Cold Mercy

A crimson trail followed in his wake, the fresh snowfall stained with his rapidly dwindling life. Pieces of armor fell away bit by bit as his pained staggering jostled the tattered parts loose. He didn't notice. It didn't matter. The wound was fatal. If the enemy had sent out any forces to finish off survivors, no amount of armor was going to save him. If he was lucky, he might land one more hit on an attacker before they finished him. The sword was broken, the jagged metal shard on the handle barely larger than a pocket knife, but maybe he could jab an arrogant soldier in the neck right before his own head was lopped off.

Assuming said attacker actually came up to strike, and didn't just shoot him with an arrow. Assuming they even bothered sending their men, and didn't let that wizard's loathsome creatures go hunting for them. Could he do more than give a papercut to those winged demons? Would he even chip a scale on those spined leviathans? Would those shaggy behemoths even notice he was there before they stepped on him?

He let out a choked laugh, tasting blood on his tongue. What had even been the point? The world was different now. Humans had no place on a battlefield where the monsters of legend were unleashed with a wave of a sorcerer's hand. A man with a sword and a bow was a gnat on the battlefield. As this fight had proven, even those with enchanted weapons and armor had little chance in direct combat with a dragon or a demon or the endless variations of chimera.

The alternative, if one really wished to stand a chance, was to let the Alchemeters work their magic directly on your body. But he had seen the results, and that was no way to live. Nor even, in his humble opinion, a proper way to die.

He staggered and fell against a tree, clutching his side. A hideous sense of wrong filled him, to feel how large the wound was. He was astonished he had managed to walk this far. He was astonished the pain hadn't become crippling yet. Surely adrenalin alone couldn't be keeping him going with this heavy a wound, one even a regeneration potion hadn't been able to fix. Some of the armor's booster spells must still be in effect. Or maybe the cold was working deeper than he thought. He briefly wished he'd thought to scavenge more potions from his fallen comrades, but in chaos of the fight, he'd barely had time to slip away as the enemy rolled over his squadron. Besides, drink too many of the potions at once, and you'd risk mutation.

He caught his breath, pushing himself off the tree. He grit his teeth as he gasped, his breath fogging the air. The pain was dulled, but not gone. Even without it, feeling the unnatural way his body tugged and pulled around the wound, that gut feeling of wrong made him shudder. Or was the cold making him shiver? Even if what was left of the armor was fending off the worst of the pain, it couldn't protect him from the deep chill.

Where was he even going? It's not like he was going to make it. His choices were to bleed to death or freeze to death. Which was worse? In either case, he'd probably pass out before he died. That would be nice. Maybe he'd have a nice dream before he went. Although he doubted it, given what he'd just been through.

Gods, what had the battle even been for? He didn't remember, hadn't really questioned it. Probably another land dispute. The growing number of sorcerers and wizards and warlocks staking claims to lands that they believed held precious magical treasures and fuel. The lives of the people, of soldiers like him, of the natural beasts of the Earth, all were expendable to secure the strength of their magical warlords. It hadn't been this bad before the Magic arrived, had it? He'd been a boy back then, working the farm with his family. He knew they'd worked for a noble who did what he could to keep his lands safe from his rivals. Back then, if their lord had gotten abusive enough, he and his family and their fellow peasants could have stormed his castle and put his head on a pike if things got bad enough. And thus, the noble had treated them well. Even if he had a small army of guards, the risk of an uprising kept him in line.

Not so with the wizards who had claimed the nobles' lands. Their magic made them untouchable, except against one another. They sat in their towers, pondering their trinkets and scrolls and consorting with their demons and angels, and shuffled their peasants around like pieces in a game.

He stumbled again, landing hard on his knees, breaking off another piece of his armor, and causing his cracked helmet to tumble into a pit of snow. The ground was uneven here, and the snowfall obscured his way forward. The helmet fell into a patch deep enough to swallow it.

And that was the last of his protections. The armor had broken in too many places. The protective spells faltered, and new pain lanced through him. He gave a ragged scream as his vision swam, the clash of fiery agony from his wounds, and the piercing cold of the air and snow clashing in his body. He tried to force himself to his feet, but he slipped and fell over instead, his open gash landing on a patch of snow that had covered a rock. He tried to scream again, but he had no breath. His vision went white, then grey, and he realized this was it.

