Athenium Ch. 01

Where am I?

Feels like I've been...underwater. For years.

No. Underwater is the wrong word. Water doesn't make you forget where you are. Who you are.

I'm alone. It's dark. It's quiet. Can't remember the last time I saw anything, heard anything. I remember lights and sounds, but...they feel weird. Like someone else's memory.

...

Wait. I remember now. Who I was. What happened. Why I was down here.

And.

And.

There. There she is.

I know what this is. She's letting me...and then...

Ohhhh. Mmmmm.

After I...I remember...ahhh...she...mmmm...

******

"You have violated the agreement," I begin.

Leader. Emissary. Negotiator.

The words flood my mind like a tidal wave of flattery. This is not a new tactic, but it served as a fresh reminder of her powers of persuasion. She's trying to ply me, to sway me towards mercy, to forgive her transgression. It was an odd gesture, considering the position she held me in, but I dare not let that thought cross my mind. She would certainly feel it, and use it against me.

She has pulled me into herself. For not the first time, I stepped onto a surface that felt slick and gummy, but as dense as concrete. Naked as the day I was born, I waited as she softened, turned into a kind of goo that felt like oobleck: thick and viscous, but as smooth as cocoa butter. The surface would open up, accepting me into the center of her swimming-pool sized mass as the goo gently and lazily rolled over every square inch of my skin.

Well, that was how she usually did it. This time, she sent tendrils of the stuff up my legs, wrapping around them, spreading my toes and hungrily sucking at every square inch of skin. She didn't pull me down any faster than usual - if anything, the pace was slow and languid - but there was a hunger to it that hadn't been there in any of our earlier meetings. She always took care to make the engulfment feel pleasant, but this was...erotic. She brushed across my crotch with a little bit more pressure than anywhere else, as if savoring the touch.

It looks like a hand. Is that a hand? She's not letting me fall in this time.

She's gripping, grasping. Sucking, pulling.

Friend. Partner. Suitor.

"Did you hear me?" I said, ignoring the flattery and the forward gestures, "He was not a prisoner. You should have given him up."

I "spoke" by thinking. She - her voice was a distinct, disarming, husky feminine thing - read thoughts and emotions, and gave them in return, magnified and unmistakeable for anything other than her intended message.

Well, they were usually clear. Today, her messages were clouded with barroom smoke and the promise of a wild night with a stranger.

"How should I know," she purred with thinly-vieled teasing, "Who you have fed me, and who sought me out?"

The image of a tall, strong redhead in a maroon negligee appeared in my mind's eye. The specter stretched a long, toned leg towards me as she inclined upon a ridiculous red velour couch - the couch, like her, conjured from the porno version of a noir film - and her eyes looked down as her bee-stung lips shot me a mischevious smirk. I couldn't meet her eyes without staring straight through the valley of her cleavage, where her mountainous breasts fell from a loosening satin top...

Lover. Paramour. Inamorato.

Why was she doing this, I thought? How did she even know what it was that she was projecting? She had never attempted to seduce me - or to my knowledge, anyone - before. She said that she always blanked the prisoners we gave her.

"Don't play dumb, Ath-" I stopped. Not the name. Don't tell her a name. "Don't play dumb. You know which is which."

"What's...Athenium?" She said. The name conjured, in spite of all resistance, the image of crimson lips, the 'mmm' sound exaggerated like she was suckling on a aphrodisiac-laden candy.

There was no point in not answering this question. The answer would have been immediately betrayed by my reaction to the name, as hard as I was trying to resist the thoughts of everything the name meant.

"It's...what some of them decided to name you. My colleagues, I mean," I answer.

She is unnaturally grateful for this answer. She makes me feel her gratitude, like floating on a stream of cool water on a warm summer day. I feel my body shift as she shifts me in her mass, laying me down, like an impossibly strong lover guiding me towards a honeymoon four-poster.

Monolith. Mountain. Pioneer.

She's trying to make me feel strong as she is weakening me. She coaxes the meaning of the name from my treacherous subconscious: the daughter of a king of gods, a locus of knowledge, an unpredictable and all-powerful entity, made into an element, a foundational substance that outlives civilizations.

