It being the glorious month of Taurgust (Taur - as in centaur - plus August), I did a poll for my patrons with a number of humanoid torso + monster body 'taurs' and they decided on a nonbinary drider who's a tailor to royalty, and a royal, gender neutral reader.
Available to all tiers on Patreon
Preview:
“How’s that, your Royal Highness?”
Gods, how that soft, susurrating voice in your ear made your heart flop over in your chest, and how those light, dancing fingertips made your skin prickle into goosebumps, even after all these years.
Sal had been your own, personal tailor for six years now, while their mother remained the court tailor to your parents and older brother. Having them stand so close to you in the seclusion of your private apartments, their fingers skimming over the lines of your body to make the final adjustments to your outfit before you emerged into whatever task or speech your role as the younger of the two royal siblings demanded, had become a guilty pleasure in which you indulged far too often. Nobody needed that many new outfits, after all.
Nothing was going to make you stop.
Nothing short of Sal asking you to stop, that is, but they didn’t seem inclined to back off either.
You’d been dancing around each other for years, after all. At least, in your mind you had… Finding out the truth would involve shattering this spun-sugar fantasy you’d woven around the two of you like spidersilk.
Sal had started coming along to their parents’ appointments to learn their mother’s trade when they’d only been around ten years old, and the first time you’d met them, you’d been fascinated by them. Of course, you were used to the sight of driders from having to attend your parents’ and older brother’s appointments already, dragged along like a piece of spare cargo and expected to sit quietly on a silk damask sofa until it was your turn to be fitted for something new.
The captain of the Royal Guard was also a drider, but he looked nothing like Sal and their parents. He had long, steel grey hair that he plaited back off his stern, slate-grey face, and he was armoured with his own, natural carapace that gleamed softly like burnished steel. His nightmare limbs were needle-sharp and hooked at the tips with stiletto-talons that could probably have punctured the steel of the royal vaults in a single punch.
Sal and their parents were more like tarantulas, with velvet-soft fur and low-slung, rounded bodies, but while Sal’s mother was white all over, including the thick, curly hair on her head, Sal’s fur had slowly turned from white to a cherry blossom pink as they’d grown. Their father, apparently, had done the same, and his fur was now a rich, vibrant fuchsia, banded with paler tones across his legs. He was a renowned leather worker in the upper city though, and while some of his skills had been used in his wife’s work, he rarely came up to the palace.
The first time that Sal had been there had been the day you’d first begun to enjoy learning about clothing, and at every appointment since, they’d been there to make you smile or reassure you, or keep you from keeling over out of sheer boredom.
More recently though, it had become exquisite torture.
Sal never did anything that wasn’t completely appropriate. Every touch had a purpose – to snip a stray thread or to tuck up a hem for adjustment, or to make a suggestion about the drape of a fold of silk – but the way their fingers lingered at your hip or the nape of your neck always made you shiver.
When you met their strawberry-pink eyes, your breath caught.
Read all of it right now, as well as August's monthly exclusive - a male gargoyle x f. human that's over 10k words long!
non-binary forest being x gender/body neutral reader
5100 words
lemon | making out, multiple tongues, fingers, oral, size difference, sex pollen (but consent is Very Much still included)
chapter one? or chapter two?
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Winter makes one last desperate grab for spring, sinking lightning strikes like talons into rain heavy clouds. The days are still cold and gray, still better suited to thick jackets and staying off the roads, but green finally appears on bare tree limbs, sprouting and unfurling into bright shoots before you can blink. All you can think about is visiting Aspen now that the snow has stopped falling. The heavy scent of them has been lingering in the air, the faint sweetness of nectar and the crispness of greenery. You know from experience that it isn't the wisest decision though, running off into the heavily soaked trees all on your lonesome.
Then again, you’re not sure you can make any claims to being wise when you’ve been dating a creature of the forest, brought into being by human feelings of love and affection. And lust.
You can’t forget about the lust.
The bloom that Aspen had dropped for you that first night fed on lust, just the same as them. Small and dainty, with a single stem, you’d brought it home and put it in water, charmed by the gesture. You hadn’t thought much of it for a few days. Hadn’t done more than give it a few glances, thoughts drifting to Aspen’s rumbling voice and slick tongues. It looked normal enough, but after a few days you’d noticed that it was still fresh, and after a week that it had grown.
Nervous, and wondering if you were going to have to tend to some kind of child-like Ent creature, you’d brought it back to Aspen a day later, but the sight of the thriving blossom had only made them laugh.
“This was meant to be a gift only. A reminder.” Aspen had bent, their branches creaking, threads of lichen getting caught on your shoulder as they prodded the petals. The bloom hadn’t moved, hadn’t grown or opened beady little eyes, but then Aspen had tilted their head to rest upon yours. A leaf sprouted along the stem when Aspen touched you, quickly followed by another bud. The motion had left you both enraptured, wide eyed and silent until it stopped growing. “As long as you desire me," Aspen had murmured, lowering their voice as their wooden mouth brushed your ear, "I believe it will remain fresh. Indeed, it may well grow larger.”
“Will it be sentient?”
“I know not,” they’d confessed, truthful. You hadn’t missed the teasing glint in the depths of their dark eyes though. “But I doubt it. Many of my blooms have dropped here through the years, but none have lingered for long.” Aspen had plucked the bloom out of your fingers and then had tucked it behind your ear. It had sprouted more leaves, had grown a small offshoot, but a day after you’d gone back home, it had… If not exactly withered, had returned to its original state.
And then every time you’d been in the same room as the bloom, every time you’d even felt a hint of arousal, the flower had perked back up, had flourished like it had roots and the perfect soil. Until midwinter.
Aspen, for all intents and purposes, hibernated during the coldest months of the year. There had been little reason to try and stay awake when humans stopped coming to Makeout Point before you, but even with your presence and touch bolstering them, Aspen had begun to grow drowsy. Three days before midwinter, they’d barely been able to speak past cracking yawns, the moss and lichen on their shoulders and chest grown dry and brittle.
The lack of them, of being able to look forward to seeing them, had put a damper on your spirits. And then the bloom going into stasis three days later had been a bit worse.
Winter felt like it lasted an age, but two days ago the little white flower had perked up again. You’d been walking past the small vase, lonely and lost in thought when the moving petals had caught your eye, reaching slowly towards the weak sunlight shining through the fogged windows. You’d assumed it had only been disturbed by a breeze until you’d reached for it, extending two fingers. The blossom had shot up, stem growing long until it bumped into your skin, Aspen’s heady scent filling up the room until you’d breathed deep and, overwhelmed, sneezed.
You’d felt a bit silly asking the little plant if Aspen was awake, and even sillier when it hadn’t reacted in the slightest. There was little cause for doubting though, not after the flower had followed Aspen into its own rest, all you need to do now is wait.
But waiting is proving much harder than you want it to be.
You miss Aspen, have been missing them and their rumbling laugh. You miss the way they can’t seem to stop stroking your cheek or your shoulder, eager to touch you, to have your attention. You’ve thought about them frequently through the winter, but that nectary taste is so heavy on the back of your tongue now, no matter what you drink, no matter how deeply you breathe in that it feels… Off. I should go, you tell yourself a few times a day, but as soon as you make it to your car, you find a handful of excuses to stop. To stay.
The winter might have been long, but another week won’t hurt anything, will it?
Twice you drive halfway there, but the state of the roads always sends you back. Rain has been pouring from the sky, leaving the underbrush of all forested areas slogged with mud, and Makeout Point will be the worst of all. The normally well traveled paths are always dotted with leaf litter, and this time of year they’re likely to have puddles, floating with decaying leaves, unassumingly deep.
All it would take is one misplaced step, your feet gliding through the slick mud, for chaos to reign. If Aspen is awake, they would most definitely attempt to help, but you can’t imagine a giant tree person carrying you back to your car without a few lingering consequences.
The rumors about Big Foot and wandering bears died down towards the end of November, but at best that would start them up again. At worst—well, you don’t really want to imagine the worst. Most of those thoughts have to do with mob mentality, and you can’t let yourself imagine that fallout without feeling sick.
You swallow, finding yourself back on the road to Makeout Point, heart beating a bit too fast. You don’t fight the urge to go this time. The flower had been much larger today, dotted with new buds and leaves, and all it had taken was a single inhale of the little thing to make you ache.
Even if all you do is spend a short time by Aspen’s side, you have to see them. Just to make sure they’re awake. Just to make sure they’re okay.
You’re clutching at the curved handle of your umbrella, rain splattering against the arch of water-proof material, as well as the sleeves of your zip-up hoodie, when you realize you may not have thought things through. Again. You look down at your feet, frowning at the amount of mud already caking your boots, and glance back up at the winding path disappearing through the trees.
