Authors: Jill Soffalot
Chapter Six:
Harvest Moon
Andrax was perched on his roof overlooking the Fay, desperately trying to fend off the oncoming horde. He had cracked the weathervane off its perch and used it to keep the mob at arm’s length. A frisky sprite had mounted the wooden rooster, and its scream of delight attracted more rapacious wood elves like a dinner bell. Swinging the sprite off the rooster with an audible pop, Andrax turned around and saw Herrik’s skylight winking in the sun.
Two female nymphs lay beside the open window, their heads rolling and eyes closed as they fisted each other with small hands buried up to their wrists. A glassy-eyed nymph grabbed at his cock, her fingertips scraping along the cool skin of his balls and her teeth snapping inches away from its pink tip. Andrax struck the nymph hard across the temple, but she only smiled at him, revealing the row of throbbing clits that had replaced her teeth.
These transformations are a waking nightmare. She has grown powerful.
Andrax scuttled away on his hands and feet and flung himself past the insensible nymphs and through the opening.
Andrax landed on Herrik’s tiny bed with a crash, spinning around to seize the iron bars of the window and slam them into the nymph’s hideous smile. Andrax took a deep breath as he watched the nymph grind her clits against the warm iron, a gargling noise erupting from her misshapen mouth.
Now what the fuck was he supposed to do?
He knew that he should make for the adjoining stable and ride for town with news of the rapture, but the Fay were everywhere. The stable was less than fifteen yards to the left of his house, its doors bolted and his horse clearly panicked. The beast had been a gift from the Council, and the Negress had affectionately named him Nightgift. She had placed her cool black hand against the stallion’s midnight hide and looked sadly at Andrax, telling him that the creature, like man, was a night traveler.
He will ride like lightning across the falling night, and other beasts will shiver when they behold his great power, but before long he, too, will bow beneath the eternal glow of the sun.
Interpreting the musings of the Negress was always a perilous occupation, and Andrax had more pressing concerns.
Like finding a weapon and a way to Nightgift.
Looking at Herrik’s spare accommodations, Andrax felt a pang of concern for the sulky, ever-obedient wood elf. His bed and desk were tidy, uncluttered by the portraits of family or extravagant ornamentation of human life. Herrik was a wood elf of simple needs, but he was also a practical person. Plunging for the chest at the foot of the bed, Andrax flung off the lid and rummaged through the contents. He could hear the panting of the backwards nymph as she shuffled through the house below, and Andrax almost abandoned his search before he wrapped his hands around a lean wooden cudgel in the bottom drawer. Waiting for a minute to rally his courage, Andrax considered the morning’s outrages.
Rapture in Shadehaven! Andrax thought he had seen the last of it many years ago, but the Negress had said that Minerva would never give up her search.
She risked eternity to join herself to you. One day she will find you, and when that day comes she will bring rapture and threaten the very existence of our world.
Her willingness to consider mortality because of her devotion to him may have moved Andrax once, but now he feared it merely revealed the irrationality and danger of the Fay.
He thought of the first time he saw Minerva. He was twenty two then, and knew nothing of life below the weave. He was a quantity surveyor sent by property developers to chart the topography of a remote forest grove. The day had been hot, and he was shirtless as he spread measuring tape through a grassy meadow. Standing next to a viewing bipod in waist-high grass that concealed his scruffy denim jeans, he was trying to visualize a parking garage when Minerva revealed herself to him.
The Fay could choose which mortals could see them, but he did not know that when the grass parted and Minerva stood before him. He also had no way of knowing that she was descended from one of the most powerful lines of Fay nobility, being a moon elf from the Ice Mountains. All he knew was that he wanted this woman with a ferocity that he had never known, and he forgot everything he knew about a world without magic.
Tall and dazzling in a dress made of iridescent black lace, she walked up to him and placed a hand on his bare chest. She smiled, her eyes dancing and her white hair snapping in the wind behind her as she stroked his moist torso. The blue-eyed young man reached for her face.
“Are you real?”
“I am Minerva, Outlander. If you were smart enough you would know to bow to me. I am older than the earth you tread upon. Or perhaps I should be frightened of you? Maybe you mean to ravish me. Should I run?”
Sweat beaded above his brow and his blue-ice eyes drifted down to watch her bare white feet, which left no impression on the ground she stood upon, “I would catch you.”
“Would you run to the place the sky ends to catch me?”
“I would run until my heart exploded in my chest,” he muttered, transfixed by her wicked smile and lustrous skin. She bolted.
