Deviant Mage Pt. 01

She gave her legs a token brushing and pulled her stockings on over the dense flecks of drying crap clinging to her leg hair. The smell of her feet mixed with the smell of shit, creating a heady mix that she couldn't help but to stop just to savour. Then she tried to clean her dress and knickers with aid of her shit-powers. She discovered that she could not, despite all the control she had over crap, make it dry more quickly. But she could harden it into a brittle solid while it was still technically wet, and that crumbled away as dust when she worked at the cloth. The residue that was left, she wetted from her water-skin and worked at some more. The stains, once she was done, were barely visible.

Then there was her hair, into which she'd specifically mashed two good-sized handfuls of crap. The ideal thing to do would be to use the same trick she'd used on her clothes in order to crumble the crap out. But she didn't want to, and saw an alternative. She started to do her hair in a complex braid. She deliberately messed up the pattern a few times, to keep the shitty clumpy parts of her hair on the inside of the braid. The only places she needed to pick the crap out of were near her forehead, where it was impossible to hide the crusty brown streaks in her black hair.

So far, so good. She pulled her dress, and her stained yet now poo-free knickers (which felt slightly damp) on, and her smell contained only broad hints of shit rather than an overwhelming reek. That was fine, those hints would fade a little as the shit kept drying out. She wasn't going to suppress her deviant nature anymore; she'd already made that decision, it hadn't changed. She was just going to be discrete about it for another day, at most.

Her efforts to be discrete just had to actually work, this time.

Next, she found a pile of stones nearby, and set about pulling rocks out of the pile. Then she stuck her knapsack into that hollow in the pile, and carefully buried it again. She marked the location with a thick ring drawn in crap, which, with her shit-sense, she could see through the rocks like they weren't there. It was more than a little bit surreal to see that ring of smeared crap seemingly shining right through solid stone. To see all the shit-smears she'd left, and the poop-dust scattered around from her cleanup, as an overlay on her mundane vision with different (brighter) lighting. An image she could see perfectly, minus the rest of the world, when she closed her eyes.

She could see how her entire body was still, despite her cleanup, filmed lightly with a residue that she could just barely see with her shit-sense. That, among other things, made her feel giddy enough to tremble.

She steadily crept down to the hillside, glancing out occasionally from her concealment to see what was happening at the castle. The drama with the horse had presumably ended, because the guards were all back at their posts, staring boredly out across the plateau.

She'd had an idea for how to get back into the castle. She didn't like it very much, because it was a gamble, but it at least had a chance of working. It relied both on luck on her ability to convincingly lie. It was a risk whose reward was enough to justify it, and if it failed... well, she had a decent idea of what she might do then, but it would be... messy. Not in the fun way. Hopefully she wouldn't have to resort to it.

A switchback road zigzagged its way down the hillside from up here on Hethaltie's Plateau to the upper gate of Upper Lanovul. Well away from that road, she skulked her way down the hillside, a precarious but not unmanageable route, hidden by boulders, shrubs and sickly trees. Unseen, she descended to the walls of Upper Lanovul. The only people patrolling these walls were the Lanomen, only something like two of them were ever on patrol, and the only thing they ever watched for were things within the walls. No one noticed as she approached the town wall. She circled the wall to the gatehouse, but didn't enter Upper Lanovul. Instead, she started her way back up the road.

She knew that the guards up on Castle Lan's walls would see her coming up this way. They were supposed to. It took some time, her legs burnt from the effort of the climb, and between that and the still-shining sun, she got hot and sweaty under her cloak. She stank of utterly unwashed sweat and body odor with a significant trace of crap. She was reasonably sure that the smell of horse dung from the stables would obscure her own fecal stench once she got up to the castle (and so, of course, she worried about it during the whole ascent). She made her way back up to Hethaltie's Plateau, and went straight for the castle gates.

"Open up!" she called, dropping her hood, once she'd reached the gates and had caught her breath.

"Lyran?" called down one of the guards.

"Sure is!"

"What is your- er..."