It would be smartest to head back, rather than risk a dangerous slip down a too-soft hill. Smarter to keep the visit short, rather than risk getting soaked through.
You think of the soft fan of Aspen’s fern-like eyelashes when they blink, and the way they shiver every time you press a kiss to the whorls on their cheek. They always turn to kiss you in the best way they know how, afterwards. A gentle tilt of their head, the slow, slick curl of one of their tongues around yours. You can taste the faint sweetness of them on your lips, can feel the pressure of their fingers on your back.
You’ve already come this far out to see them. You can take a few minutes to give them a kiss, despite the chill and splatter of rain, can’t you?
The trail becomes worse as you go on, the rain having battered down the dirt in places where the branches overhead are thin. You have to hug the trunk of a twisted oak as you slip by one of the deeper puddles, fingers scrabbling at the craggy bark when a root proves too slippery. You don’t fall, but it’s a near thing, and your heart doesn’t thank you for the scare.
Moving slower becomes necessary the longer you walk, searching out patches of thick moss to dry and wipe your boots on. Even on drier patches of dirt you’re still sliding with mud and leaves sticking to your boots. When you finally crest the small hill that leads to Makeout Point, you assume your impatience will wane, that this arduous ache will ease now that you know Aspen is close.
Instead, it grows tenfold.
It’s cold outside, the rain is freezing, but as soon as you see the riot of fauna and moss crawling down the path, you feel terribly hot. It’s like you’ve been running a marathon in your winter clothes, like the umbrella is keeping the relief of the cold rain from your face.
You toss it aside, striding up the path, barely paying attention to the unsteadiness of your steps. You can still feel the mud sliding under your feet, you recognize the sensation of rocks and bits of dead branches catching in your boots, but none of that matters now that you’re here.
Makeout Point no longer looks like a mildly haunted hangout for people looking to bring a bit of a thrill back into their lives. The rough campground atmosphere has vanished in the wake of springtime. The sky overhead is still grey, still covered over with clouds, but they’re thinning, bathing the spot in the promise of sunshine soon to come. The fire pit, made of forest found stones or carefully cultivated bricks, is overgrown with ferns and green and purple leaved clover. Dainty white flowers are brilliant in the tide of greenery, drawing the eye like a meandering path of scattered stars.
As gorgeous and awe-inspiring as Makeout Point currently looks, the calm feeling that you came here for, prior to Aspen finally deciding to speak to you, is utterly absent.
The humidity has risen, and sweat dots the back of your neck while you slowly creep closer, staring up at the ocean of thick leaves and blooms and buds swaying with the breeze. It’s always been shadowed, has always sported full branches, but this is almost overkill. The branches are so heavy with buds and new growth that they’re bowing, and the gentle weight of a single bird looks like it could make them snap. You breathe in deep, fumbling with your hoodie, eager to shrug out of it, when you finally turn and spot Aspen, standing straight and tall in their normal place.
They’re waking, the obsidian gleam of their eyes mildly unfocused as they blink. The horn-like branches on their head are draped so thoroughly with vines and thick leaves, and the blooms that match the one you have back home, that all you can bring yourself to do is stare. You’d thought that Aspen looked impossible the first time you’d seen them, a being so strange but artfully put together that surely they could be nothing but animatronic, something you would normally only ever see through a movie screen. A creature pulled straight out of someone's imagination.
“Lovely,” they say, and their name for you reaches right down into your depths. Your bones, you realize, have felt like kindling placed too close to the fire, and Aspen’s voice is the bright burst of heat that finally makes everything pop. They take a step away from their spot, caught midway between two towering redwoods, and half the branches overhead seem to come with them. They have to pull free of a net of vines, so thickly overgrown that when the vines and loose branches fall, and they do, scattering like a strong storm has passed through, you have to skip back a few steps to avoid being caught in the deluge.
You suck in a breath, almost choking on the sweet taste of them as your eyes catch on their shoulders. The tiny mushrooms that had dotted them all through autumn have grown, tall and thick, and faintly yellow or white, and then there are shelves of them trailing down Aspen’s biceps, edges gone periwinkle blue.
They cross the little clearing in a handful of steps, swooping you up into their arms and cradling you against their chest. The thunder of their movement startles near-by birds into screeching and taking flight, branches snapping as they take off, and then Aspen turns in place. They’re a walking, talking tilt-a-whirl that leaves you breathless until you rap your knuckles against the least green covered spot you can find, closing your eyes to try and keep them from stinging.
“St-stop spinning!” You gasp and the world jolts to a halt, leaving you blinking and panting. Aspen is ripe with the scent of growing things, and it feels like you’ve been rolling through a field absolutely chock full of sweet smelling flowers and the tang of pine. If you thought Aspen made you weak kneed before, with their scent and taste and rumbling voice, it’s nothing as to now.
You’re overheated and happy to see them, and blood is rushing to all the right places—but your wanting is so terribly strong that it still leaves you feeling off kilter.
“I have to ask,” you get out, doing your best to breathe through your mouth. It doesn’t help much, you can still taste everything on the back of your tongue, can see their wooden jaw lowering, writhing tongues just barely visible. “In Spring, your… You said once, that I made you feel like Spring when—”
“Ahh,” Aspen murmurs, and then very, very gently, lowers you back to your feet. They keep hold of your shoulder until you’re standing straight, and only then do they take a few careful steps away.
The space is a little maddening, even though you’d been hoping for it so you could get your head in order. You have to swallow to keep from following after them, to tamp down the urge to move your feet and instead make your mouth speak. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, knowing where you come from,” you say with a wry laugh, clutching tightly at your sweater sleeves. “...Does, has your presence always been a kind of aphrodisiac in spring-time? Or is that just with me?”
Aspen flutters those little fern eyelashes, slowly crouching, elbows resting on their knees. Considering. “Perhaps it has been. I don’t intentionally give back what was given to me, but it’s hardly outside the realm of possibility.”
And it might well explain why, even after it became a little less cool to wander through the forest rather than head to the movies, couples still continued to flock here. You’d noticed that Aspen had fed from your pleasure, had bloomed every time you kissed or touched, so it isn’t entirely a surprise to know that they feed upon others.
Granted, in a much less hands on kind of way.
“Does it make you uncomfortable?” Aspen asks, reaching for you, and then thinking better of it. Their long, branch-like fingers curl, hesitating before dropping back to their side. “While I am wonderfully glad to see your face, Lovely, if you want to leave—”
You wave away their words, closing your eyes to see if that will help with anything. The ache of yearning for them is still very much present, but you’ve yearned for their touch since the night you first had it. It’s stronger now, but you were still able to reason through it enough to ask. You were still able to stop yourself and think before stripping off your clothes. You forget to breathe through your mouth though, and that sweet scent makes you shudder, makes your mouth grow terribly dry and then fill with saliva to overcompensate.
If you stay, or if you wait and come back when the height of spring has passed, what will change? You’ll still want Aspen. Still crave their company and the refuge that their home has become. You’ll still want their touch. You’re just… A little more horny than normal right now, and a little more willing to speak about it.
“Not leaving,” you finally say, blinking your eyes open when one of their fingers presses against your shoulder. You’re swaying forward, most of your weight balanced against their precarious hold. “I want- I want to stay, but I have to tell you: All I can think about is getting out of my clothes.” Whether the statement might have shamed you normally or not doesn’t seem to matter. The words are so overwhelmingly true that a weight vanishes from your shoulders, decision made. You do your best to slow your movements though, trying to straighten your stance as you lift both hands to grab hold of their arm. Your fingertips brush over the spongy edge of a mushroom on their forearm, and another mushroom promptly pops into existence right next to your hand.
“Oh, good,” Aspen says, reaching out for you with both hands now. You let them lead you close, let them lift your feet onto the bend of their knee, leaving you within range of their mouth. “I dreamed of you while I slept,” they confide in you, and the deep rumble of their words makes your knees want to buckle.
Even with the heavy humidity pressing in on you from all sides, making your back faintly damp with sweat and pushing your hands to quest for zippers and buttons, your brain is still working. A flicker of half recalled knowledge about dreams clamors for attention. If they were dreaming of you, if Aspen is more akin to humans that either of you think, their dreams were recent, had in the moments or days just before waking. Maybe that was why the bloom grew, why it started budding, why whenever you breathed in the faint scent of nectar, you started to ache for the lack of them.
“And what did I do in these dreams?”
For a single second, Aspen looks abashed, ducking their head close enough for you to press a kiss upon. Their eyes fall closed when you brush your lips on their face. Your hoodie comes off, tossed over your shoulder to land somewhere upon the carpet of multicolored clovers.
“Shall I tell you? Or would you rather I show you?”