He was going to die. Alone. Frozen. His blood coating the land to draw the beasts of the forest out to pick his body apart. He hoped he'd be gone before the first hungry thing started gnawing. He gazed at the grey sky, seeing it dimming. He'd lost track of time, and hadn't even noticed twilight was approaching. He looked at the stars. He remembered when they had just been little white points of light, numerous, but distant enough to be distinct. Now the sky was a riot of multi-colored stars and lightning and auroras, casting the night in a head-spinning clash of iridescent visions.

A final kick in the gut. Magic had even taken the sky from him. In his final moments, he couldn't even see one last, normal thing to center himself. Perhaps it was a blessing, though. It was said if one stared at the night sky for too long, they would go insane, even turn into a monster. The pain he felt was enormous now, blotting out all reasonable thought. Why not simply hasten the process? Perhaps insanity would be its own relief...

Except, as he stared, he noticed part of the sky seemed suddenly obscured. Two particularly bright stars of exceptional size seemed to stare right back at him. He blinked and squinted, and his blurring vision refocused...

Those were not stars. That was not a cloud overhead. That was...

He tried to jerk away, his self-preservation instinct kicking in even at the very last. There was a person now standing over him, long white hair draped to partly mask their face as they leaned over him. Through the curtain of hair, however, he could see the person's eyes, glowing a piercing blue. He tried to move, and he only shuddered. The cold had seized his body, his injuries denied him leverage. He lay there, nearly paralyzed, as the humanoid thing leaned closer. The hair touched his face, and in the light of the mystic sky, he could make out feminine features.

Oh no. Oh gods. This was why you didn't go out at night. This was why you never went into the forest unprotected. This was why humanity was forced to hide behind magically sealed walls. Nevermind the monsters the wizards summoned to fight for them, the entire natural world had been subsumed by the supernatural.

He didn't know what she was, but he was now at her mercy. What would she do to him? Eat him? Experiment on him? Suck out his soul? He would have rather been eaten by bears or wolves. She leaned closer. Could he will himself to die before she got the chance to do anything to him? Could he will himself to...

Her lips touched his. The kiss was surprisingly tender. Although her skin felt only slightly cooler than the air, a chill surged through his body that he could not describe. He could feel every inch of his body crystallizing. The cold was so fast, so intense, his nerves didn't have time to register the pain before they were iced through. He was now nothing more than a statue of frozen flesh. The pain was gone. He felt the cold, in all its intensity, and yet it didn't bother him. He couldn't move, not even to blink, not even to breathe, and yet he felt no need to do either.

Why wasn't he dead? Why was he still conscious? What was happening to him? Had she trapped his soul in his frozen body? Was he doomed to lay here, in the snow, in the dirt, gazing at the sky until someone or something shattered his frozen form? What was--

She was moving over him now. He saw that she was naked, her body as white as the snow. Her equally white hair was tinged with streaks of silver, the light of the sky glinting off the strands. Her eyes held the only color in her form, still glowing bright blue. With the pain gone, able to do nothing but stare, disoriented from his sudden frozen state, he felt strangely calm, almost detached.

She repositioned herself so she was on her hands and knees over him, her head above his chest. She stared at him studiously for a moment, before bringing her hand up and lightly running her fingertips across the exposed parts of his chest. Despite feeling like he had been turned into a statue, he could feel her touch. Her skin felt cool, but very pleasantly so. As cold as he already was, her touch surely would have felt like ice against his skin under normal circumstances, but now he found it rather pleasing. Her hand drifted lower, past the hideous wound, tracing the jagged edges of his broken armor.

She placed her palm against the chest plate. A dull blue glow appeared over the metal plates and leather straps, followed by a crackling sound. The pleasant chill washed over him where all the parts of his armor remained. Then, the woman leaned back, and started pulling the armor off, breaking pieces of it away like chunks from a sheet of ice.