He had chased her then, catching her by the wrist as she raced through the grass laughing. Turning her to face him, he traced a finger over Minerva’s porcelain loveliness, barely touching the skin as he ghosted across arching cheekbones and quivering lips. His other hand slipped beneath the lace of her dress and cupped her warm mound. Her inky eyes never left his as her wetness parted for his probing thumb. He fucked her with his thumb while he slipped his middle finger into an anus wet from her running juices. She rubbed his cock, squeezing hard through his blue denims.
She turned around then and peeled off her dress while he unbuckled his jeans, running her nails provocatively over the curves of her ass. Spreading her legs, she bent her face to the floor and looked back at Andrax while she opened her asshole for him with two fingers.
She liked to destroy taboos, to dive into the animal center of things.
Getting down onto his knees, he kissed her asshole before he had even kissed her lips, and as he rimmed her, she began to loop the surveying rope around her neck. She passed the end of the cord back to Andrax, and before he knew what he was doing, he had pulled the cord tight and entered her from behind. Her cunt was a wet glove around his cock that pulled him deeper into her, and while he fucked her, he pressed one hand down on her back and used the other to choke her while she came.
That day time had frozen and the ground shook as Andrax and Minerva joined their bodies for the first time. There was a magic to the symmetry of their entangled limbs. He had been with women before, but none who had desired with such striking alacrity and invention. Every time he thought he had reached his peak or gone too far she took him higher and pushed him further. And Minerva was every bit as aggressive as him, slapping his flesh and chewing his cock in the white fever of her need.
Another memory assailed him, and he remembered the day he knew he would have to leave her forever. She had stood in the blinding snow, her naked skin burning with rapture. How he had wanted her then, her body unfurled before him and clothed in the awesome and terrible raiment of her power. She had reached for his departing hand and despite the raw power ebbing through her being and calling to him, he had left her alone in the biting cold.
Andrax knew that this day was long coming. She had claimed him in that sea of grass, had wed her soul to his with cum and heat. The hunger of the immortal is an endless thing, and together they had dared to feed that ancient hunger. Minerva had always wielded her passions like weapons to cut down her enemies, and her love for Andrax had tempered the blades. But her hunger had darkened and Andrax could not follow her, and the Negress had searched his soul and seen the truth of his words. Gripping the cudgel, Andrax said a prayer to no one in particular.
It was up to him to rescue Shadehaven, and that meant putting on some pants and leaving the safety of the attic.
Waving the club before him, Andrax poked his head out of the skylight. The seething mass of bodies was growing and enraptured Fay tore and gnashed on every side of the outlander’s house. The faces of female Fay that he had fucked were everywhere, their fraught eyes imploring him to take them once more. Andrax rolled his fingers along the club’s handle and girded himself for battle, and then saw something remarkable happening.
Their bodies were making a bridge. Andrax could not believe it at first, but sure enough the Fay orgy was rising. A madness overtook him then, like the audacity of a twenty-two-year-old man taking a bite of the moon.
If he acted quickly he could breast this wave.
Running like a man possessed, he jumped onto the roiling press.
At first, he thought he had made a terrible mistake as his leg slipped, and he felt claws and lips attacking it, but he struck out fiercely with his club and made a beeline for the stable across head and chest and rump. Sprites and wood elves with inflamed cocks and assholes bubbling over their bodies tried to grab him, but his aim with the club was true, and he reached the stable miraculously intact. Nightgift calmed as he slipped through the skylight and quietly climbed astride him. Wheeling the glorious horse around to face the wooden doors, he whispered,
“to the village, through the forest," into Nightgift’s ear, and the beast exploded through the doors in a mess of splintering wood ad left the Fay behind.
Nightgift carried him into the dark forest as evening began to creep into the sky. Clinging to the stallion’s mane while exhaustion settled over him, Andrax looked up at the harvest moon. It was huge tonight, an almost impossible whiteness that put the stars to shame and bathed all in its otherworldly glow. He had tasted merely a drop of rapture, but Shadehaven seemed to be drowning in it.
She must’ve found the Moonheart,
he thought.
If that is true, then all could be lost.
Nightgift suddenly whickered as they passed a great oak, and Andrax jumped off the horse to read Minerva’s message.
A piece of parchment was pinned to the tree by a knife, a small Fay finger joined to the bloody missive, “Abandon Shadehaven, Overseer. Your queen commands it”. As Andrax turned the letter over in his hands, he heard a strange snuffling at the foot of the old tree.
There lay the whimpering Herrik, wrapped in an unfamiliar brown cloak far too big for his shrunken frame. Andrax noted the unfamiliar grey of his eyes, and wondered what terrors the wood elf must have seen.
“Herrik, are you hurt, can you walk…”
“Master, I escaped just in time. We must head for Bower Ridge at once. The Dark Lady has come.”
