I don't know. Maybe try to separate them? From the sound of things, we're going to have to figure out how to deal with this and there's no time like the present. Okay?"
"Okay," I agreed as she turned to go. "And: thank you. For staying with me."
She looked back over her shoulder, but she didn't say a word.
////
"You know, I still remember her touch," said Tom. "The way I burned without burning, that secret, impossible, wonderful fire. I'd never felt so comfortable in my skin, because to her it was no barrier at all. Do you think you could do that, too, if you transformed?"
I snapped my fingers and several candles sprung to life around the cabin, bathing him in a soft and flickering glow. His eyes were wide from the darkness and his lips were damp with anticipation. I brushed his tousled curls and he purred like a cat.
"I don't think I need to transform to make you feel like that," I said.
He needed no further incentive. Tom moved quickly, yanking my pants and underwear out from beneath me, letting my cock spring free. Before I could say a word of welcome, his lips had drawn me in, voraciously encouraging me to swell to full strength.
"Fuck, Plum," he moaned around his mouthful. "You taste so good."
I didn't know what to say. It would be a particularly egregious lie that I'd never imagined what it would feel like for Tom to blow me, but that had been a different Tom, a less real Tom, and what he was doing now felt better than it ever could have in my fantasies. Maybe it was the flow of the still-raging storm seeping into me, but it took all I had not to grab him by the ears and use him like a toy. Instead, I let myself groan in appreciation and stayed out of his way.
When my head made its way into the back of his throat, he began to move faster and more forcefully, popping my length in and out of his gullet with increasingly loud glugs of effort. I wondered where he'd learned to suck cock like that. A dark pang of envy suggested that maybe it had been with his ex-husband, but I was in no position to judge. Jealousy didn't become me, either. Besides, something told me that it wasn't true. Maybe it was vanity, but I had a strange feeling that he'd been practicing this skill just for me.
"I'm not going to last long if you keep going like that," I warned.
"Good," he gasped, letting me hang free, raw and dripping. "I'm greedy and I'm just getting started."
He dove back down onto my cock, letting me spear his throat while he fondled the space between my balls and ass with a firm and insistent touch. As expected, I exploded. With a mewl of delight, he swallowed every shot, letting the last one pool on his tongue so he could show it off to me. Oh, I was in so much trouble.
Some rational part of me wondered if I ought to be preparing to confront the Beldame rather than indulging in this carnal excursion. Her recent activities were minor on the scale of her past misdeeds, but people were still getting hurt and it was my responsibility to prevent whatever harm I could. Why else had I been given this power?
Tom read me like a book and snorted condescendingly. He rose to his feet and slipped his borrowed shorts off his cute tush with a little wag and a flourish before he climbed onto my lap, planted his knees on either side of my ass, and waved his swollen vulva dangerously close to my still-throbbing cock. But it wasn't time for that, yet. No, he thrust his hips forward and grabbed me by the neck, pulling my face into to his delta. I looped my tongue around his cock and he shuddered like the cabin walls, overcome by violent sensation.
"Touch me," he hissed through gritted teeth. "You don't have to be afraid. I am what I am. It's all me."
I took him at his word and let my tongue drop, running it through his folds, tasting his acid sweetness. He whimpered as I snaked my tongue inside—and whimpered more as I withdrew, leaving him unfilled. It wouldn't be for long. I slid a hand between us and slicked two fingers with his already free-flowing wetness. As I returned my tongue to his cock, I dipped my fingers into his depths. He ground his hips against me, urging me to go further, and it wasn't long before my resolve crumbled. I plunged into his cunt, curling and twisting, fingering him while I sucked him off. He wobbled and squirmed and panted and whined and then he erupted, covering my face and showering my chest with a flood of crystalline ejaculate.
Tom looked down at the mess he'd just made and covered his face with his hands.
"I may have primed myself while I was in your shower," he confessed. "But I didn't expect to squirt that quickly."
I reached up and moved his hands away, folding him closer to me. My soaked lips found his and I parted them with my tongue. He melted into the kiss, tongue dancing with mine, letting go of his shame and inhibitions as our breaths mingled and our mouths collided. I could go on kissing him all night, but I wanted more—and by the way he rocked against my lap, so did he.
"That was a good start," I whispered between sloppy kisses, "but I'm greedy, too."
I lifted him with me as I stood, drawing his legs around my back for balance, and walked him through the cabin to my bedroom. Our lips never parted except for little haggard gasps for air, but I knew my way, even in the candlelit half-dark, even with his gorgeous face obscuring most of my vision. This place was my sanctuary, though only now, by his presence, had it been blessed.