All at once, it clashes. She's stroking my ego - among other things - sowing relaxation and lust into everything she can touch, one smooth undulation at a time. The sensations struggle against each other and fail to coexist.

"You have to let him go," I say.

Suddenly, she eminates rejection. Now she is a scorned lover, Calypso, desperate for Odysseus to return to her isolated palace of debauchery and mind-numbed ecstasy.

"Do you think so little of me, that you won't even use my name?" She is pouting.

This is a game, I know. She wants me to chase her, to stop negotiating, to feel that I have insulted her. I build her up, and we're right back to square one. But I am not a stone, and damn it if I don't feel that I have wounded her.

She is patient. Her physical form, a goo built to expend as little energy as is possible, is built for that patience. She will wait until the heat death of the universe for me to call her by name.

She. It is she. She has decided. She is adamant.

"Athenium..." I say.

Time slows to a crawl. I can say no more; my voice perverts itself: it dips an octave and becomes a ragged whisper in the ear of a fire-haired woman. She has been denied so long, so long by the man she wants. She won't let him go this time. She knows he wants her as bad as she fucking wants him, and she'll pin him down and take her retribution for the carnal euphoria that he has denied her.

This is wrong. No. I came here for a reason...some, uh...something.

She stretches my arms and legs as wide as they comfortably go. She flows between every space, meeting herself as she squeezes, claiming every digit, limb and patch of skin as her own. She sucks on every inch of me, piling on me and pressing me further down into herself. Her oozing bonds conspire with her mass, squeezing ever so gently as they pull me into deeper depravities, deeper pleasure.

"You..." I struggle for the words "violated..."

"Violate..." The redhead says, ending in a wicked grin as she grips a rope of goo, still hauling her prey towards her. Yes, he's so close. So close. A little closer and his resistance will break. And when he breaks, he will stay inside of her, and she will squeeze and suck and fuck his body and mind and soul until he can think of NOTHING except how goddamn good she feels, all over him, forever, cumming and cumming and...

She has made an error, one that she can't understand right now. I break away from the fantasy that she plunges into.

"Marco," I say, my mind suddenly cleared, "He has a wife. You've held him for three days now. It's time to let him go."

"He came to me," Athenium says, bombarding me with the image of a man in a dark pool room, shaking with weeks of built-up anticipation as he took a tentative step onto a solid goo surface.

"He came into me," She moaned.

******

Marco was there when we discovered Athenium. Just a small oblong shape the size of a basketball at the time, it gave off a warmth and a glow that was the same dark green as itself. Unearthed from the Antarctic ice by glacial melting, it grew as it gently borrowed the warmth from our hands.

It took something else from all of us, we later agreed. Specific memories in our minds were described in scant, but vivid detail by our peers. For Marco, that memory was a buxom brunette peeling a too-tight white brassiere from her caramel-colored breasts. None of us had ever seen her in our...necessary addressing of bodily needs. Marco had said that she was his wife - possibly, not really my place to say - and we knew that thing could at least record what was on the forefront of our minds. He was horny that day; that was fine, Antarctica wasn't the kind of place to bring your significant other. You didn't really talk to the other guys about it, but we all had our fantasies. You don't survive six months of icy purgatory without some place in your mind to escape into.

It kept growing. We couldn't keep it in the lab; eventually, it would be too big to fit through the door. The heated swimming pool, we thought, would have plenty of space.

Six weeks later, Marco was standing at the edge of a pool so filled with the solid goo that it threatened to overflow. Marco was about to overflow, as well. When the thing started expanding to the edges and filling up the depths - 6 feet, 8 feet, finally 10 feet - Marco watched until he couldn't resist any longer. He had watched every time a criminal was drowned in goo here at the bottom of the world, and he was almost willing to commit a crime himself to be in those depths.

With shaking breath and a raging erection, he stepped onto the surface...

And it held.

Why won't it...he mumbled. It was a bit sticky, warm, felt good, but if he had waited all this time for...maybe someone needed to push him, like they did with the others.

It opened, taking him into itself up to his knees in a flash.

It savored him, licking the anxious sweat from his flesh and squeezing it, hungry for more.

Yessss, he moaned.

But why did it...

