The ship rocked and the baron swayed to its hypnotic movement. Years of experiments had led to this foul night. He could feel it in the air, coiled tight from thunderstorm and thick with tallow. Here laid real power. His assistant, however, was not so convinced.
“The lilac is in place,” Bernard said limply. “What is the next step?”
“The gold,” answered Julian.
Like bovine in a labcoat, Bernard dragged himself over to the chest and removed the small pouch within. Carefully then, as if dazzled by its shine, he withdrew the coins and set them down inside the summoning circle. In total there were six, unremarkable, unmarked pieces; one for each day of the spell.
“And now?”
The blood.
Calmly as to not alarm the man, Julian Malkolvo walked around the glass window dividing the cabin, opened the iron door, and shot three bullets into his chest. His reaction was oddly not so much that of betrayal, but of timing. He gurgled something and dropped the empty pouch. With at most one lung, however, he could not scream as his white labcoat bloomed a horrid red. There was no going back now.
With a loud thud Bernard slumped to the cabin floor and Julian listened, with a fox’s intensity, for any signs the rest of the crew may have heard. Lightning flashed across the bow, into the portholes, and then — distant thunder. They were too busy battling the storm.
“Had you ever taken interest you would have known,” he said gaily, watching the last convulsions shake from the man. “But none of you do.”
Something happened then that he didn’t expect: a cold satisfaction settled deep in his gut. The risk, or the act of disposing of such a man felt empowering, justified. Bernard’s wife and children would be defenseless now, in need of a father figure once he returned. Perhaps he would take her as his wife. She had fine features. The thought of those conceited eyes looking up at him as she bobbed up and down his cock — a sharp inhale brought him back to the cabin.
Where pooling blood began to move.
Joining the spines forming the outer ring of the ritual, the liquid sucked out of Bernard’s orifices and over cracks in the wooden floor. Not realizing it, Julian began to mumble words of old scripture that he’d memorized from childhood. It was one thing to understand such powers, but something else entirely to see it with his own eyes…
Horror began to accumulate like a bad bet, going deeper and deeper into the red. The gold coins were being plucked into the circle of blood as if it were literally a pool and a creature swam beneath it. The hand that grabbed was crooked and sinuous. Part of the baron’s brain attempted to pair it with drawings he’d seen in ancient text, but the sight of it turned his brain numb and his prayers into senseless chittering.
Had he made a mistake?
The crimson liquid lifted from the circle then as if it were a trapeze hoop. And where once there was nothing bones slowly materialized a monstrous curtain of bat wings. The blood rained as it raised toward the ceiling, but not enough to disguise the body of a giant prehistoric snake. A demon.
Yet as if Lucifer were playing some immortal joke, from its head reared the upper body of a angel with fire-born skin and large bare breasts. No chains of light wrapped its scales.
It is supposed to be bound! Words! There are words. Summoner’s words…
“I- I am your summoner,” Julian rasped in Estruscan (the ancient language of the script). “You must heed me… What is your name? What is your name?”
She -it- did not respond; once the hoop of blood reached above her horns it broke loose and splashed down atop her. But still Julian stared. They way she stretched and wiggled her hips… the wooden floor groaned under her weight; her wings knit together behind her. A flicker then. A spark of blue in the poorly lit cabin spawned inside the corpse’s mouth and flowed like flame into hers.
She moaned in such raw pleasure the sound sent electricity up the baron’s spine.
“T-tell me your name!”
“My name…” she whispered. “Is Yentheshaa Yiney. Mother of Evintool’s brood. Do you know?” Her voice was wrong. Breathless.
Seconds ticked by like tiny eternities. In the dismal light he could see the blood drizzle down the monster’s head, and around the curve of her jaw. How could he answer? He had nothing stopping her from a terrifying death. The script had shown chains of golden light!
To make matters worse she spoke in modern day English. How was he to make any sense of that?
“Confounding,” said she. “These words: ripe with layers. Story. Mana. Plane. Shape…. Shift. Do you know?”
Abruptly she left the summoning circle and began to slither toward him!
“Damnit!”
Julian threw himself back through the iron door and clamped it shut. In moments the sounds of the ship rushed to his ears: the crew battling the ocean, men hollered and water pounded the deck. This half of the cabin was not half as insulated as the experimentation chamber, but could a single iron door stop such a monster? A demon? Shivering, Julian peered through the glass, for once happy at how small the window was. The lanterns, however, had gone out.