Lightning illuminated us as I tossed him onto my bed. He tore away his borrowed shirt as I stripped off my own. I fell upon him and we were bodies, flesh, companions in parting and lovers in reunion. Whatever ideas I might have had of further foreplay were lost in the storm of our reawakened lusts. There was no stopping this, not now, not even if we wanted to.
I pulled his knees apart and hooked his heels over my shoulders and did what came naturally to animals like us. There was no resistance. We did not hesitate. I drove home and he took me in.
There were tears in Tom's eyes, again, but they did not sting. Had I ever seen him so undone? How had I imagined him happy before this? I didn't need more light than this to see his joy—he practically glowed with it. I might carry fire in my heart, but he was a star.
"Fuck me," he moaned. "Fuck me, fuck me. Fuck me, Damson. Fuck me!"
I did as best I knew how, piercing him with long, earnest thrusts, starting at unrelenting and building from there. He gripped the headboard, bracing himself against my barrage, letting me lift him with every thunderclap of our skin. We had become the storm and we raged with all its fury.
He felt my orgasm building even before I did and began to work himself against me, tipping us feverishly over yet another edge. His eyes were anchors, ordering me with a glare and a snarl to let myself go, to spill myself into him. Some rational piece of me that sat at the back of my mind knew that there was no risk, that an unfortunate twist of his biology meant he could carry no child at all, but that piece was all but silent beneath the noise of my boiling seed.
I released with a wordless howl, pounding and pumping, injecting him with my essence. He shook and shrieked, riding my waves, holding me in with all the strength he could bring to bear. Sparks brighter flared across my vision, brighter than the lightning that echoed them, but I had persevered through greater hardships than this. It was far too soon to give up the fight.
Tom clearly thought the same, because he extricated my cock from between his legs, heedless of the steady drip that sloshed out of him in its wake, and repositioned himself on all fours.
"Now that you've made me your bitch," he barked, "I want you to make a man out of me, Plum. Don't tell me you won't, because I won't hear it."
He planted his face in my pillow, leaving his hands free to spread his own ass cheeks as wide as his body would allow. His asshole was mauve and throbbing and lightly glazed with my semen from when it had streamed down between his cheeks. There could be no clearer invitation, nor bolder statement of intent.
I leaned into one of the fringe benefits of my magic, letting fire flow through my veins, stimulating the passage of my blood, bringing myself right back to full-to-bursting hardness. Maybe it wasn't the kindest approach to skewering his backside, but I knew what Tom thought of that sort of kindness. He wanted nothing less than me at my grandest and most brutal and I wouldn't dream of disappointing him.
"I love you, Tom," I murmured as I pressed the head of my cock against him.
He only made a soft, strangling sound, muffled as he was by the pillow, but I watched the tension go out of him, those dark clouds blown away by the warm westerly wind of his feelings. The moment his ass unclenched, I pushed inside.
There was a little more resistance in this hole, but only just, and the depths of his desire made the passage easy for us both. I plunged a little deeper with every thrust, gradually leaving him no quarter, no escape from my encroach, but he made no plea for mercy. Rather, when I worried, halfway in, that his body couldn't take much more of me, he cursed into the bedsheets—something about cowards and whoresons—so I put my concerns aside and did as I was told.
When I was three-quarters inside him, I released him from his cheek-holding duties, grabbing him by the upper arms and lifting his face back off the bed. He arched his back as I pulled him the rest of the way onto me, allowing myself some pride at his guttural sputters of awed satisfaction.
"Do you want to stop?" I asked him. "That's quite a lot of cock for a cute little ass like yours."
"Fuck you," he countered. "Fuck me."
I swung back my hips and slammed them forward again, only barely moving in and out of him, but making an impact just the same. Now my operation progressed in reverse, each stroke pulling out of him a little farther than the one before it until I managed to get nearly my whole cock in and out of his ass with each cycle. Tom, overwhelmed, began to go limp, but as fun as it was to tug on him like a rag doll, that wasn't what I wanted for him. I moved my grip to his chest and pulled him against me. Our relative heights meant that he had to perch on the balls of his feet while I knelt behind him, but we wouldn't have to be uncomfortable for long, because neither of us was going to last like this.
My right hand moved upwards to cradle his chin and apply a gentle pressure to his throat while my left hand moved downwards to pinch my thumb and forefinger around his little cock. His own hands found purchase as we settled into an unsteady rhythm, one on the back of my head and the other on my hip. I jerked him as I fucked him and he held on for dear life, berserk orgasms threatening to break him free of my grip, but my cock holding him rigidly impaled.
It was hard to keep count of his climaxes, by that point, something like patting my head while I rubbed his tummy and sang a jaunty tune, and even if I had managed it, the number would never have been high enough to make up for all our lost time. Even I had my limits, though, and I was rapidly approaching it.