It pulled him down with a sudden jerk, stopping as it reached his balls. A spasm of pleasure shot through him; it felt luxurious, like a dozen strippers sliding their lotion-bodied curves across every inch they touched as they fought to touch him, to smother him.

"I'm so close..." He said, breathless and desperate for consummation. It was a thousand times better than he imagined, but his cock was still...

And then it was under. The shock of her sudden claiming of his lower half drove him over the edge. He explodes into orgasm as his the goo pulls him down to his ribs. It had teased him for only a minute before it gave him the pleasure he wanted, and so much of it.

Damn, he thinks, I thought I could last longer than that. Wonder how long it will be until I...

The mass moved like it never had before. It held him motionless as it rolled across every inch of submerged skin, down his stomach, up his legs, concentrating into a tugging suction that was so strong that it felt like it wanted to take his cock with it.

It hurts, but only for a moment. For the first time, she has felt the most intense and incredible of human experiences. The feeling is like a drug, and she amplifies it, savors it...finds that it does not last nearly long enough.

But she can change this weakness.

The pain disappears. The fatigue after climax never comes for Marco. She again begins rolling over his shaft in undulating waves, hurriedly, frantically.

She wants more. Oh fuck, does she want more.

"Get down here, so I can fuck you everywhere," she says.

Athenium isn't a gentle lover anymore, she decides. She is a sex-drunk feral Amazon, and the man inside of her - not deep enough inside of her yet but soon, so fucking soon - is going to fucking explode when she has him all. He will never not be cumming. She's going to suck him, stretch him, bend him, undulate across him and fuck him for millennia.

Marco gave a moan that was almost a scream. His eyes rolled back as Athenium pulled him down in rapid yanks. Once. Twice. Every time, another inch of his neck squeezed further into the writhing mass like a cork being shoved back into a wine bottle. Every pull on his quivering body shakes him harder, sucks at him with more lustful hunger.

Down. He gasps. He cums.

Down. Another ragged gasp. He cums, moaning and out of breath.

Down. Down. Down. Get inside of me, she demands, so that we may cum together without end.

He whimpered at every downward tug, pleading with the goo to not stop, to take him all the way down. If it felt this good above, then so below, fully engulfed in the undulating hunter green goo, he...

He stopped for a moment, suddenly wondering if he would ever see daylight again. With the goo at his chin, he could not struggle free now. He was fully at the mercy of this living mass of slime the size of a house, and she seemed to have no intention of letting him go. Terror gripped him for one moment.

But the terror was just a shot of adrenaline to flavor the orgasmic wave that washed all inhibitions away. Please, he begged, steal me. Whatever the slime would use him for, this pleasure was worth the small price of a life that could never be feel so good as the sensual assault that Athenium was doing to him now.

Another tug. Mesmerized, Marco watched as the top of the goo bounced, bobbing him up and down while keeping him locked in place.

Oh god yes, he said, delirious from ecstasy, hold me down. Don't let me go. He struggles, knowing it wouldn't free him. He drools in slack-jawed euphoria, reveling at feeling of the gooey squeeze across his whole body. His oobleck prison thickens, forbidding him from motion. He tenses and writhes, deliriously delighting inside of his inescapable confinement.

She responds with another urgent tug, and his chin disappears as Athenium undulates even higher. He grew lightheaded as the goo moved in on itself, squeezing him and lapping at his neck like the tongue of a crazed lover.

Another tug, and Athenium pulls him down to his lips. She cradles the back of his head, giving him a crushing, passionate kiss.

"Mmmmm," Marco said, shuddering in the silence now demanded by his enveloping lover. Your lips are mine, it told him. The feeling of his own hot breath from his nostrils, bounced off her surface a mere half inch below.

You're so close, she told him. Just a little further; imagine how good I can make you feel when I have all of you.

She pries open his lips and oozes into his mouth. She tastes like honeyed tea as she fills his throat, and her French kiss strips all thoughts from his mind, all thoughts expect for a universe of plush, gooey, slick flesh that he was going to fuck forever...and that was going to fuck him back.

He doesn't feel it travel down his throat, into his lungs, through his heart. His body accepts her as if it was meant for her.

She lets him glance out one last time across her surface and then, with one smooth, slow motion, rolls over the rest of his face. He screams in terrible bliss as she squeezes him, wraps him, covers him, drowns him in the lust he had given to her. He cums and cums and cums, and when he is empty, his mind fails to get the message.