There it is. Their mouth opens, a single fingertip finding your chin. It’s softer than normal and cool compared to the normally temperate feeling of their wooden body, and you have a split second to glance down and see that those blue edged mushrooms are growing along the length of their finger. Then Aspen is tilting your head back to kiss you.
Like the first kiss you’d shared, they start out slow. A single, sticky-sweet tendril traces your lips until you part them and then slips into your mouth to curl around your tongue. You suck on it, hands pausing in their overeager quest to strip off your clothes. You want to brace yourself against Aspen’s face, to press your hands to their chin as you roll your tongue, arousal flooding you so fiercely that you can barely breathe. You forget about your clothes entirely when you tilt your head back a little more, gasping as another one of those thin green tongues flicks out to touch your lower lip. Aspen’s hand, gentle in the middle of your back until now, curls around your torso, fingertips pressing a little uncomfortably into your ribs. They groan, in that lovely, low tone of theirs, the noise filling you up with a gentle, steady vibration until you wonder if you could get off on that alone.
You pull back, just trying to get a hint of space to breathe, but Aspen chases after you, more green tendrils flicking against your lips and trying to slip into your mouth until you gasp out for them to slow. You tip your head to rest against theirs, breathing hard and smiling too wide, and then get back to the business of shedding your clothing.
Aspen’s grip on you trembles, but they allow you the space to shuck what feels like yards of material, fingers tensing like they half want to help. They tried, just the once, in the very middle of November, thumb and forefinger pinching at the end of your sleeve. They’d been careful, truly, but Aspen had still moved a little too fast, a little too sure. They’d split the seams of one of your jackets at the arm and then nearly dropped you in fright. For both your sakes, it’s better that you handle most of your own clothing.
Now they just stick to watching. You can catch the vague shape of yourself in the dark mirror of their eyes, and can feel the soft wind of their breath on your quickly bared skin.
“Is all of this you?” You ask, looking away when your face becomes a little too clear in their large eyes. Makeout Point is rife with plants now, and looks more like humans haven’t been in the area for decades as opposed to a single winter. A cool drop of water splashes onto your shoulder from the crown of greenery still circling their horn-like branches. You jump, and Aspen reaches out to swipe the scattered droplets away with their finger while you unlace your boots and push your clothes down your hips. “The new growth. The flowers.”
Aspen hums, turning their finger until the new blue tinged mushrooms drag over your skin, leaving behind a trail that tingles, even after they’ve stopped. “I suspect so. I’ve never been quite so ardent in my dreams of spring as I was this year. But then I’ve never gone to my dreaming knowing I may well wake to your Lovely face.” The end of their finger comes to a stop in the hollow of your throat, eyes dropping to watch you swallow, to watch your pulse speed faster. You shake one of your legs, letting your boot drop to the ground and clothes slide down your skin. You switch, uncaring about the muddy boot print you’re putting your foot back down on. The other boot and the rest of your clothes drop to the ground.
The chill in the air is all but gone, or what senses you have that would notice it have been overwhelmed by lust alone. The press of your thighs, the warmth of your own skin, is enough to make you want to slide your hand down yourself. As impatient as you are though, you want Aspen’s touch more. You tilt back your head again, reaching out to rest your hands against their jaw—and pause.
“After this, the growing is going to get a little out of hand, isn’t it? Will I still be able to make it through when it comes time to leave?”
It takes a fair amount of effort for Aspen to drag their eyes away from you, but they make a quick glance around Makeout Point, noting the shiver in the still moving plants. “I won’t let the forest cage you,” Aspen promises and then huffs when you grab hold of one of the dangling vines twisted about the branches on their head. They let you tug, let you pull their attention back to you, and their eyelids lower as you tilt back your head for another kiss.
When Aspen’s vine-like tongues curl around your tongue this time, there’s more than just the one. They angle their head to the side, pale green shoots tracing your lips before pushing into your mouth with the others. Aspen doesn’t choke you, leaves plenty of room to breathe, but it’s still a little overwhelming, have that many vines snaking into your mouth. They twist and writhe against your tongue, drag over the edges of your teeth like they enjoy the sensation, and desperate ache for them grows stronger, until it feels like you shouldn’t need to breathe. Aspen picks you up off their knee, a deep rumble echoing through their chest when you keep hold of them.
They’re slower even than they were the first time, without the cushion of your clothes to keep your skin from pressing too hard on some of their fingers. They cradle your back and neck and head with one hand, while the other curls around your hips and thighs as they stand up straight. The rush of movement is strange when you’re still holding onto their face, still sucking on their tongues, eyes closed, but you don’t care about it right now. You trust them, and nerves have been pushed far to the wayside when you want them so badly that every inch of you feels like it’s on fire.
There’s a gentle pressure as they urge you to open your legs, but you barely need the prompting. You part your thighs willingly, gasping when they finally pull their mouth away from yours, tongues flickering over the hollow of your throat and along your collarbone. You expect them to lift you higher, to angle you towards their mouth as their tongues are still sliding down your chest. Instead Aspen’s thumb, ridged with those blue edged mushrooms, drags over the top of your thigh. That tingling feeling spreads over your skin and then your legs start to shake as the mushrooms press between your legs, soft and growing warm from your own body heat.
The tingling sensation turns sharp as they stroke their thumb gently over you, and you can’t help but whimper when they drag the gills of the mushroom down to your ass and then back up. You can’t see what it looks like with their head in the way, Aspen’s fern eyelashes closed as their tongues curl and pluck at one of your nipples, but it's starting to feel like the mushrooms must be secreting something slick. The next drag of their thumb, the tip of it pressing into you, makes you arch and moan. You reach back to grasp at the finger bracing your head, legs shaking as you get closer to orgasm and then Aspen pauses, one of their tongues fluttering over the edge of their wooden mouth.
“Did you dream of me, Lovely?” They ask, but not entirely like they expect you to answer. “Was that why you rushed to see me when spring dawned?”
“Yes,” you gasp, immediately. That was partially why you came, but every inch of you is hot, and you’re still right on the precipice of coming. It’s too hard to cobble together a coherent sentence.
Aspen’s thumb pushes and turns and then your eyes are rolling into the back of your head as you come, breath leaving your lungs in a harsh, almost painful gasp. Their mouth finds you as you do, slick, sticky vines pushing into you alongside their mushroom ridged thumb. They drink down your pleasure, moaning when your thighs tremble against their face. They don’t seem to notice when you dig your fingernails into the smooth wood of their skin, they just keep moving, the pressure of their tongues and thumb leaving you full and clenching as you finally whimper.
“Fuck, fuck, fu- Aspen! Aspen, I’m-” You buck against their face, noise dying on your parted lips as that only presses them deeper. You kick out your leg, bare toes brushing over the moss on their shoulder, but that only makes Aspen adjust their hold.
Maybe it’s because it’s spring time, or because yearning for you has been building up in them as steadily as it had for you during the winter, but even after you stop shaking, even after your legs go limp, Aspen isn’t quite done. Their thumb pulling out of you makes your back bow again, and then they turn you over. You’re on your stomach in their giant hands, Aspen’s tongues filling you up over and over again before you breathlessly ask for them to cease.
Your legs feel like jelly, and that strange, hot ache has finally ebbed.
When you blink, glancing around the circle of trees, it looks like the forest has erased all signs of humanity. Vines are thick and tangled over every inch of the area, laced between trees. Ferns peek out from the ground, and those pale, white blossoms are scattered around the area like wedding petals. Aspen’s next lick is gentle, cleaning rather than fucking, and you shudder in their hold.
“I don’t know if I want to leave,” you mumble, tired and sated. “I missed you something awful.”
There’s a creaking noise and then you clutch at their fingers as they sit, flowers and leaves puffing up into the air and raining back down. Aspen carefully turns you to sit on their thigh, arranging you against their midsection until you’re lounging and grinning for all their effort.
“...shall I come with you?” They ask, and when you glance up at them their head is tilted to the side. “While I know you will return now, it’s always difficult to part.” Aspen hesitates and then places a fingertip to your lips, eyes filling with pleasure when you kiss it tiredly.
You’ve watched them turn back into nothing more than a tree in the presence of others, and… And a bigger yard would be nice. A backyard, you amend, thinking of neighbors catching sight of a moving tree, or simply noting the fact that a tree has switched places somehow overnight.
“Not yet,” you say, trying and failing to hold back your grin. “I think the park rangers and the rest of the town might notice if you were following my car back to my house. But… But soon. I would like that.”
Aspen hums again, that deep rumbling noise making you warm a fraction. “Simply tell me when, Lovely, and I will always follow,” Aspen vows, and plucks your hoodie out of the nest of vines. They spread it over you like a blanket and a spiral of flowers blooms along their forearm.
...Maybe you should just find a house out in the middle of the forest.