With Lyran in perpetual disgrace as she was, and with no resources or powerful friends to speak of, she had basically nothing in the way of authority. But she was still a Lanovin, and when the Lanovins wanted the gates opened, the gates were opened. There was probably a debate raging up in the gatehouse as to whether she could just ask to let herself be let in, and possibly why she was out in the first place.

After a few minutes, the gates were unbarred for her, and the portcullis raised. And when she crossed into the courtyard, she saw Sirgil Lanovin standing there, arms folded, looking grumpy. Apparently, the guards had summoned him, due to the irregularity of Lyran arriving. Sirgil, not Dovian. She could work with this.

"Greetings, dear Father."

"What were you doing in Lanovul?" he demanded, though his voice was fairly low. Besides the guards, there was no one else present. The guards were watching, but were too far away to hear.

"The answer to that question does not concern you" she said, which was the stock answer every Lanovin gave when they were up to something nefarious.

"It very much concerns me, daughter. How did you even get out?"

"I'm the family's black sheep, I have my ways" She grinned. And then her grin soured. "Probably not the best ways, honestly. Would love to know how you get in and out unseen so often. I only figured out the 'out'."

Sirgil narrowed his eyes. "Answer me, daughter, and do not attempt to evade the question. What were you doing down there?"

"Are you going to hurt me if I don't tell you?" she asked in a low, dangerous voice. Sirgil winced slightly. "It concerns Mum's plan for me. I trust you are familiar with it? Well, I am going along with her scheme, but I have concerns. I was down in Lanovul addressing some of those concerns. That is more than you need to know." Her words, though softly spoken, had a tone hard as iron.

A look passed over Sirgil's face. A calculating one that might, just might, have had hints of approval. But it disappeared as quickly as it had appeared.

"It is good that you told me that" he said softly. "Try to be more discrete in the future."

"I understand."

Sirgil headed back to the keep, and Lyran followed him. Then they went their separate ways.

As soon as she knew for sure she was alone, her face broke out into a grin. She'd actually managed to deceive her way back into the castle. And now Sirgil thought that Dovian's scheme might be due for some complications (who knew what he'd conclude from her vague implications?), and he was probably trying to figure out how he could use that knowledge to his own ends, so he certainly wasn't about to tell Dovian that something was up.

There were occasionally benefits to how her family members passive-aggressively schemed against themselves constantly.

Lyran's grin vanished as she imagined what would have happened if Dovian had been the one to answer, not Sirgil. It wouldn't have gone well. She knew of many relatives who had ended up ruined thanks to taking 'calculated risks'.

Time to make the most of her luck.

She sat in a privy closet, and emptied the load of crap she'd been carrying around up her cunt, not into the chamber pot but instead into her hand, pushing it out with her vaginal muscles. It had an oddly triangular cross-section, and it had picked up a distinct unwashed pussy smell in addition to its fecal reek. With pleasure, she breathed in the smell, and the smell of her unwashed crotch (the crap saturating her pubic hair was mostly dry now) that filled the confined space.

She would have been quite content to leave the thing up her cunt- it had felt so wonderful inside her, grainy and knobby and faintly tingly, a constant reminder of her true nature, finally embraced. But it was the only fresh shit she had, and she needed to experiment with her newfound power while she could.

It was unfair to say that she hated every single one of her family- many of them were merely incredibly annoying- but as a whole, they could all rot. She already had a pretty good idea of how she was going to get back at the lot of them, humiliating them before their soon-to-arrive guests while simultaneously throwing her true nature defiantly in their faces with them unable to do shit about it. But there were two people, besides Dovian (and the main revenge plot was primarily directed at her) who had particularly pissed Lyran off over the years, and who she felt needed to pay specifically. But before she could even plan how to get back at them, she needed a better idea of what she was actually capable of.

She just hoped that she discovered some useful shit quickly. Now that the castle was full of people, there was only so long she could spend in here before people got suspicious of why this privy closet had been occupied for so long. Some people were bound to have long memories about what that could potentially mean.