Chapter Seven:
True Beauty of Subjugation
Minerva sat in the shade of the Moonheart, trailing a silvery finger across the surface of the pool that spread from the core of the immense white tree in the shape of a crescent moon. Her reflection looked back at her like a second self floating in the pale sap, its eyes distant and reproachful.
Is this the face he loved so well? Will he recognize this liquid stranger?
Working her finger across her second face, she looked away and stared at the womb of the world.
The Moonheart was a massive sprawl of white branch and blue leaf situated in a vast cave in the frozen heart of the mountain. It was solid ice and colder than any living thing Minerva had ever touched, yet still it grew and pulsated in the dark. It stood like an ice sculpture carved by primordial gods and left as a monument to their power, while the moonblood dripped ceaselessly from the black mouth at the center of its trunk.
Fitting, I suppose.
Minerva searched for the fabled tree for years, had first discovered its whereabouts with Andrax at her side. Knowing that her love for the outlander threatened her grip on eternity, she devoted her life to finding the tree and its promise of a sacred power that could forestall death.
And more.
If it had looked anything less than divine, she would have been gravely disappointed.
Amidst the Council of the Fay’s chorus of nodding heads, the Negress had told her to abandon her pursuit, arguing that hunting the Moonheart was a fool’s quest, “It may deliver you into infinity once more, but the Moonheart is not a prize that can be won. It must remain hidden, for the good of all Fay. Only destruction can come from this, Minerva. Think of Andrax and the love you bear him.” Minerva had turned her back on the black bitch then, and with Andrax she had scoured the mountain passes till finally they had found her deliverance.
Minerva sat naked on the somber grey cloak she had worn on her bitter trek. Through the winding tunnels and outside the cave, her slave carriage awaited her return and their long ascent back to the palace. They would wait at her leisure. Neora had gone to capture the man she loved while Minerva remained confined in the prison of the Imperial Palace. Her power threatened the stability of the weave, so she could not set a foot in Shadehaven without alerting the Council. So she must wait wondering if the love she bore Andrax was more than the reflection of a stranger in a murky pool.
She needed rapture.
Lying down in the icy knot of roots that spread like giant white worms from the Moonheart, she spread her radiant legs and raised her dripping hand from the pond. The black tattoos that covered her body reconfigured in the light of the moonblood, becoming barking dogs one second and bursts of startled birds the next. She placed her ivory cock on the edges of her pussy with her dry hand, running the buzzing head across her dilating lips. She prodded the dildo into the gape, preparing herself for the heady fall. Dildo pressed against her damp center, she brought the wet fingers to her clit and gave herself over to the distant currents of memory.
At her insistence, they remove their clothes at the entrance to the cave. The Moonheart is the birthplace of the Fay, after all, where the Moonmother sat upon the early world and delivered magic from between her thighs. They must approach it, wearing only their skin. He is resistant at first, shivering in the bitter wind like the mortal he is, but he relents. He wants it as much as she does, and their mutual need compels them through the mouth of the cave.
She leads him to the base of the tree. She looks at him, this mortal man, and the love he carries for her so plain on his beautiful face. The lake’s pale light dances quicksilver against his broad chest and flat stomach, licking at the outlines of his cock hanging flaccid against his thigh. She smiles, gesturing at the pool, “After you, Outlander. I offer you the first taste.”
Pushing a strand of jet-black hair from the alluring blue of his eyes, he drops to his knees and cups a hand in the thick white moonblood. He tilts back his head, silver dribbling down his chin as he sucks. Nothing happens for a second, and Minerva begins to rage at the unreliability of myth. But Andrax looks at her, his eyes shining as they never have before, and leans in to kiss her.
The heat of his mouth contrasts strangely with the warm sap. It tastes like everything yet nothing, a synthesis of the universe and all its living parts. Intoxication slides down her gullet, all her senses awaken and commingle so that taste becomes touch becomes scent, and she feels her hungry new self pushing against the membrane of her former skin. She knows she must have him.
She pushes him into the tree, his muscular back thudding against hard ice. She kisses him messily, her tongue searching his mouth and tasting his sweat. He bites her lip hard, brushing his thumb against her nipple and raising a foot to her wetness. The sensation jolts her body, and she grunts like an animal as the bone in his foot grinds against her cunt. His cock feels like silk against the whorl of her belly button, but she does not want it now.