Edit which I’m including in all my works after plagiarism and theft has taken place: I do not give my consent for my works to be used, copied, published, or posted anywhere. They are copyrighted and belong to me.
Well, here it is folks: the very last of my batch of commissions, and what a prompt this was! I really hope you it!
Contents: sensory overload, an entity beyond full comprehension, feeling of being drugged/spaced out/diorientated, all consensual though, sex occuring on a mental as well as physical level. Please let me know if anything else needs tagging/warning, but it’s all consensual.
The sheer, unfathomable vastness of space stretching out before her never failed to take her breath away.
With each trip out into the plunging void, a familiar excitement sizzled along her skin, but as the blinking lights of the sprawling, bustling hub faded behind her to a mere blip on her scanners, she felt a familiar pang in her chest. The noise and contact with friends, people, and beings from all over the system always left her feeling recharged and invigorated, and it was a wrench to leave them when the credits from her previous scrapping haul began to dwindle.
Shuffling a little in seat, she felt her cheeks heat as a deep, lingering twinge sent a shiver up her spine. She still hadn’t quite recovered complete sensation in certain patches along her thigh from the numbing saliva of her partner from the previous evening, a Kharmorian with whom she long-standing ‘friendship with benefits’. Memories fluttered against her skin; echoes of his array of cylindrical, crystalline teeth raking across her body, his thick, mildly psychotropic venom dripping from a gaping, black maw which had made her feel like she was floating six inches above the bed…
… good job her small ship was on autopilot for a while.
For three Standard Days, she heard nothing and her scanners remained empty. A passing pleasure cruiser hailed her, but they didn’t communicate beyond a polite greeting as she shot on towards the edges of the system. If she wanted to go further, she’d have to jump to faster than light, but for now she decided to circle the usual spots on the edge of raider territory, keeping an eye out for space debris she could haul back to the hub and sell as scrap.
After ten days of silence and stillness, with only the ship’s limited AI for company, and more than a human lifespan’s worth of audio dramas and music which she’d downloaded before setting off, something shifted in the blackness of space beyond her ship.
Eventually she could make it out with her own eyes, and found an old imperial freighter, decades out of official use and spinning slowly. She’d seen hundreds of ships floating like stunned fish before, but what was different about this one was the fact that space itself seemed to fracture and reform around it, sometimes flickering, sometimes billowing like ink in water, and sometimes flashing and sparking. It was hard to look at for long.
The most remarkable thing about the ship itself though was the fact that certain parts of its ugly, blocky form were not where they were supposed to be at all. It seemed almost as though it had been through a kaleidoscope, twisted like a puzzle toy, but without any kind of visible damage. No chips of metal orbited around it in a broken aura, and no debris floated off like particles in water. It was whole, but altered.
Every cell in her body told her to turn around and leave before the same thing happened to her ship.
Something was there.
Something had done that deliberately to the freighter; twisting it and splicing it until it barely resembled the original craft, as though it had been taken apart and reassembled without regard for its original form.
Objectively, she knew that things existed out here in the deep tracts of empty space that were bigger and more complex than most entities in the galaxy could truly fathom. You just had to linger long enough at a bar in the hub to hear stories of crew members going on space walks, vanishing, and then coming back fifty biological years older, or people getting their heads completely scrambled by a glimpse into something that they couldn’t process.
This was one of those things. She just knew it.
Something had picked that ship apart, perhaps out of curiosity, perhaps out of spite, and she would be next if she didn’t turn the heck around.
And yet… her fingers fluttered over the ship’s controls, curiosity kindling into something stronger.
Her ship dangled there a long time — long enough to watch the freighter change again, with an engine disappearing and reappearing near the nose of the craft faster than the blink of an eye — and before too long, something brushed across her senses like a breath across her skin. The hairs on her forearms prickled and the atmosphere in the cockpit felt suddenly thick and heavy, as though the expanse of space itself was trying to pour into her ship. Into her very head.
Whatever it was had sensed her and was reaching out for her.
Fear should have been her first reaction, but instead excitement thrummed through her. Something out there had perceived her, and it too was curious.
Though she couldn’t have articulated the exact sensations that sparked across her mind as the entity continued to shift a fraction of its focus from the freighter to her, the overwhelming impression she got was of a scientist who had discovered an unfamiliar species of insect and was stooping low to the ground to inspect it.
Having decided to go closer, she nudged her ship over and docked against the side of the freighter.
“Don’t you fuck up my ship too,” she muttered as she donned her helmet and space suit to make the short hop to the freighter to begin exploring.
If the entity chose to reveal itself, it could, but she was damned-well going to salvage what she could from the cargo ship in the meantime; a ship like this could hold ore and a plethora of valuables in its belly, and if not, the core would sell for more than she made in fifty trips.
Despite its contorted exterior, the interior of the ship was exactly as it should have been. To her surprise as she opened the small access hatch, the corridors were also ablaze with light, and the gravity field was still active. She fully expected a crew member to come around the corner at any moment, but her scanner had revealed no recognisable life forms aboard whatsoever. The instruments on her suit told her that the atmosphere and pressure were safe for human survival, so she slipped out of the bulky gear and helmet and began to poke about in comfort.
While she explored the lower cargo deck, something brushed against her mind again and she shivered.
Like a handshake or a tentative greeting, the gesture had been respectful but insistent. Behind that, however, came the distinct impression that the entity hadn’t been able to simplify their request down far enough for her to process the nuances of it. There was a definite hint of frustration in there, and she froze, tilting her head.
“Where are you?” she asked, and something else flickered across her mind, like a brain freeze — intense and sharper this time. “You’re everywhere, aren’t you?”
Something akin to a scoffing laugh thrummed through the air, which she felt and heard at at once.
“Close enough?” she smiled. There was absolutely no threat to the entity that seemed to hover around the ship, encasing it like a bubble, and her instincts were usually good. After all, a lot of people had said that the towering, nine-foot tall Kharmorian with a jaw like a deep sea fish from Earth was dangerous, but he’d been nothing but courteous to her, both in bed and out of it.
“So… what are you doing here? You messed up the outside of this freighter pretty good, but somehow the inside is still the same… How’d you manage that?”
Instead of an answer, a curious sensation probed into her mind like a needle, and she found herself viscerally reminded of a visit to the medical bay for a routine checkup, when her head had been tilted back, and the doctor had instructed her to ‘say ahh’. So the entity was curious about her now. It had apparently finished picking through the cargo ship, twisting whole sections of it like a Rubik’s cube, perhaps to try and figure out what had happened to the crew.
Fleetingly, as the entity rifled through her mind like it was simply a filing cabinet of memories and sensations, she wondered if the being was responsible for the crew’s disappearance, and was met with a rebuking blast of scorn so overwhelming that it brought her gasping to her knees. Instantly the sensation retreated, like a child who had poked at an animal and hadn’t realised their own strength for a moment.
Static buzzed in her ears and she struggled to catch her breath, thoughts feeling scattered and fractured, but after a moment or two, she blinked and like a shattered mirror seen in reverse, clarity returned to leave the distinct feeling that the entity would hardly be interested in something so petty as devouring the physical. They didn’t consume primitive flesh to survive. Quite how she knew that, she wasn’t sure, but the thought remained like residue in her mind.
“Ok then,” she croaked, and, staggering a little, began to make her way over to a large, sealed industrial container in a corner of the cargo bay. “Maybe go a little easier on me?” Scanning the code on the exterior with her reader, she found it contained refined ores, and was not on any of the imperial databases. Jackpot.
All the while she worked, she felt a presence over her shoulder.
“You just going to stare, or are you going to introduce yourself properly?” she asked as she slid her decoder into the locking device and watched it get to work on opening the container.
While she waited and leaned her body against the smooth side of the container, her arms and legs crossed casually, she wondered just how the entity worked. Tapping her temple, she said, “You’re still poking around in here, aren’t you? Any chance you can tell me a bit about yourself while you do?”
Again, the sound of laughter, rough and scattered like flakes of metal, filled her consciousness. They liked that she was sassy and unafraid — carrying on with her business while they carried on with theirs. They actually found it endearing, though they rather patronisingly conveyed to her through another bout of incomprehensible static that she literally couldn't understand how something like them functioned. Something about her being limited to a mere three — four at a push — dimensions…
“You’re too complex for me, huh? Ah well, any chance you can give me a taste anyway? Nothing that’s going to leave me a broken wreck like this ship though, if you don’t mind…”
Nothing visible changed around her, but the room pulsed and began to feel heavy again, and she felt that if she were to raise her arm, it would feel like the gravity had been dialled up by a factor of ten. To her surprise though, a wrench drifted past her a moment later, spiralling lazily and unaffected by the freighter’s active gravity generator.
She blinked and watched its passage, fascinated.
In the next heartbeat, she felt the entity abandon their exploration of the ship entirely and focus their attention on her.