Staring at the modest-sized lump of shit on her hand, it was easy to tell that her shit-sense activated, because the turd was suddenly lit by perfect shadowless light despite the closet's gloom. She could see the smears of dry shit that still clung to her body, through her clothes. Interestingly, though, as she continued to give the crap her full, focused attention, the supernatural image changed. The crap, previously brown even to her second sight, was itself suddenly overlaid with a splotchy technicolour. She then saw that her whole body was filmed in this technicolour smear, particularly brightly around her various shit-smears. She blinked, the technicolour splotching went away, and the only thing she saw supernaturally was crap.

Interesting, but probably a mystery for later.

Concentrating again on the lump of shit (which sometimes fuzzed with that technicolour when she focused particularly intensely on it), she tried to project the concept of 'hardness' upon the crap. She felt the crap abruptly solidify, like it had frozen solid. Wanting it to become soft made it soft- so soft that it nearly melted out of her hand before she retracted the command. She could make it hard and brittle, its consistency reminding her of rotten wood. She could command it to be fairly flexible and cohesive; like rather bad leather. Most usefully, she could make it so sticky that she was unable to pull her hands apart.

While she was experimenting with the supernatural attributes she could assign to her poop, she discovered something else she could do. She had given the poo in her hand the consistency of potter's clay, and was sculpting it with the fingers of her opposite hand. She had a pretty good idea of what she wanted to sculpt, and the idea that she might form a sculpture that she could then instantly solidify seemed potentially useful. As she imagined what the thing she intended to sculpt might look like, though, the poop itself started to flow in an amorphous mass. She squeaked in alarm and withdrew her hand as the crap morphed into a perfect tetrahedron on her palm, exactly what she had been visualizing as she had started to sculpt.

Huh.

This prompted an entirely new round of frantic experimentation. If she imagined the crap taking a shape, then it would amorphously form itself into that shape. There was a sort-of feedback- she couldn't actually imagine a form that it was impossible for that volume to take while her shit-sense was active. She tried to imagine the crap moving and propelling itself, and that proved rather hard. The best she could do was make it walk around like an inchworm. What she absolutely could not do was force the crap to float in mid-air, no matter how hard she tried. She'd heard of telekinesis before, and apparently her shitty version of it (hah) couldn't do that.

She learned, as she messed around with this shit-telekinesis in the painfully short time she had, that the force with which the poop could morph itself was considerable. She made a squat cylinder of muck that stretched itself longer and thinner, and had it pressed between her palms. No matter how hard she resisted, the morphing crap could push her hands apart like they were nothing.

Mid-experiment, someone tried the door to the privy, startling Lyran. The man grumbled about the privy being occupied, and stalked off to find another one. Lyran, her shit-sense active, turned her attention in the man's direction, expecting to see the crap inside his bowels. Except she didn't. She could see that there was poo starting to form in her own gut, but she couldn't see anything of that person who had just left.

Another mystery that she just didn't have time to delve into.

She cleaned up, though the only mess she'd really made was on her hands. Despite only messing around for a few minutes, the crap had started to dry out. The dryer it got, the less well it had responded to her commands to change consistency, and the more sluggishly it had moved with her shit-telekinesis (coprokinesis?). Good to know. Also a little annoying; it seemed her powers were very limited. Hardly the sort of thing a wicked witch intent on revenge ought to have.

Well, she'd have to work with what she had. She exited the privy as though she'd been in there doing perfectly innocent things and not conducting actual witchcraft, disposed of the chamber pot, and went off to help some servants scrub at the grime on one of the castle walls, careful not to get too close to any of the servants lest they notice how shitty she now smelled. As she toiled mindlessly, she plotted.

The lunch that Lyran had never expected to have was fairly simple, since all the cooks had been too busy with other things to get fancy (by the time it was served, the crap covering Lyran's body had dried, and had only a faint smell, masked again by everyone else's unwashed smell and the scent of food).             

Lunch was a hearty stew with lots of tender braised beef, onions and sage, and naturally, a bunch of the Lanovins grumbled about having to eat 'peasant food'. Lyran mentally rolled her eyes at the complaints. It was weird how little a lot of her family understood of the people they ruled- it was like they'd deliberately avoided trying to learn anything about them at all. Lyran's understanding was better, she'd at least read about them. No one who qualified as a 'peasant' (low citizens or serfs) could possibly afford to eat meat with every meal like they did here.