"Don't leave me behind," Tom sobbed. "I'll follow you anywhere, just take me with you. I love you, Damson Plum. Let me stay by your side."
Filling his ass with ropes of cum wasn't the most eloquent response, but it was the only one I could voice. It was, for all its vulgarity, utterly and inescapably honest. He was my chalice and I would ensure that his cup ran over for all the remaining days of our lives.
With morning came clear skies and clearer purpose. My body was sticky and sore from our long night of lovemaking, but I couldn't just sit around and wait for the Beldame to strike again. I could find her through the substrate at any time and I could just as easily open a passageway that would deposit Tom and me within a stone's throw of her present location. However unprepared or out of practice I felt, there was nothing to be gained from further patience.
"Slow down, hero," mumbled Tom, groggily, entwining himself around me beneath the sheets. "You're not going to save the world again without taking a shower, first. Maybe get some coffee in you, too?"
I sighed. He was right, of course. It didn't matter if I could show up on her doorstep if I was too bleary to focus. Also, did I really want to reunite with the Comtesse while splattered head to toe with cum? No.
He crawled up onto my chest and kissed me. If I did what I really wanted, we wouldn't leave this cabin for several more days. A month, at least. Maybe a year.
"You go start coffee," he suggested. "I'll warm up the shower. Join me when you can."
Two hours and several unplanned-for orgasms later, we were clean and caffeinated and ready to step through a portal, just as soon as we got dressed. I opted for a pair of past-their-prime jeans and a simple t-shirt. I knew better than to dress well when I'd need to transform at a moment's notice. No sense in burning up good clothes. Tom, on the other hand, had cut the sleeves off one of my favorite button-downs and matched it to a pair of shorts so short I couldn't believe I'd ever bought them. He also carried two of the woolen cloaks that had long served to cover me in the aftermath of my transformations. One for me, one for the Beldame, if all went according to plan.
I closed my eyes. I opened the passageway. We stepped through into a hot Nevada morning.
Disuse hadn't dulled my senses. The Beldame was close, but there was an eerie calm to her presence. I'd never arrived before she transformed, back in the old days. Was she waiting for me? Had she just been trying and failing to get my attention? Or was something else going on?
"This way," I told Tom.
I traced her through the substrate like a hound following a scent. We traveled along mostly-empty suburban sidewalks as the buildings around us fell into poorer construction and worse repair until we finally left whatever town we were in proper and entered a run-down trailer park. It was all but deserted, but there, at its center, was a well-loved R.V. that had been painted haphazardly in every possible shade of off-white. Out front of it, lounging by herself in a lawn chair, was a young woman. If I had to guess, I'd say she had just turned fourteen. In fact, I was certain of it.
My brain ran through a dizzying cascade of connections. Everything made sense, now. Damn me, but it did. I swallowed a silent curse and tried not to burst into tears.
"Is your mother around?" I asked the girl.
Tom, who had no doubt put together all the same pieces I had, looked like he was about to be sick. I put a hand on his shoulder, urging him to stay calm.
"Not for seven months, now," drawled the girl. "The doctors called it a 'wasting disease.' Said it was a miracle she made it as long as she did."
"You here live alone?" I asked the girl.
"Near enough," she confirmed. "Mama taught me to drive the bus. I took care of her more than she took care of me, near the end. I manage on my own."
I closed my eyes. Tom's hand found mine and squeezed. Then, as he had done so many times, he moved just out of harm's reach. He would be there, waiting, when it was over.
"What do you say we finish this?" I asked the girl.
She stood up from her lawn chair. The girl was tall for her age. She was lanky and pale. Her strawberry-blonde hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She wore cutoff jean shorts and a loose-fitting t-shirt with a painting of the Eiffel Tower on it and no shoes and a ribbon of white silk around her throat. The girl had her mother's eyes, but she had my nose.
The girl sang a spell—no words, just notes, just feelings that couldn't be contained—and for the first time, I watched the Beldame transform. Threads of silk stretched out from her collar, entwining around her young body and bursting out from beneath her clothes, shredding them to scraps as they bubbled and swelled and wove themselves into a brilliant, impossible, mismatched gown. The style of it wasn't quite the same as I remembered. The cut was a little more modern, the bodice a little more trim, and it had no sleeves at all, leaving her thin arms bare. I waited for the shimmering mask to conceal her face, but it never formed. Perhaps it didn't work when you knew who was under it.
"Your turn," said the girl.
"O My Prometheus, Lend Me Thy Fire," I recited.
I didn't need the rest of it, I'd learned along the way. The words didn't really matter. They were a framework, a guide, but the magic was mine to command and the ring did as I willed.
Chains stretched up along my arm, burning away my clothes with their concealed heat. That left me uncomfortably exposed, as my raiment always had, but I reasoned that if this were going to work, we needed to move past embarrassment. Bodies were bodies and we needed to trust each other in our skins. In that, I had to lead by example.