In the same way a specimen in a glass slide beneath a microscope cannot comprehend the intricate mind and body of the scientist peering down at them, she gasped, feeling simultaneously folded up and opened out as they probed around her mind in earnest, rifling through her most distant memories in a too-fast-to-follow flash until they discovered her most recent ones. Namely, sex with a non-human back at the hub.
A wry, slightly embarrassed smile twisted her lips as the entity’s curiosity blossomed again at that, and they began to sift more carefully through the sensations they discovered. A quick flash of an impression told her they didn’t really understand the physical needs she experienced, but they wanted to experience them too, slowing down the memories until even she could follow them, and repeating them until she began to feel hot and flushed. They were enjoying the reaction that each replay prompted in her.
“It’s just sex,” she laughed, the noise breathy in her own ears. Heat pulsed beneath her thighs as she remembered on her own the scrape of teeth and the feeling of his cock deep inside her. She opened her eyes, not having realised she’d closed them in the first place, only to discover that she was floating prone in the centre of the cargo bay.
She got the impression that the entity was cradling her body, but she couldn't see anything. A second later, they sent her a flash of something that she interrupted simultaneously as ‘let me show you how we take our pleasure’ and ‘I wonder if this will work on someone like you without obliterating your mind completely’. It was all rather vague, but the idea of it filled her with a thrill she couldn’t quite articulate.
She licked her lips.
Was she really considering this? Could she even say no at this point? It had felt safe enough until then, but could the entity truly understand her if they were so incomprehensibly complex in comparison? At their scale, could they tell the difference between apprehension of the unknown and fear for her safety?
A shimmer ran down her back, like a physical ripple against her body, inside and out, and she just breathed for a moment.
Reassurance.
Like a doctor calming a patient before beginning an invasive procedure, the entity reached out to her. The option to retreat, to leave, flickered at the edge of her consciousness, and she nodded. Whatever they were, this entity was giving her the chance to refuse, and a rather professional promise to be careful.
She paused, mind racing, and then murmured, “So long as you don’t break me — mentally or physically — I’m up for finding out what happens…”
They seemed pleased then; pleased that they had managed to communicate the mere kernel of their desires to her, and even more so that she had consented. The impression that that had been really important lingered long in her mind, along with a nauseating and visceral revulsion that rolled through her as it tried to convey the depth of that significance. The sensation wasn’t her own, however, and it was gone almost before she’d experienced it.
“Incomprehensible yet oddly sweet,” she muttered distractedly, still reclining in the soft blankness of anti-gravity that seemed to have enveloped her.
The already-muted colours of the cargo seemed to fade to black and white as she dangled there, waiting. Was ‘there’ even where she had been? Did ‘there’ have any significance beyond ‘here’? Her mind reeled and she realised the entity was already exploring her, causing her mind to slip sideways. She hadn't even noticed when it had started.
A moment later, the entity found what it was looking for and brushed against the pleasure centres of her brain, like the backs of fingers gently exploring the effects of their touch, and she yelled and arched, lighting up all over, every nerve tingling and thrumming. Pulsing waves went right to her core and she twisted, bucking helplessly against empty space.
The sensation was beyond intense, and, being the scientist they apparently were, the entity repeated the gesture just to see if that would garner the same reaction a second time, which of course it did. She laughed, feeling dizzy and floaty; mentally as well as physically. It felt like the entity was trying to recreate the effects of the venom that they had encountered in her memory, but even that was too simple a concept for them and so the gesture was laced with a million other sensations, too densely-packed to process individually.
Like a spool unravelling, she felt her mind unravel as the entity toyed with her, manipulated her. They probed deeper and deeper into her consciousness, delighting in the reactions they provoked. Confusion soon gave way to utter disorientation as she allowed the strange entity more and more access to her, and they soon discovered what she enjoyed. Instinctively she spread her legs, her body relaxing and tensing in convulsing waves, beginning at her core and radiating out in wild ripples that left her gasping for air.
Something physically brushed against her, and she jerked, but like a cold hand leaves an imprint on warm skin it was gone before she could remember how to open her eyes.
“Can you show yourself?” she asked, shocked at how wrecked she sounded, and finally her eyes rolled open. “Without… you know… breaking me?”
The air hummed, a gentle vibration that went through every cell in her body. The entity was looming all around her, just beyond her perception. Then, while time seemed to stretch forever between heartbeats, a pinprick of prismatic light appeared in the space between her parted legs.
Shimmering, made of more colours than she could ever have conceived, something was trying to manifest in front of her. Whatever the entity was, condensing themselves down into something she could make sense of seemed apparently beyond them. It couldn’t hold any kind of tangible shape, and when she looked at it for more than a heartbeat her mind hurt and her eyes narrowed as if she were looking at the sun. A spike speared up from the centre of it but was gone before she could process it, and something dripped like viscous oil onto the floor, only to shatter in a spray of glittering particles.
Shifting constantly like petrol on water, something spiralled up the inside of her legs and as she fumbled to unzip the top of her close-fitting suit, a pressure built at the back of her head. As though she were being held upright in water by strong hands, she floated and leaned into the pressure, finding that it filled her head until she thought she might burst. At that, the pressure eased, but the trippy tingling that went with it didn’t.
As the entity explored her, inside and out, she realised they weren’t actually trying to pleasure her — at least not in the way that a gentle lover might focus their attention on a partner. This entity was detached, enjoying the way they could push buttons to test reactions, forcing synapses to fire, noting reactions as they occurred.
Like the onset of a visual migraine, her vision warped, blanking out in some areas and twisting into impossible shapes and colours elsewhere.
“Is that you?” she gasped, arching as ecstasy washed through her, sloshing around and leaving her weak and shaking. She tried to reach out to touch the shifting sphere at the corner of her mind but something weighed her arm down and prickled like pins and needles along her nerves in a delicate warning. “Ok, don’t touch the entity,” she slurred as her thoughts drifted into one another. Words started to slide away from her grasp into pure sensation.
The entity was touching her physically too, but she couldn’t process how. Her geometry met only a fraction of theirs, and they were moving through her in ways she couldn’t possibly work out.
Soon she stopped trying.
This was beyond her.
It might even kill her.
If she was going to die like this though, at least it would be experiencing the greatest pleasure of her life.
Something tender, though cool and distant, chided her for that. They weren’t going to let her come to harm. They had memorised her, and like a clockmaker taking notes of all the inner workings of a watch they were going to put her back together again, every atom back where it had been before they ever encountered each other, so long as she let them finish this. A specimen on a table, all she could do was lie back and experience it all.
At that vague realisation, she gave in completely.
The entity revelled in the feedback they received from her quivering, sweating body as they touched and pushed, probed and experienced. They tasted the sounds she made, heard the memories they sparked, laved a tongue across her mind and made her scream and twist as her insides turned to magma. She lost herself to it and became mere fragments. Atoms of carbon, molecules of water without thought or consciousness, lost and drifting, gasping and writhing. Full. So full. Wet and hot and alight.
A frenzied delirium overtook her as the loop of sensation, of query and reaction, went back and forth between them.
She began to come; an explosion of light and ecstasy that never ended. It rolled through her with the thunder of a thousand engines overhead, but the entity didn’t stop there. They pushed. She came again and again, screaming soundless and raw, her increasing sensitivity ignored by the entity until she was shaking and heaving, suspended in zero-gravity while the entity existed around her in a billion planes. On all of them, she experienced nothing but inarticulate pleasure.
Like a sheaf of paper folded into a complex shape, she knew the entity was taking her out of her known dimensions, and each time she lost herself in that hazy, spinning place, she got the impression the entity reached their own kind of climax. They were using her to reach their own peak. Somewhere, she smiled at that, and came again. It tasted sweet.
The nature of the ship around her shattered and rippled as the entity focused on not damaging her as they took and took from her, over and over. The ship was unimportant, a mere speck of sand on the shores of a planet in comparison to her. She was the centre of everything, everywhere all at once, and the entity took its pleasure from her physical sensations. Something filled her, leaving her wet and gasping as existence warped and the entity reached their final peak of ecstasy; this time it was a physical one too.
Suddenly everything stopped. All awareness, all sensation, light and sound stopped existing.
She had no idea how long she lay suspended there, in between.
In reality it had to be only a second or two, and when she started to come back to herself, she found herself breathing hard and trembling all over as she still floated there, insensate.
In a twisting pattern of fragments — a million jagged screens all showing a different view — an aspect of the entity hung beside her, exuding curiosity, a little worry, and feeling more satiated than they had been in a long time. All their emotions washed around her like a wave and she shivered, managing a dazed smile, and she discovered that she was wetter than she’d ever been in her life. She was also still dressed but the feeling of having been filled was unmistakable.