She was doing her thing of pretending to be utterly focused on her food while trying to take in and process the various conversations happening around her (but also with the faint worry that someone might actually catch a whiff of the fecal element to her stink this time), when she smelled someone else's familiar stink, and realized that there was someone standing right behind her. She looked over her shoulder at her older brother, a large young man, twenty-five years old, with wide shoulders and a round chin. His name was Umtieone, and he was one of the people on Lyran's revenge-list.

Normally, she would have maintained a theater of politeness towards Umtieone. That was a mask she hoped never to have to wear again.

"What do you want?" she asked with a exasperated tone.

Umtieone frowned at Lyran's rudeness. "I hear Mum's finally decided to trust you with some responsibility."

"If by that, you mean she forced me into one of her schemes, then yes."

"Don't talk like that, Lyran. She wants the best for us."

Of course you'd think that.

"This is your chance to prove that you're better now." He sounded so genuinely fucking sincere. Lyran wanted to punch him in the nose.

"Get to the point of why you're here."

Umtieone's expression darkened further. "I was just coming to see if you needed... help with anything."

"Not any kind that you'd ever offer" Lyran snapped back.

Umtieone frowned. "Lyran! Smarten up!"

"Umtieone! Piss off!" She replied in exactly the same tone, making a shooing motion.

Their altercation had drawn the eyes of everyone at this end of the table. Lyran didn't currently care.

Umtieone stayed right where he was. "This attitude is unbecoming of you, Lyran! You're better than this" he said sternly.

"Yeah, I'm pretty great alright. And thanks to Dovian's plan, I've finally got a way out of this shit-hole. That means I don't have to pretend to like you anymore." She smirked. "What, did you assume I was being genuine this whole time?"

A snarl on Umtieone's lips, he grabbed Lyran's shoulder and forced her to meet his gaze. He stood over her. What Lyran wanted was to regard him with complete bored apathy. But she was nervous that he might smell the shit under her clothes with him being so close, and that showed on her face despite her efforts.

"If you have such a tongue on you when the Wandering Duke arrives, then I doubt his knight will find you... comely. And if you ruin Mother's plan, then I will undertake your discipline personally" he hissed. "Smarten. Up."

"What, you want in on Mum's fun, now? You know she's gonna hate that." Lyran hissed back.

A disgusted expression briefly crossed Umtieone's features, and Lyran felt grim triumph. "It is beneath Mother to sully herself from flaying your soiled hide" Umtieone growled, voice rigid as a file. Then he stormed away.

It didn't look like he'd smelled the fecal element to Lyran's stink. She let herself relax a little as she turned back to her food. She took in the whispers around her by habit (a lot of them were now about her) but didn't overly care about anything she heard. She was too busy imagining how she was going to make Umtions the Ass pay dearly.

Umtieone was the future Lord Protector of Lanovale. Whatever that meant. Mommy's little sycophant; praising Dovian perpetually and pointedly ignoring her awfulness ('flaws' was far too mild a word), always striving desperately for her approval and basking in whatever attention he was given. In the four years after Lyran's 'transgressions', Umtieone had seen it as his duty to 'set Lyran right', being foremost in the efforts to spy on her for any hint of regression, even acting as a would-be spymaster for the other kids who did the same. All of it, he insisted was because he wanted to be a good brother to his poor, damaged little sister.

Lyran was just about certain Umtieone's efforts had actually been part of a long scheme to bolster his image as being a 'knight in shining armour', all so that Dovian would deem him to be a good boy and dole out some actual authority despite him being her third-born child. Lyran wouldn't have given a shit about that, except she owed several... sessions with Dovian to Umtieone's efforts, and all of those supposed incidents had been pure fancy on his and the other spies' parts. Worse yet, his effort to impress Dovian had worked, and she'd been so pleased with the man that her son was pretending to be that she'd deemed him the future Lord Protector of Lanovale (an impressive title, whose actual meaning was highly ambiguous), and she'd bestowed upon him a prized Lanovin heirloom, the Butcher's Blade, a supposedly legendary sword that had once belonged to the Lanovins' warlord ancestors.