Neither of us had summoned our weapons. Our hands were empty. Perhaps she meant to fight me hand-to-hand? Our perhaps our purposes were more aligned than I had hoped for.
"Now what?" she asked, her voice heavy with the Beldame's magic. "Are you going to kill me, Dad?"
I laughed, momentarily overcome by the absurdity of it all. But no, Origine couldn't have taught her that. If she were half the person I believed her to be, even a little the person that I loved for those precious weeks and that one shattering evening, she would have come to the same conclusion that I had. She would have figured out that there had to be a better way.
That anger was a teenager's anger. That was the rage of a child who had just lost her parent and who didn't yet know that she had a spare. She had no reason to believe that everything was going to be okay. It was my job to fix that.
"As Joy Drives Your Heart, Let Fire Guide Your Hand," I whispered. "As Passion Disturbs, Let Purpose Balance. Let My Power Join With Yours. O Muse of Fire, Ascend."
My magic flowed out from me and into her. I didn't give her all I could—she wasn't ready for that—but I gave her just enough to bring her own magic in line. Fire was the power to bring joy to heel. It had been so from the very beginning, I'd just been too stupid to figure it out.
The young Beldame willed her lyre into her hands and ran her fingers over its strings, but what emerged were not beasts of the joyful menagerie, but music. Elegant, lovely, inspiring, heart-aching, but plain and simple music. It was a melody that would make any of the great composers proud. She played until her fingers tired and then she rested.
We let go of our transformations at the same time and just like that we were no longer the Beldame or the Magic Knight, we were just two silly people, a daughter and her long-absent father, now returned. It didn't matter that we were naked. We were family. And both of us were too relieved to care. She fell into my arms and began to cry.
"I didn't want to hurt anyone!" she sobbed.
"I know, sweetie," I cooed. "Neither did your mother. I understood that, but only after. I'm so sorry I wasn't there for you while you were growing up. If I'd only known—"
"Not your fault," she interrupted. "Mama didn't want you to know. She didn't want you to know that you'd killed her. She didn't blame you. And she didn't want you to hate her for taking me away. We fought—"
Tom cleared his throat, holding out a pair of ponchos.
"Put these on, please," he growled, "before someone calls the pigs."
The girl rolled her eyes, but took the garment and pulled it on over her head.
"Bodies are just bodies," she grumbled, echoing my prior thoughts. "Nothing wrong with a little family skinship."
"Be that as it may, we're not in Japan or France or anywhere else that thinks that way," said Tom. "Although maybe we should be."
"Daughter," I addressed her, "meet your stepfather."
That shut him up. He blinked at me, uncharacteristically at a loss for words. What, did he think I wasn't going to marry him after all that?
"Tom," I addressed him, "meet my daughter, the Nouvelle Comtesse du Monde—whose given name I don't know because I only discovered that she existed twenty minutes ago."
"I'm Cherry," said the girl.
Of course she was. What other name had I expected? There was nothing else it could have been. The circumstances were too perfect for any other arrangement. The map of the next several years of my life unfolded before me, the fog lifted, the opportunities presented. I had never been missing her—she had always been waiting for me.
"A pleasure to meet you, Cherry," Tom murmured, still half in a daze.
"Hi," she chirped. "What happens next?"
"Well," I sighed, "I suppose that depends on you. Where would you like to go? You can come back to Canada with me or we can find a way to set up something more permanent here in America. Tom, are you still living in Seattle?"
"No," he said with a bitter chuckle. "I've been living in the summer house in La Paz. It's helped to keep the rest of the family away."
"In that case," I said, "it sounds like you have the whole of the continent to choose from. We have the means at our disposal. We'll set up with you wherever you'd like to be."
Cherry closed her eyes, pondering. It was strange to see that expression on someone else's face, when I could feel it fit so comfortably on my own. Tom shot me a look, noticing that same eerie similarity. If there was any doubt in him that she was my daughter, it was dispelled.
"I think," she announced after a little while, "that I don't really care. We sold the house in Tuscon when mama knew she wasn't going to leave the hospital. I've been running across the desert, trying not to make trouble and moving on when I inevitably do. This R.V. is all I have and there isn't much in it that I can't carry on my back. I think I'd go just about anywhere with you, as long as you promise not to leave me alone again."
It was the second time in as many days that I'd heard that offer and that demand. When the grandfather storm rolled in yesterday morning, I expected thunder and wind and rain, but what it really brought was change. One day, I had been a hermit in the forest. The next, a husband and a father. It was a comfort to think that I could be so mutable. I knew these bonds would hold, no matter how the gods raged.
I reached out a hand to each of them and we started over, together.