Fantasy tf featuring a “knight” and his squire, the latter of which is the only one who knows that his master is actually a horrific arthropod with a carapace that can be configured to take on any shape, color or texture. At the end of the day, the squire dutifully cleans every inch of his knight’s metallic chitin, not that the monstrous warrior needs another set of hands to do that for him. He polishes each plate to a mirror-shine, until he can see his face reflected in each one, subtly distorted by the slight whorls in the organic surface.
Someday, he hopes, his master will induct him, not only as a meager knight but as a creature greater than feeble men of soft flesh. He strokes his own skin inside his bedroll while his master sits across from him, unsleeping; he passes his fingertips over his joints, pressing them into his limbs until he can feel the long bones of his appendages, as if by kneading his skin and muscle he could coax an exoskeletal armor from within himself.
The day finally comes. He’s traveled with his knight for years, and on the third anniversary of his becoming a squire he is to be knighted. There is no ceremony, only his master roughly awakening him and dragging him out of his bedroll. For the first time, he sees his knight’s plates slide away, revealing his soft innards: pink and crimson musculature contracts as if winking, iridescent fluids coat every cord and membrane. He doesn’t realize that what he’s looking at is a mouth until he is pulled inside, his smallclothes quickly discarded so that he is shoved, naked, inside of his master.
He never realized how roomy it was within the plates of his knight’s armor, how easily he could fit inside. The squire never imagined such softness to be hidden within his master’s shiny steel facade, nor how good it would feel to be enveloped from all sides in such tender, secret flesh. Inner appendages work their way into every hole they can reach, stroking every sensitive surface of his skin. All the while, he can see out of his knight’s visor as he goes about his day, as he continues his duties for the next several weeks.
By the time his skin has melted he’s in a state of perpetual orgasm, the loss of his dermis doing nothing to blunt the constant pleasure being wrought upon his nerves. The formation of the plates of chitin he had sought for so long is, unfortunately, too painful to ignore even in the throes of ecstasy he’s bathed in for weeks, so the knight has to seek the deep wilderness to hide his shrieks of agony as the transformation comes to completion.
Finally, the metamorphosis is complete. The creature’s plates reopen and out tumbles a new, shiny knight, its chitin resolving into gleaming silver. The squire-child looks up at its progenitor, thankful to be made into something superior to men, something older than kingship and more beautiful than any gem shaped by mortal hands.!he rises, and the two embrace, armor clinking together as a silent understanding passes between them.
They part ways, each in search of new squires.