That rasping, unreal laugh jangled in her mind and she struggled to find thought behind the mire of primal sensation sloshing around inside her. Eventually, things crystallised again, and when she was able to talk, she murmured, “You learned something about humans then?”
The entity laughed again and she realised that the iridescent, shattered fragments were no longer there. She hadn’t noticed them go; they simply weren’t there anymore. That laugh hadn’t been patronising, but oddly affectionate.
“Thanks then,” she whispered, sensing that the entity was already moving on.
They had taken what they wanted to know about her and were preparing to shift elsewhere through some bridge she couldn’t comprehend, perhaps to learn something new; perhaps to report back on what had just happened. They felt like a scientist: curious and respectful, but more than willing to get personally involved with their research.
“Write me up in a flattering light, eh?” she snorted, her consonants soft, brain still sparking from time to time.
She twitched a little, her body working to remember how to behave in the familiar dimensions it had been born to, and she found herself sinking slowly back down as the creature’s ability to affect gravity dissipated.
Then they were simply absent.
The realisation came like the moment her ears popped on re-entry to a planet’s atmosphere, and she knew instinctively that she was completely alone on the ship once again.
Her perception felt distinctly flat after that day, as though she had had a glimpse of the eternal which now, in her humble human body, she would never grasp again.
She would carry flashes of that experience with her for the rest of her life.
___
This is the last of my commissions now, but I’m thinking I might open up a few short ko-fi stories or a ‘sponsor a story continuation’ option to help me keep afloat financially now that I’m not taking commissions. If that’s something you might be interested in, please please let me know!
I really hope you enjoyed this one! If you did, please consider reblogging the story, since that’s the best way to help out creators whose work you enjoy on Tumblr!
Edit which I’m including in all my works after plagiarism and theft has taken place: I do not give my consent for my works to be used, copied, published, or posted anywhere. They are copyrighted and belong to me.
This was begun on a Twitch writing stream, with lots of input from the chat, and while I did say I would post it straight to Tumblr, I ended up adding another 3k words to it, and a tiny bit of plot, so I figured I'd put it up on Patreon first. Since Patreon supporters voted so highly for a ‘nightmare’ on the 'next monsters' poll (thank you!), I thought it should go up there first too.
Our reader has been experiencing anxiety and insomnia lately, and this draws something to us... There's a bit at the start that's got creepy vibes to it, but the creature means us no harm. Because of the sleep paralysis element, I'm going to say watch out for non-con vibes, but nothing really happens without our consent first time round. Just putting it here in case that's a major issue for anyone.
Ft. dapper mothman landlord Reggie, and gnoll best friend too.
“You’re living where now?” Francis practically barked into his whisky as you sat together after work. The gnoll’s enormous, dish-like ears flicked forwards, dark and fuzzy and full of concern. “Seriously, you do know how shitty that part of town is, right?”
“It’s not that bad,” you growled, taking a sip of your own drink and leaning back into the soft leather back of the chair. You stifled a yawn and blinked, the exhaustion of a week’s worth of broken sleep catching up to you in one brutal rush.
Francis flicked an ear and levelled you with a flat look, dark eyes serious for once. “You’re kidding…?”
“Ok, fine, it’s not amazing, but it’s really not the worst bit of town. Anyway, it’s all I can afford right now until I find a new job.” That seemed to shut him up on the subject, at least for now. He couldn't argue with your dwindling bank balance after all.
“When’s your first interview?” he asked, raising the whisky to his lips and sipping it with surprising elegance for someone with such big hands and such a powerful jaw.
Taking a deep breath, you forced the nerves down and muttered, “Monday. I’m not prepared, but at least it’s something.” You tried not to think about the inbox full of rejection letters which, in a mere two sentences and with surgical succinctness, told you that they were not hiring, nor looking to hire, nor to take on any new staff just at the moment. Thank you for your interest.
It wasn’t interest; it was sheer bloody desperation.
“You’re not going to be at all prepared if you get mugged to death on your way home tonight,” Francis grumbled.
“It’ll be fine.”
He looked at you again and took another final drink of his whisky, long tongue lapping out the remaining dregs before he set it down with a clonk on the circle-stained table. “Please text me when you get there?”
With a solemn promise to do just that, you stood and he followed you outside into the cool evening. A scuffle of dry leaves drew your attention to your right, and the fleeting shadow of a cat projected huge along a brick wall made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Francis’ concern had got you jumping at the smallest things, and as you separated from him with a warm hug and the reiterated promise that you’d be fine, you gritted your teeth and told yourself in no uncertain terms not to flinch at the slightest sound.
To be honest, the neighbourhood honestly wasn’t that bad. There had been a few break-ins, and the police had conducted a drug raid a few streets over last month, but other than that, it was mostly just… tired. Perhaps it would be the subject of the city council’s next ‘rejuvenation’ scheme, and some commerce and life could finally be injected back into this wallowing, languishing, crumbling part of town. Still, the mothman who had let you rent one of the apartments in his old, converted town house had been very pleasant when you’d met to discuss rent, and that had gone a long way towards heartening you. Without his offer, you might not have had anywhere at all.
You tried to keep that fact in mind as you passed by the closed grocery store, the lights inside low, the neon sign flickering and drawing moths to it like supplicants to a shrine. For a moment, you caught the rapid drumbeat of footsteps behind you and tensed. In under a minute, they disappeared down a side street, and you let out a shaky breath. “Get a grip,” you breathed, reaching into one pocket for your keys all the same.
After fifteen minutes of striding at a quicker pace than was cardiovascularly comfortable, the old, slightly shabby, turn-of-the-last-century building loomed out of the gathering night. At the pedestal-base of the antique, cast-iron street lamp, a narrow pool of golden light shimmered and flickered intermittently, illuminating cracks in the pavement that seemed larger and more treacherous than they had in full daylight. Your imagination conjured black, coiling shadows creeping up from those dark cracks in the earth like smoke on a stage set, and as you paused a moment beneath it to sort your keys out, a breath of wind stippled goosebumps across the nape of your neck.
Glancing once over your shoulder, half expecting to discover someone standing silently at your back, you found nothing at all out of place, swallowed, and scuttled up the uneven garden path to the main door of the converted apartments.
No sooner had you put the key in the lock than the door rattled and swung open from the other side. Reeling away in surprise, you stumbled half a pace backwards and gasped as your eyes registered nothing but blackness inside the hallway beyond. From within the swath of darkness, two points of crimson glowed, then tilted slightly to the side, and you would have shrieked, had the entity inside not murmured your name at that exact instant in his deep baritone.
“Reginald!” you practically whimpered in relief, body going slack as you encouraged your heart rate back to normal with steadying breaths, and then huffed an embarrassed laugh. “You scared me… sorry. I’m just super jumpy this evening.”
“No, no,” the mothman purred, stepping delicately out onto the path and holding the door open for you with his lower right arm. His black fur rippled and shimmered in the soft night breezes and he buzzed his wings once. The fur around his nose was beginning to turn silver, and on his hands and around his antennae too. “I apologise. I felt you coming and I should have announced myself. How are you settling in?”
“Fine,” you croaked, equilibrium mostly recovered. The cool night wafted across your clammy skin and calmed your racing heart while you stood there making polite conversation with him until you yawned conspicuously.
“Thank you for indulging an old moth, but I shan’t keep you up any longer. You look as though you could use some sleep,” he said, inclining his head in an old-fashioned bow, antennae dipping too and making you think of a gentleman dipping his hat at you. As you headed inside, fumbling on the wall for the light switch, you heard the distant buzz of his wings, and closed the door with a soft click as Reginald took off into the night.
The decor of the main areas of the building left a bit to be desired, with the odd peeling corner and scuff on the antique dado rail, but it was clean, which had set it well apart in the list of other apartments you'd scouted in the last month or so, and as you traipsed up the stairs to your first floor flat, the boards creaked raucously beneath your feet. No one was sneaking in or out of here without making a huge racket, and that thought provided a little comfort.
The interview on Monday loomed in your mind, ticking your resting heart rate up higher than normal, but after you went through the motions before bed with a strange sense of detachment, you let the weariness building behind the anxiety creep over your limbs and draw your eyelids down. Reginald hadn’t been wrong when he’d remarked on your appearance; it had been a while since you’d slept really well. So, it was with a familiar sense of dread that you let your mind slide away into unconsciousness, praying that the nightmares that had plagued your sleeping mind would stay away that night.
With a jolt, your eyes flew open to find the room dark, the street lamp outside extinguished, and a familiar sense of crushing dread weighing on your chest. Lying there, motionless, you breathed slowly, trying to figure out what had woken you so suddenly. Nothing stirred, and as you strained your ears, you caught no whisper of autumn leaves in the reaching branches of the walnut tree outside.
