Aftermath Law

"Thank you." He took the glass and swigged it. It was foul, and he winced as he swallowed. "What is it?" He asked, his face screwed up from the bitter taste it left in his mouth.

"We make it from the bark of the willow tree," she said. "It's an ancient remedy we found in a number of books salvaged. It might taste awful, but for the next two months or so, you'll come to depend on it."

"Two months?" Aithran was horrified.

"I'm afraid so. We can't rush recovery."

She smiled, taking his glass from his hand and retiring from the room. Aithran sighed: it looked as though his life was getting more and more complicated, and there's nothing so depressing than complication in life. There was nothing he could do but pick up a book and ride out the tedium as the pain in his leg slowly began to subside.

But those two months were to be entirely without event. Though Maria went to a new man at the Solstice, Aithran wasn't entirely alone in his hospital bed as he recovered from his situation.

The first evening after the Solstice, the nurse Sally came into his room and sat on his bed, the top button on her pristine white uniform casually undone.

"How are you feeling?" She asked.

"I don't know…" he said. "That medicine of yours is pretty effective."

"Good," she said.

"But it's going to be a long two months," he said gloomily.

"Yes," she said, "you won't be able to go to your next village for some weeks. Still, if there's anything I can do to make your stay a little more…pleasurable…"

To his surprise, he found her hand sweeping up his healthy leg to his crotch, where her dextrous fingers sought out his hardening penis. He looked at her, his jaw dropping in an obvious expression of disbelief.

"As a nurse," she said, "I don't get a man at the Solstice – I have to be on call at any hour of the day or night."

"How did you get to be nurse?"

"Well someone has to do it," she said. "At least there's no chance I'll have to spend six months with a man I absolutely hate…but a girl does have needs…"

Her fingers found his fly and soon his hardened shaft was fully exposed, her fingers enclosing his hot flesh.

"I don't usually get a handsome young man to look after," she said, smiling at him with blatant lust in her emerald eyes.

"Well I look forward to you looking after me," he said, and she pulled his clothing fully away from his clothing and began to kiss him around his stomach and the tops of his thighs as her hand gripped his hard cock and squeezed, motioning up and down to really get him going. Planting little kisses closer and closer to his erect shaft, he felt her hot breath tickling his sensitive skin.

He couldn't help letting out a moan as her lips moved over his sac to the base of his penis, and when that intense heat suddenly engulfed his sensitive helmet, swarming over the pre-come coated end, he closed his eyes as if to prevent pure sensory overload.

"You think you can handle a little real nursing?" she said as she climbed astride him, her short white dress riding up to show a distinct lack of underwear underneath, the top of her dress unbuttoning before his very eyes to allow her chest to burst free.

"No pain, no gain – isn't that the saying?" he smiled as she sank down on his hardness.

"You sound like a real hero," she said, her hot pussy clamping around him, so very wet in her arousal as his hands found their way to her breasts, his fingers to her stiffened nipples.

*

Yet even nightly visits from nurse Sally did not keep Aithran's mental well being high for long. His mind kept wondering back to Iona - the sweetest person in the entire cracked world - and the child that he had not even seen.

A few weeks into the new season, Sally brought a group of young women in to see him, and so strong were the questions about Iona in his mind, that he didn't even pay attention. It was all in a haze as Sally taught the girls who would be of age at the next Solstice how to pleasure a man.

He just lay on his back, from day to day, in various states of undress as various women used his body to suit their purposes – education, pleasure, release.

*

But release did eventually come for him, too. Two months, and he was back on his feet. He worked intensely hard to get walking again, taking as much physiotherapy every day as was humanly possible to get tone back in the limb so that he could leave the village and start the rest of his life.

Sally tried to persuade him to stay: to ride out the remainder of the season with her, but he wasn't to be discouraged. His bag was packed and on his back, and he was on the road.

But though he received a full briefing as to where the next village was and how he could catch up with his group, he was resolute in his action: he was going back to a certain room in a certain empty apartment in a desolate part of the ruined metropolis.

8

He slept there, in front of the fire, alone but resolute. He was determined to find his true love: he couldn't face moving from village to village, steadily further away from her. But though he was exhausted after a long trek through unstable terrain, sleep was hard to come by. While still tired, there was a thrill deep within his chest about what he was planning, a thrill that wouldn't set his heart at a relaxed pace sufficient for sleep to creep through his system.

For hours, he gazed into the dancing orange and yellow devils, picturing her impish smile in his mind, recollecting the warm, buttery feeling he felt inside whenever she was with him. His whole body trembled at the anticipation for what he was to do the next day.

As the fire burned down to glowing embers, his eyes finally closed.

*

In the morning, he was up and ready to leave within a few brief minutes of first waking. His body brimmed with adrenaline, which made him want to run all the way to his home village, but he controlled himself, taking deep breaths to try and calm down. He knew the trouble that carelessness could cause: one wrong foot on a heap of rubble and he could have another broken limb, and in his current situation, he was too far away from safety to recover.