Soon he was naked, and her bare, cool skin was touching his. He could move his eyes, albeit sluggishly, but still could not tilt his head to see what she was doing. He couldn't see past his nose to look at his own body, or the rest of her below her torso. From what he could see of her, unabashedly bared to him, her body was a perfectly cut model of human beauty. Skin free of blemish, hair a little disheveled, but clean and free of tangles. With her snow-white skin and the pretty way in which her eyes glowed, he found himself thinking she could have been an angel.

Maybe she was. Maybe he'd lucked out, and his heroism on the battlefield had earned him the attention of a gorgeous savior. He would have laughed ruefully if he could. He knew that was a fantasy, even in a world of magic. Even now, as her felt her hands drift down to trace his wounds, particularly the gaping hole in his side, he winced, and prepared for the far more likely outcome that she was going to bury her face in the wound and start chewing.

She leaned down. If he had been breathing, he would have held it. If he could have closed his eyes, he would have. He felt the urge to shudder as he felt her tongue lick along the wound, very gently lapping at the edges. She leaned back up, and a splash of red stained her lips. She slowly licked them clean, gazing at him studiously again.

Then she reached out to the side and put her arm in the snow. They were in a knee-deep bowl, pressed into the snowfall when he'd hit the ground, and she was able to scoop a large pile of it against him. She started pushing it up against his wound, packing the hole with snow. That did not feel pleasant, not at all, but the pain was still surprisingly absent. The chill was sharper, but it was mostly the inhuman sensation of the invasive pushing and pulling in a place not meant to shoved and filled that way. But after several minutes tightly pressing and packing the snow against him, she pressed her palm to the covered wound, and the blue glow suffused his torso. When she pulled away, he felt strangely whole.

He had other wounds. She crawled around his body, filling them with snow, using her magic to do something that was fixing him. He still couldn't move to see, but the more she worked, the better he felt. There was still that unnatural chill, but it felt strangely good now. He felt good. His head was clearing. Even when he looked directly at the maddening, iridescent sky, his thoughts felt calmer. He figured he should still be panicking. Why was he--

A terrible realization struck him. He knew with a sudden certainty that she was not just healing him. She was doing something else. He hadn't been breathing this entire time. He hadn't been blinking, despite the chill air against his eyes. He was so cold, deathly cold, and her touch was even colder, but it felt good.

He tried to struggle. He strained with every ounce of willpower he had left. Even though he felt increasingly rejuvenated, he couldn't move a muscle. He was completely paralyzed, still at her mercy. He couldn't stop her, no matter how hard he tried to make himself move.

Eventually, she finished patching him up. She took a moment to admire her handiwork, roaming her eyes over his body until they settled on his middle. She kneeled downed and leaned forward to inspect his most vulnerable area. He felt an internal shiver as her hand clasped him between his legs. It seemed there was one more part of him besides his eyes that could move.

The cold should have made him shrivel, but instead, her touch made him swell. Her chill fingers excited his organ, now unexpectedly sensitive. She looked him in the eye and smiled softly, then shifted to straddle him, giving him a fuller view of her body. She was human-shaped all the way down. Part of him was terrified, but that part was more subdued than he felt it should have been. Seeing her without pain or overwhelming fear, she was one of the most beautiful women he'd ever seen. Had she been human, if she'd even just had a normal human skin-tone, he might have been fully stunned at first sight, even through the pain.

But she wasn't human. And she had done something to him. And she was moving now, stroking him to force him to rise, making his body betray his reason. He could not have stopped her anyway, could not be blamed for reacting to such a beauty, but he knew this was wrong, he knew this thing on top of him was a creature, a mystical monster, not a human. She had saved him, but to what end? Surely not just to fuck him. Maybe she was just curious, and was toying with him now, but when she was done playing, what was she going to do?

She would eat him. She would skin him alive and use his flesh for leather. She would use his guts to mix potions to poison other travelers, or feed her fellow creatures. She would...