No sooner had you closed your eyes again, hoping to slide back into dreamless sleep, something touched your hair with a spider-light touch and you tried to scream and flail. Finding yourself utterly unable to move, you could only lie there as adrenaline flooded your whole body, your throat went dry, your tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth, and the sensation returned, stronger now.
Pinprick sharp claws - like a cat’s but much, much larger - raked through your hair, softly stroking your scalp, and you felt a silent scream tear itself from your chest. Something was there in the dark with you and you couldn’t move a muscle.
A shadow in the blackness of the room, a darker blur than the rest of the inky room, shifted along your bed from behind you in a coiling tendril, unfurling across the sheets and over your body like the root of a plant or the limb of an octopus, and your blood began to hammer in your ears. All you could do was lie there and gasp for breath.
Claws, long and glistening and dripping with darkness, scraped almost gently down your temple and as the entity moved into your limited field of vision, you felt another soundless yell rip itself from you. An involuntary trembling began in your limbs as a dark, black, skull-like face loomed over you, a wide maw stretching open to reveal rows of needle-sharp teeth.
You were going to die. If this was a nightmare, you’d probably be found a few days later, dead of a heart attack, and if it were real… gods above - the thought of being mugged was abruptly shunted to the bottom of your list of things to fear in this neighbourhood. The last thing you’d said to Francis was ‘I’ll be fine.’
The creature opened its mouth wider and wider as if trying to draw out your soul from your body, teeth glistening, breath completely silent, leaning in close to your face. It looked veiled, somehow, as if a wet, gauzy material had been draped over a skeletal form, which then stuck to the emaciated body beneath. With a jolt, you realised it looked like a shrouded corpse, wrapped in black fabric. The ragged shreds of material that floated eerily, slowly, as if the creature were underwater and the wisps were nothing more than kelp, and the tips constantly dissolved into fine smoke that curled lazily around the figure.
Was this Death itself?
Please… you begged silently. Please… I don’t want to die.
To your surprise, the creature tilted its terrifying head to one side in a motion that reminded you of a cat; as though it was curious.
Oh please don’t be something that toys with your prey first…
Fractionally, the entity drew back a fraction, though its four-inch long, sickle-claws remained at the side of your face. As you stared at it, wide eyed and sweating with fear, you got the fleeting impression of an emaciated torso and two equally skeletal arms beneath the floating veil.
In a moment of oddly detached clarity, you wondered if it could understand you.
It nodded.
The fuck?
That grin stretched wider. It had teeth like an angler fish, and the moment you thought that, all you could imagine was it lunging for you out of the darkness like a sprung trap, teeth sinking in, blood pouring, ending in nothing but pain and fear…
The creature nudged its clawed hand against your lips, and for a horrible moment you thought it was going to slice open the skin of your mouth, but instead, like anaesthetic wearing off, your lips began to tingle. You could move them again. Swallowing, you rasped, “Can… you understand me?”
Again, the entity nodded and retreated a little further from the bed. Like an aura of shifting mist around it, the darkness of the room rippled and moved, and you realised it really was floating beside your bed, one hand tethered to the headboard, the other near your shoulder.
“Can you speak?”
The creature paused, going still, and the air in the room thrummed with a sudden tension. Your lungs squeezed and your ribs creaked under the pressure of it.
Eventually the strain on the atmosphere snapped, and a rasping, polyphonous voice from somewhere to your right hissed, “Yes.”
Stunned, you could only lie there as it remained beside you, suspended and shifting like waterweed in a lazy current.
“What do you want?” you managed to croak. You still couldn’t move anything else but your eyes and your mouth. “Are you going to hurt me?”
Again, the air seemed to vibrate, and a chill ran through you.
“Is that you?” you asked. “Are you doing that?”
This time it took longer for the creature to make a sound, but it nodded slowly first. Its claws returned to your body and you gasped as the muscles unlocked and you found you were able to move again. Scrabbling to sit up, you blinked, and the creature twitched, lurching backwards away from you like a skittish horse.
“You can’t be… You’re afraid of me?” you blurted, almost laughing. It didn’t seem like it wanted to hurt you or scare you any more, but the surreal vision beside your bed was enough to keep your heart pounding. “Are you Death?”
Its wide maw stretched open again, revealing its mouthful of deadly teeth, and you balked, fear leaping into your throat again as you clutched the sheets around you like a child. Those claws could slice a sheet - or a body - to ribbons, and yet you clung to them.
It reached out slowly for your ankle, latching its long fingers around the joint, and you choked out a whimpering yell. Knowing you were alone in the house, with Reginald out on his nightly business and the only other apartment in the building still unoccupied, your fear crescendoed to a peak and your words failed you.
With what appeared to be a gargantuan effort, the entity paused, then inhaled, and then chorused, “Not. Death. You… fear… me…”
No shit, you thought. “What do you want?”
“Fear… is… all I… know… Without it… I am… nothing.”
Was that sadness that tinged its many voices? Was there more than just one entity within those constantly-twisting shadows?
“Just… me,” the creature murmured, half-turning away and releasing its solid grip around your leg.
The emotion in those two words made something crack inside you. “You’re lonely…” you breathed, and the creature began to tremble, glitching like a badly aligned SCART connection.
In that instant, your fear drained out of you to be replaced by a wave of compassion, and the tension left your muscles. Whatever this was, it was alone as well.
The creature’s form continued to flicker, and as you blinked in confusion, the misty veil covering them seemed to boil off, leaving nothing but the emaciated, charred-looking skeletal figure beneath, strangely vulnerable for just a heartbeat before it seemed to evaporate away altogether.
The stillness in the room left your mind reeling as you sat there. Had you dreamed the whole thing?
Scrambling, your fingers found the light switch beside the bed, and you squinted and scowled as harsh, yellow light flooded the room at the click of a button. Nothing was out of place beyond, and no hint of creeping shadows drew your eye.
“Are you still there?” you whispered, but after waiting for what felt like hours, you got no answer.
If you returned to sleep at all that night, it would be a miracle, but still you tried. Lying in the dark a good while later, and curled on your side with your eyes screwed shut, you couldn’t help straining your hearing for the slightest hiss of claws on fabric, but nothing came, and eventually, you must have drifted off into an exhausted sleep. Remarkably, no nightmares plagued you that night, and when you woke the next morning, you felt oddly peaceful and well rested for a change.
You stretched and yawned, and only remembered about the strange experience from the night before when the soft weave of the cotton sheet snagged across your ankle and a sharp prickle made you frown.
Upon investigation, you discovered a long, thin scratch in your skin, as if a cat had nicked you with its claws in passing.
You froze.
It had not been a dream after all.
For the next two nights, nothing unusual happened, unless you counted the fact that you actually slept well for the first time in weeks. You found it almost physically impossible to make it past midnight, whereas before you’d frequently seen midnight tick by and vanish into the past as you lay there with prickling eyes and an exhausted, restless body, anxiety tingling along your nerves, counting the minutes as time ticked closer to dawn.
Astonishingly, as you faced the interviewer on Monday morning, you felt alert and almost chipper.
The naga smiled and held out a hand to you as she wrapped the interview up. “Thank you so much for your time,” she said. “You’ll hear back from us tomorrow, most likely, but let me say now that I was extremely impressed.”
Your brows rose and she laughed kindly at your evident surprise. “Thank you,” you croaked, and left politely before you ruined anything.
That night, you lay back alone on your bed after celebrating with Francis again, spread-eagled and stared at the ceiling. The old-fashioned plaster moulding made it look like you were underwater, especially if the huge tree outside swayed in the wind and cast shifting, kaleidoscope patterns on it. A cold draft prickled over you and you shivered. “Is that you?” you asked almost hopefully, wondering if the nightmare creature was back.
Nothing.
With a huge sigh, you looked around without moving, nervous in case you spooked it. “Listen, if you’re the one that’s given me such amazing sleep lately, then… well… thank you. I think I might have got the job…”
A movement in the darkest corner of the room caught your attention, but when your gaze landed on it, all was as it should be.
“Seriously, if you’re there, please… let me know.”
Again, you experienced that strange pulling sensation, like some kind of energy was being drawn from the room, and as you sat up, your bedside lamp flickered. In front of the darker form of your dressing gown on the back of the door, something had begun manifesting into a tall, slender figure. Shrouded as before in shadow, the creature glided forwards, every bit like a nightmare, and your heart thudded.
“Afraid…” came a chanting, polyphonic voice, “And yet not…? How?”
“Have you seen yourself lately?” you hissed. “You’re kind of intimidating. What are you?”
“Nightmare…” it hissed.
You blinked. “You’re a literal nightmare?”
Its claws glinted in the half-light of your small bedside lamp as it just hung there, swaying softly like a corpse on a gallows. “Yes.”