Through the day, the closer to his childhood home he got, the stronger the confusing feelings of familiarity and rejection were within him: this was the neighbourhood of his birth, his upbringing, his real happiness before uncertainty and loss moved into his life. But it was also a place that he was not permitted to return to, a place that had spat him out as soon as he had been old enough and wasn't expecting him back.

He kept to the shadows as he got near to the village, his life depending on not being spotted by anyone save for the one he'd come for. But as the sun slowly went down, he was ready for the final stretch. He actually slept as he waited, concealing himself where he knew nobody from the village would venture, close to the collection of small huts, but too risky for anyone to explore.

And when he opened his eyes and it was fully dark, it was as though his heart was on fire. Now was the moment that would make – or break – his entire future.

He leaned out of a glassless window, peering across at the village. The space between the huts was empty: aside from a few wandering animals, the village folk were inside – either sleeping, or if they were of age, trying desperately to breed.

He crept through the night like a thief, forever flicking glances all around his environment to check for the slightest threat. But thankfully, Iona's hut was on the fringe of the village, and the reliable form of society here meant that there was no one around to catch sight of him. He hovered at a window of her one-room dwelling, and silently shifted the sackcloth curtain to peer inside.

And his heart sank into the pit of his horrified stomach.

He heard it first before he saw it, but there was what he had worried about hundreds of times since he had last been in this very village.

"You stupid bitch," the man said, and the gut-wrenching clap of his hand against her delicate cheek cracked through the air. "You'll do whatever I tell you to. You just don't learn, do you?" He hit her again. Aithran stood, mortified, unable to move he was so horrified.

"Please…" She stammered, her heavily bruised face causing her to mangle her consonants. "I…I just don't feel I can…"

"Listen, bitch. I've had enough of your mouth, d'you hear?" He hit her again, so hard that she collapsed to the floor in a sobbing heap of misery. "D'you hear?" His scream was almost a screech, rage running raw through his demonic face. A huge monster with a poor, wretched little innocent girl at his feet, unable to defend herself.

"If you don't take off your clothes now, bitch, I'm going to tear them off you, and you know well that you don't want that."

"N-n-no…" she said, struggling to pull her clothing from her body. Aithran couldn't believe it: her face was nearly unrecognisable it was so purple and misshapen. She looked up, and for a brief moment he thought she had caught sight of him. She seemed to peer at the window, but one of her eyes was swollen and closed, the other squinting through sheer pain.

Removing her dress, her exposed skin bore even more of a horror story. Aithran looked away, wincing. His gaze fell downwards, and he froze. Looking up at him, terrified under a brown blanket was the tiny face of a young toddler. His son. The little boy stared up at the stranger at the window, a pleading expression on his tiny face. Aithran winked, and allowed the curtain to fall back in place. He stepped back into the darkness.

"That's better," said the ogre, "you don't need any of this shit, you know. You stop acting the frigid bitch and you'd soon be healthy enough to go back outside."

Iona sniffed as he approached her naked form, putting his hands all over her blackened body. Perhaps she should have submitted to him - it would have been less painful, that was certain. It was going to be excruciatingly agonizing having him press his substantial weight upon her, his brutal power into her dry vagina. But there was no rescue now. He was on her, the enemy at her gate.

It was just too much for her. The throbbing, rippling agony burning through her system seemed to leach her last remaining drop of energy and she collapsed completely, the light of the central fireplace effervescing into a haze of unconsciousness, reality fading into a fizzing dreamlike state, and just before her lights went out completely, the pain so much that her mind itself was shutting down, she had a sudden lucid hallucination that her dear Aithran was with her again, and everything was all right.

9

Iona woke completely bewildered. She recalled bizarre dreams that didn't connect – visions of her son, Daniel, and Aithran, her beloved Aithran, all tangled with pictures of the monster who had made the last few months of her existence a living hell.

She was instantly afraid when full consciousness returned. She sat up, wincing in expectation of massive levels of pain in her body. But none came.

The chill air bit at her skin, so she wrapped herself in the soft woollen blanket. And it made her wonder: where was she? Where did this blanket come from? Why was she not in her little hut?

She was in a different room: somewhere she had never been. It was dark, with light coming from one direction, from in front of her. The walls were of rock, and the furnishings very Spartan in appearance. She got to her feet, holding the blanket around her nudity, and stepped off the low mattress. There was a strange peacefulness in the air, yet a noise that was most bizarre – like the sloshing of a vast amount of water.

She parted the curtain that separated the blackness of the room from the daylight outside, and an expression of incredulity and shock exploded in her face. She emerged into the brightness, stepping from the dirt floor onto soft, emerald green grass. In front of her, a few metres above dark craggy rocks, a vast expanse of blue spread out as far as the eye could see, to the horizon that was so strangely flat.

White birds swooped and soared in the windy blue sky above, calling to each other as the water below crashed against the rocks. The air seemed so clean, so fresh, with an aroma of wild flowers and the strange cleanliness she had never smelled before, that seemed to come from the blue water that could be nothing other than the ocean that myths and legends from childhood had described.