“Damn them! Damn the church! Damn Clemence Ardouin. Damn God himself for what he has done to me! See what path you have laid for me? See where it has led me?!”
Baron of Gormonstan, Julian Malkolvo’s rise to prominence was slapped down by the delicate, and embarrassingly young, hand of Clemence Ardouin. This rejection combined with his outburst in front of so many prominent noblemen shunned him from polite society and forced him toward the path of the Church. How easily his younger brother had taken his place as patriarch within their family, leaving him with naught but scraps to not starve as he studied. How he smiled before I’d turned my back!
Languages came easily to Julian, however. Too easily did he pick up the romance languages before moving onto Hebrew, Arabic, Latin (old and new), Tamil and then his true gift: ancient tongues. Had they just given him a hole to fuck and a mansion to live he would not have traveled down this dark road of forgotten scrolls, marred tablets, or wrinkled skins of dead tattooed monks.
Convincing old men to fund his experiments naturally followed, as Julian soon found a hidden similarity between them. Not voiced or somehow secretly
acknowledged, their similarity was a thing missing from all conversation over his years. Most easily recognized when discussing matters of politics, power, and sex.
They wanted this.
The iron door simply popped off its hinges then and dropped to the floor. Too stiff with fear to run, Julian backpedaled at a useless rate. What next came through the door was not the apocalyptic demon of his making, however, but of sex.
A wingless angel with black shoulder length hair, glistening bare pale skin as if exiting a sauna, walked calmly from the gloom. Julian thought her an angel not because of some saintly glow, but because her image could only have been fashioned by the divine. Each curve was precisely sculpted. Her body played off the imaginations of countless artists: thighs plump, abs toned, breasts of ample squeeze. A smell of sweat and fire filled the room as she came near.
“Do you know?” It was the demon’s cadence, though her voice had changed. She sounded energetic, breathing.
“W-what?” Julian stammered.
She paused and swiveled her hips; Julian could look no other place. “Has it been forgotten?” she asked.
The air was so close. Julian’s brain felt like a fog. “Has… what?”
Easier than sighing the woman closed the distance between them and pressed her body into his. His hands wrapped around her hips and for reasons he could not explain, felt infinitely stronger. If he wanted to he could have tossed her across the room weighing nothing more than a toy, but he did not. He gripped her sides and felt their sensual muscles tighten.
“I will fulfill the contract.”
“Con–”
The baron lost control; her lips were too much. Driving his tongue into her mouth he tasted every part of her. Fire in his chest, he lifted her by the ass onto the table and tore off his clothes like paper. She did not struggle or scream, but giggled and moaned. The response beckoning more.
The last stroke of thought parted when she hooked him closer with her feet and looked up at him with those green eyes that reminded him of Clemence Ardouin: unreasonable and wild.
“Take me.”
He pushed inside her as answer and felt all condense into that single sensation. Legs gripped his back and forgotten primal urge claimed him. Each withdrawal left a gap of immediate pleasure needing to be filled more desperate than the last. Things were being broken across the desk that weren’t just physical.
“You dumb bitch,” Julian groaned.
He came into that perfect hole, squeezing her enough to bruise the skin — and she giggled. He withdraw only after she released her legs to start again somewhere fresh, on the floor slick with salt water. The smirk on her face gave him his next target.
She molded to his will with ease, going down on her knees like a dutiful whore and sticking out her tongue like he needed enticing.
A slap wiped that smirk off her face.
She winced like a good girl should, no more giggling with a cock in her mouth, at least none that he could hear. The baron pushed her head back and forth over his cock like a rag with growing rhythm. The force of it what he dreamed of doing to so many court sluts needing correction.
Needing hard cock down their throats.
A few more thrusts and he started to cum. He did not allow her an option, but she swallowed more seed than Julian thought possible, more spilling out her lips and nose trickling down her chest.
His mind could not register that he was right. So much cum was not possible. She swallowed and groaned. After finishing he took her again from behind.
At some point the baron lost track of both time and consciousness, awaking to the sound of thunder shaking the floor beneath him and a pain roaring from every corner of his body. He shivered as thoughts once again began to stir in his muddled brain.
“We are bound,” the demon said from some corner of the dark.
We are bound.