She took him inside. She was cold. So delightfully, wonderfully, deliciously cold inside. His organ swelled and stiffened like a spear of ice inside her, and she moaned with delight. She moved atop him, using his manhood like a pleasure toy. She took her time to work herself up, moving at a steady rhythm, gripping his chest as she gazed into his eyes with loving affection. Her breasts swayed prettily as she bounced on his rod, cooing sweetly, until she threw her head back, digging her fingers into his chest, and howled her passion into the night. She bucked and shivered and gasped through a powerful climax.

Meanwhile, he could only sit there and be used. The pleasure was unreal. He'd only been with a few women in his time, mostly prostitutes at that, and had never found the act particularly amazing. Something to do to get his head clear for a while. But this was a whole other world of sensations. His cock felt so sensitive, so responsive to her every motion, every rock of her hips sending a searing pleasure through him. He had never had trouble lasting in bed before, but in just under a minute, he could take no more. He felt he should be cumming.

But he didn't. She kept riding him, slowly building speed as she worked herself to her own climax, but the whole time, he stayed hovering at the edge of release. It was as if his orgasm was frozen too, and as she paced herself to experience her own pleasure exactly how she wished, he was trapped at the maddening edge, unable to go over. She took several minutes to reach her first orgasm, and he lay in sensual anguish the entire time, and he prayed she would stop when her climax was finished.

But one wasn't enough. After only a moment to collect herself, she moved on him again, taking several more minutes to reach another powerful climax. Then she lifted off him, and for a moment, the winter air felt soothingly warm against his frozen cock; then she mounted him again, this time facing the other direction, angling his cock to fill her in an even more pleasing way. She leaned back, clutching his sides and covering his view with her long, wild hair, as she rocked her hips eagerly up and down.

Once, twice, thrice, she experienced more wonderful orgasms, crying musically into the sky over the course of another hour. He remained stuck on the edge, losing his mind, the pleasure without release more maddening than the mystical night could have ever been! Was this how this monster consumed her victims? Did she feed on his sexual suffering? Was this a ritual to crush his soul, or would she leave him here, a broken statue in the woods?

She switched back to face him, and kept going. She was insatiable! She was going to use him until he went mad and died from the pressure! He need to cum so badly! He needed to cum more than he needed to live! Her ultimate bliss was his ultimate torment! And yet, as she faced him again, he looked into her beautiful eyes. They were glowing brighter than ever, and he found a refuge in the madness. A cool oasis in her supernatural gaze that held the worst of the need at bay.

He stayed denied as she worked herself slowly on him, building herself up to another, powerful climax. The pressure in his body was enormous, soul crushing, but the longer he looked into her glowing eyes, the less he cared about his own needs. He wanted her to use him. She had saved him, hadn't she? He owed her his life. He was hers to use and destroy, or toss aside when finished, or lock away to use again at her leisure. Whatever she wanted. He had no life to return to now, not after his army had lost, not after he'd wandered into the wilderness where the monsters were free to take him.

She'd taken him. He was her toy now, her meal, whatever she wanted. He lived only to please her. He wanted to cum more than he wanted to live, but even more did he want to serve her. He--

And then she came again, her whole body shuddering, and she screamed so loud, his ears hurt. Her body glowed with that soft blue light, and all around them, a wind suddenly whirled. Snow was sucked up into the gale, a miniature flurry blotting out the world, rising higher as her climax reached its crescendo!

Then, he felt something inside him shift. And then he was joining her in climax. His mind froze over as his cock filled her with his seed, the pleasing chill around them dropping as a thin layer of ice formed over their bodies. The two locked up in a joint spasm of release, both quivering in place, as their bodies experienced a surge of pleasure that no human mind could have possibly comprehended! The small maelstrom of snow and sleet tore at the woods around them as the moment stretched on and on, and his world faded into pure white...

And the next thing he knew, daylight was coaxing him to blink awake. He gasped and sat up with a sudden jolt. He looked around wildly, his mind still caught up in the ineffable experience of supernatural euphoria.

But it was over.

He was alone once more. Naked. Half-buried in snow. The woman was gone. His broken armor and sword were nowhere to be found. He looked down at himself, seeing his body was whole, his skin unblemished, and white as the surrounding snow. He sat and stared at himself for a long time. He thought he should have felt angry, or disgusted, or violated, but instead, he felt only a strange calm.