Just as high on endless climax as her prisoner, she keeps him there, right at that blissful instant. Inside of him...yes, there it is. No more fatigue. No more waiting to cum again. He is her fucking machine now. Even when his fluids run out, he will keep feeding her that bliss. His mind is locked at the moment of climax, thinking of nothing except the sustained sensation of draining his balls into his encompassing lover while she cascades over herself to touch every inch of him.

******

"He has a wife," I say, biting my lip so hard that I taste blood. I must make myself feel anything but the nitroglycerine cotton candy endless orgasmic mind melting that she had given back to Marco, a thousand times stronger than the depraved need he had held for her for six weeks.

"Mmm, bring her too. You've never given me a woman before."

The thrill of a new discovery fills the goo; it feels like cool water, refreshing and exciting at once. There was another half of the human race that she only knew through memories and approximation. She wants to know what new mysteries the female mind held. What did the throes of orgasmic tremors feel like for a woman?

Oh, she muses, would a woman want to be gripped like Marco? Caressed and suckled and kneaded and penetrated and...

"They're afraid of you," I say.

Her sensual reveling screeches to a halt. For a moment, she relents, rearranges her thoughts. I wasn't telling her anything she didn't already know, but opening a new door in a familiar hallway.

"Yes. I feel their terror as you shove them until me."

A pang of guilt washes over me as the image of terrified prisoners appears in my mind's eye. They thrash, flail, scream. She takes them. The surface bounces for a moment, then falls eerily still.

"I hate it. Its taste is so acidic. I could make them feel anything, but when you give them to me, all they want is to feel nothing."

A brief scream startles me, but it is gone, silenced before I can even tell where it came from. I gulp as I wonder where she is taking this conversation.

"He wanted me. Do you understand? He was the first. He WANTED me!"

Her anger becomes an omnidirectional vice, almost painful. She might not let me out of herself - I knew that as soon as I stepped onto the goo - but before now, I had failed to anticipate that she might not even keep me alive, like she usually did to the ones we fed her.

She senses my fear of death, and her grip loosens. The acid taste leaves her mouth.

"He wanted me. He STILL wants me," Athenium says.

A tear rolls down the redhead's cheek.

Marco had given her her first taste of lust, of all-consuming passion. He didn't realize that there would be no "post nut clarity" where he would realize how he had willingly drowned himself in an empathic goo, but then again, how he would escape Athenium was not something he had worked out beforehand. This was a careless experiment. Regardless, he was now feeding her the most potent and intoxicating ecstasy known to humans, and like she did with every other emotion, Athenium had made it her own, amplified it to impossible extremes.

How do you make a new addict give up their drug? How do you make her see that he belongs to someone else?

Belonging. Companion. Partner.

"I..." She stuttered. That was it. That was how I would make her give him up.

Heartbreak. Devastation. Separation.

"You've already separated her from someone who promised to be with her for all the years of their short life," I say.

The lingering lust and anger give way to revelation. It tastes like bitter medicine, something that promises a better existence, but at an unpleasant price. Athenium sees the man that Marco promised to be, the man he could not be here in the depths of lust.

She kneads her willing prisoner again. He moans and quivers, suckling on his life-preserving gelatinous gag. He has had a lifetime of orgasms in her depths, but he wants more, NEEDS more. He strains against his gooey confinements just to feel them tighten again, reveling in the familiar denial of even the most basic of his freedoms. He can't even move unless she wants him to; just the thought of her control drives him to an even deeper enthrallment.

"The thing you fear will happen to you, the abandonment? You've already done that to his wife. She mourns. She wants him back," I say. I wait to see if I'm a good enough liar to convince her that everything that I just made up is absolutely true.

I feel her slide past every inch of me again. She's sizing me up as a substitute, I believe; she tries to wake my cock, but I resist her. She recoils at the thought of giving up her lover, hates it with everything in her being.

But in me...she feels something more complex, something that promises a deeper mystery. She tastes me. There is an enigma there, a layered emotion that she doesn't understand. She wants to, but no one like me has ever been inside of her yet. Not enough exposure to discern the taste of the falsehood.