Leaning back, she delivers a stinging blow with the back of her hand, feeling the heat of the contact like an exquisite burn across her skin. He tries to grab her wrist, but she clutches his shoulders and pushes him sadistically to the ground. He tries to shout, but she presses the fingers of her left hand firmly against the apple in his throat. Lifting her right leg to press her foot down on his shoulder, she sits on the face of her lover and screams. At first he gasps, suffocating in the hot mask of her sex. Then he begins to lick, his tongue lashing her clit in long, hard strokes. She grasps the trunk of the tree with both hands, her skin the same alabaster hue as the Moonheart. Blue leaves fall from the tree as she fucks his face, her ass pumping as she crushes her cunt against his tongue and teeth. All around them the branches begin to move, enclosing the rabid couple in their cold tentacles and a flickering prism of blue light. All color fades as she…he…
She came then with a shudder that shook stalactites off the lower branches of the Moonheart. The fingers of her right hand dropped from her clit to rest against her flushed thigh, and her other hand fell from her pussy to hang in the air. A moment passed before the slippery dildo hit the floor. A film of sweat shone on the curves of her breasts and beaded her nipples, and her pearly hair cascaded in long wet strands. It took her five minutes to regain her composure, roll open her raven eyes and lower herself from where she had levitated ten feet off the ground.
Rapture had not always been so spectacular. The magic had developed gradually. It had been exhilarating at first, as she and Andrax reveled in their heightened appetites and the intensification of their physical connection. His cock had always satisfied, but never before had it filled her so
completely
. When he entered her with the moon on his lips, his cock was like a sentient being, responding to every twitch of her cunt. Orgasms had grown more powerful, till often she blacked out when she came only to awaken in a crumpled daze with an ache in her core and blood on her knuckles. Then they began to recruit the acolytes, and they experimented with the endless possibilities that their insatiable imaginations conjured in the shade of the Moonheart.
She had masturbated as Andrax allowed himself to be sodomized by a colossal outlander with dusky skin and a ten inch cock. She watched him draw blood from his lips as that thick black prick battered his asshole, and the bald head leaned over to bite Andrax’s ear. He saw her fucked in all her holes at once while two gorgeous sisters from the eastern shores tattooed Fay calligraphy onto her breasts. The onyx liquid only began to swim across her body long after Andrax was gone, but he saw the tight clamps around her tits that squeezed them out into pallid orbs. And he saw the tall brown twins with bone piercings through their nipples and clits as they did their bloody work with the throbbing needles. The cult of the Queen of Desire had begun. The Moonmother had returned and the Council banished her from the protection of the weave.
Yet even banishment from the realm of the Fay did not chase her partner in desire from her arms. That was all Minerva’s doing. Her hungers had grown darker, and she began to test the limits of pain and pleasure, to see the body in all its complexity and to understand the true beauty of subjugation. She craved the power of enslavement, to take the will and flesh of another and usurp it. Soon the cries became more tortured, more hopeless, and Andrax grew weary of the palace they had built. He had stood in the light of the moonblood, watching in horror as Minerva tore the fingernails from a skinny young man’s left hand. Staring blankly at the pliers, Andrax uttered his last three words to his lover and queen,
“You are lost.”
Then he ran, sprinting for the exit while the blood-drenched Minerva raged behind him. He made it out the cave and sped along the snowy mountain path, her hand brushing his flowing hair as she closed on him. Then he leapt across a yawning abyss over the Lonely Sea in the blinding rain and wind, pitching headlong for a spindly rock that rose from the ocean below. Her hand reached out and caught air, and she saw a final blue flash of the eyes that stole immortality before he disappeared from her life. He somehow survived the treacherous climb down and made his escape on a tiny rowboat, and the Negress had squirreled him away, thinking she could hide him from Minerva’s possessive gaze.
And now she nervously awaited his return, her faith invested in a changeling who had consumed more moonblood than anyone aside from her. And the transformations were growing disturbing and unpredictable: Body growths, flight, gender switching. These were well and good, but other deviations were less pleasant. Some men had begun to putrefy before her eyes after being injected with large doses of the sap, and others consumed each other in a cannibalistic rage that muddied the easy distinction between sexual and culinary appetites.
Neora had filled her body with more of the fluid than Minerva expected, carrying a full bucket of the tree’s sap in her superb tits.
I dare not trust her completely, yet she is the hand that must pluck Andrax from his dream of a conventional Fay life and bring him to me. And of all people, Neora knows the power and cost of enslavement .
Minerva could not accept that Andrax had abandoned her at their greatest moment. He drank of the moon and returned to the half-life of the weave. And now, with the rapture spiraling beyond even her control, perhaps he could restore balance to the kingdom of the free flesh by reuniting with his absolute other.
Or all would be lost, and the worlds of man and Fay would both fall into eternal chaos and nightfall.
Gathering her cloak and her worries around her, Minerva flew to the entrance of the cave and her pack of waiting slaves.