“What are you doing here? Does Reginald know you live here?”
It turned away and you saw a ribcage jutting out like a mummy’s fragile body, though every inch of them was a soft, matte black, pock marked like volcanic stone.
It shook its head. “I found you…” it croaked in its struggling, faltering voice. “Your fear… drew me… to you.”
“You vanished when I stopped being afraid,” you said and again, the creature nodded.
“I was using your fear to… manifest. Without it… I could not stay.”
“But you’re not using my fear now, are you?” you were excited, your heart was pattering out a wild rhythm, but you weren’t afraid.
It shook its head.
“How?”
Turning towards you, it brought up one lethally clawed hand and let a tendril of wisping black smoke play through its dead-looking hand. The fingers were longer than a human’s, and tipped in those sickle claws. “You sleep… better now,” it said, as if that explained everything.
Sitting there on the bed, you frowned. “Yeah, the nightmares have gone and — wait, are you… are you feeding on other nightmares?”
Slowly, the creature nodded. “I fought one that night, for you…” it rumbled. “I won. Now… they fear me.”
“And me? Do I have to fear you?”
The nightmare shook its shrouded head, the fabric wafting slowly as it billowed around the skeletal body beneath.
“So why are you here? Why me?”
“May I… come closer?” it asked.
“So long as you’re not going to hurt me,” you said in a reedy, weak voice. “A bit closer is fine…”
Hovering, the nightmare seemed uncertain, but then made up its mind and loomed a fraction nearer. This close, the glow from your lamp gilded the empty sockets of its skull and showed the stretching maw, and while you might not have been terrified any longer, it certainly made you wary.
“Will not hurt you…” the creature snarled. “I swear it.”
“Ok, fine, but you can’t blame me for being a bit… you know… I’ve never met anything like you before, and you are technically in my apartment…”
“Should I leave?”
Probably, but you found you didn’t want that just yet. “No, not yet. Can you answer some more of my questions?”
It shrugged. “I will try. Remaining here is tiring though. I don’t have much time left.”
“Where do you go?”
“There are many realms beside yours… Nightmares exist… in the cracks between, belonging nowhere, lingering only a while…”
“Sounds lonely,” you muttered.
“It is. That is why I stayed. You… You spoke to me, even when you were afraid. I have never had that before.”
The mist moved like snakes between its fingers and you watched, half mesmerised. “Your claws… are they why I couldn’t move?”
It nodded. “Sleep paralysis causes… much fear. I’m sorry I had to… frighten you to show myself.”
You snorted and pulled your legs close to sit cross legged on the bed, staring at the hovering nightmare in your room. It was so surreal, you wondered if you’d hit your head on the way home. “You tried to reassure me at the same time as scaring me shitless didn’t you?”
It flashed its claws again and swung a close to you. “Soft,” it purred, now mere inches from your face.
This close up, you found yourself frightened again. The horror of its empty black eyes, its gaping maw full of black, pointed teeth, the coiling shadows around it, its skeletal hands with tipped with onyx scythes… and yet, they smelled like the very best of winter nights; slightly smoky with a coldness that, as you inhaled, stung the back of your throat.
“Afraid, and yet not,” it repeated.
“Can I touch you?”
The nightmare clearly had not been expecting that, but nodded. Trembling, you brought your fingertip to its cheek. The skin was cool and hard like leather, but a fine mist floated around them, and you realised that the shroud wasn’t cloth at all, but intangible and made simply of smoke and shadow. The creature shuddered and you pressed your whole palm to their face as they leaned into your touch.
A moment later, they began to flicker and let out a broken moan. “I cannot stay.”
“Come back?” you whispered.
The mouth that held the promise of death, with all those teeth, suddenly smiled and they nodded. After that, they vanished.
Another week went by, but as you faced the fears of starting a new job, and the nearer that your starting date drew, the better you slept.
“It’s you again, isn’t it?” you asked the empty, black room on the night before you started work. “Come on, come out. You’ve been trying to manifest all week. I can feel it.”
Rippling out of the darkness, the nightmare swayed towards your bed and hung in the space beside it, drifting.
“Thank you,” you smiled and stood up. The nightmare didn’t move as you walked towards it, and this time when you reached for it, the creature did anticipate it, wafting closer, apparently keen for the contact. “I actually missed you, you know?” you said as the creature’s whole body quivered.
It brought its hand up to your face in a mirror of your gesture and brushed the curved back of its claws against your cheek. It tingled but you were still able to talk.
“You can touch me,” you whispered, drawing it back towards your bed by taking its skeletal fingers in yours.
Having its permission, the nightmare raked those claws through your hair with a tenderness that left you breathless. “Let me take the fear from you…” it murmured.
Examining your feelings, you discovered a small knot of anxiety about tomorrow, and smiled. “Leave me a little bit, ok? Trust me, a bit of nerves helps.”
Nodding, it leaned close and inhaled.
Standing there beside the bed, your body ignited with what could only be described as a deep and yearning lust, and you gasped, knees going weak. The nightmare caught you as you swayed, head spinning, and laid you easily down on the bed, despite the fact that it hardly looked strong enough to withstand a slight draft.
“What…?” you gasped, core burning.
The creature looked at a loss as it hung in the space beside your bed.
“I’m assuming this has never happened to you before?” you snorted, feeling a little recovered. “How lonely do I have to be to get turned on by a literal nightmare?”
A chuffing laugh made you look back at them.
“You find that funny too?” you asked and they nodded. “Well, if I’m honest… now that I know you’re not going to hurt me, I think you’re kind of beautiful.”
A soft, broken, crooning sound escaped them and they floated nearer, hovering over your bed and extending a hand to stroke talon-tips down your cheek again. “You are beautiful,” it murmured in all its numerous, whispering voices.
“Touch me,” you breathed.
“It will paralyse you,” they snarled, leaning backwards. “I can only… control it for so long.”
“But you won’t hurt me, and it’ll wear off, right?”
They nodded.
“Then touch me… please… I… I want your touch,” and you did. In a way you’d never felt with anyone else, human or otherwise, you needed them.
Rearing closer to you, the creature hung in the air above you like a cloud. It raked its claws down your body, but instead of shearing your clothes open, they simply evaporated, reappearing on the floor nearby in a tangled, crumpled heap.
“Neat trick,” you muttered before gasping as their hands landed on your bare torso, spreading their fingers wide and inhaling again. “Magic?”
“In dreams, anything is possible. We are not bound by your laws.”
“Of course not, but you’re —” you cut off sharply as they opened their mouth and a long, black tongue slithered free and coiled around your hardening nipple. You lurched and your back arched before falling back onto the bed. A tingling spread rapidly all down your right side as their hands gripped you more strongly now.
Working steadily first down one side and then the other, the nightmare scraped its teeth over you in a hundred scratching lines that made you want to yelp and buck, but their paralysis had begun to sweep over you. Every almost-bite it chased with its soothing, teasing, paralysing tongue and fingertips until you could do nothing but tremble and twitch beneath its touch.
A voice hissed, “I will know if you want me to stop,” and you let the last of your fears slide away, giving into the intense pleasure that their mouth offered on your body.
Finally, breath heaving, you felt your release crashing towards you. Never before had you been utterly immobile like this. You wanted to thrash and buck, to squirm and writhe - the pleasure was so intense and visceral that you needed to scream, but the nightmare held you in its grasp and wrung your release from you with relentless focus. Before you could recover fully, it demanded a second orgasm hot on the heels of the first and you thought you might shear apart with the force of it.
Gasping for breath, you begged silently to be allowed to move again, and as it sat back, that long, clever tongue lapping up the last of your release, it touched you once again and your body went slack.
“Oh my god,” you panted. “I’ve never come like that…”
“Your… energy,” they whispered, touching their fingers and thumb together as if their skin was tingling too. Something cool and dark slid over your leg and you looked down to find black liquid dripping from their robes, all over your legs from where they were hovering above you.
You had to laugh. “Don’t tell me you’re switching careers to an incubus now?”
The nightmare looked at you. “It’s just you,” they said. “I want only you.”
“If you’re going to make me come like that, I think we could come to an arrangement…”
The creature grinned, showing all its deadly teeth, and you lay back and stared at the ceiling for a long time, drained and tired but deeply satisfied. You didn’t even notice yourself sliding into a blissful sleep.
When you woke with your alarm the next morning, there was no trace of the creature, but on the back of the door as you were preparing to leave, you found the words ‘good luck’ scraped into the surface of the wood.
“You’d better come back and fix that tonight,” you grumbled with a smile on your face as you spotted it. Even as you stared at it, the wood melted back into the shape it had always been before, and in its place, a simple, line-drawn heart appeared.
You snorted. “See you later,” you said as you grabbed your coat and headed out. “And… well… thank you.”
___
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