"Iona!" the voice called with purest joy, and just the sound of her name in that voice filled her entire existence with unparalleled bliss.

She turned, and walking towards her with little Daniel sitting on his shoulders was Aithran, the man who made her complete, the man she loved more than life itself. She ran to him, surprised again that the pain did not thwart her efforts. He stooped, depositing his cheerful son onto his tiny feet so that he could embrace his beloved.

"Where are on earth are we?" she asked him as they broke apart from a long, passionate kiss. The surreal, dreamlike landscape and the painless state of her body felt unnatural, as though the beatings she had so regularly received had finally made her depart the misery of the urban wasteland and she was now in heaven.

"We're safe," he said. "And we're together."

"What happened?" it was all she could put into words: her head was so filled with questions.

"Welcome to Dorset," he said. "We escaped, and now we're here. It was a long journey, and you slept through most of it. But we're finally here, sweet Iona. We're free to start afresh. This is a settled community – the men don't move on here."

She looked around them, at all the other dwelling places that were cut into the cliff face just like the one she had just emerged from. People were busy everywhere, going about daily life with innocent cheerfulness. Children played together in rock pools below while out to sea, boats bobbed up and down on the surf, the men and women on board struggling to get wriggling nets out of the water.

"Why am I not in pain?" she said, indicating her flesh that was still bruised to a considerable extent – though she could see in both eyes now, so the bruising had gone away to some degree.

"I learned about how to make it in another village," he said, smiling. "I make it from the bark of the willow tree. It kills pain. The other people around here are quite taken with it – they've set me up with a business making it from the trees that are growing about half a kilometre from here."

"You're sure I'm not dreaming?" she asked.

"I'm sure," he kissed her tenderly.

*

But it did feel as though she was dreaming. Plucked so suddenly from the pit of despair, she was suddenly here, in the most beautiful place she had ever seen. It was hard to believe, but there was nothing to suppose she had gone insane or had passed onto the next life.

As the sun was going down a fortnight after her miracle rescue, sinking in glorious colours over the distant blue horizon, a smile of immovable ecstasy crept across her healthy, beautiful face as she sat overlooking the bay.

"What's that expression for – or need I ask?" Aithran came out from the cave and sat beside her on the soft grass.

"Because I'm the luckiest person in the whole world," she said.

"Oh really?" Aithran raised an eyebrow. "Well I've got news for you, girl."

"What is it?"

"You've just got even luckier," he grinned, "because little Danny has gone to sleep."

He led her down to the beach, away from the numerous fires in front of neighbouring caves, towards a secluded little corner of their own. Just a metre or so up from the lapping surf, they stood in the soft sand, their lips joined while tongues danced, their hands struggling to pull clothes from their bodies.

Naked on the shoreline, their hands explored their bodies, his fingers sweeping through her hair, over her firm little breasts, coaxing her trembling flesh and coaxing her stiff nipples as her fingers swept around his behind to cup his sac and grip his hard penis.

They sank to the ground, Iona on her back, Aithran over her, plying her with kisses all over her body, taking her hard nipples into his hot mouth as she began to moan uncontrollably. Slowly, he sank down her stomach, spreading her legs to lick along her tender inner thighs towards her glistening vagina.

He began very delicately, tentatively kissing along the very tops of her legs, and his hot breath stirred ecstatic sensations on her sensitive flesh. He brushed his face through her sprinkling of soft down and then traced his tongue down each of her outer pussy lips before slipping inside briefly to taste her concentrated nectar.

She felt his hands slide up her thighs and then his fingers gently at her outer labia. Gently, he parted her succulent folds and then slowly licked down until his tongue was buried deep inside her, her pussy lips now pressing either side of his mouth and her burning clit pressing irresistibly against his nose. She was always amazed at how deep he could tongue her, and how his tongue really worked to absorb her emissions. No other man could do that to her.

Her hot little clit was engulfed by his wet mouth, his tongue swirling around it to drive her wild as he coated two fingers in her juices and slid them inside her and continued to lightly suck her sensitive button in his mouth.

She moaned and writhed under his wonderful mouth and was soon heading on that dizzy journey to a real explosion of sensation within her. The rising pitch of her moans, becoming almost screams as she released her feelings, showed him her path. At the final peak of her first orgasm, he withdrew his fingers and once more buried his tongue inside her vagina, and she came in rivulets into his mouth.

Iona rolled over onto her front, and he mounted her, gasping as the sudden heat engulfed his erection. She sighed as she felt every corner of her orifice filled by him and he responded by kissing the back of her neck as he began to ride her, still with the taste of her arousal on his lips. He reached around to hold her breasts with his palms, her nipples pinched between his fingers.

As her breathing and moaning grew in rate and pitch respectively, he reacted by increasing his own pace, his erect shaft squeezing into her from behind, loving every moment of the tight pussy doing its best to crush it with warmth and wetness.

The two of them cried out together as his burning cock erupted inside her receptive pussy, and in that moment of intense bliss, Daniel was given a sister.