Deviant Mage Pt. 03 - Lower Lanovul

Disclaimer: This work contains extreme scat scenes, general mysophilac filth, exhibitionism, and corruption (sort-of). All characters in sexual situations are over eighteen years old. This chapter will include drug-use, non-sexual violence, and police brutality.

It felt like it was somewhere close to mid-day, but the sky was still dark. Lanovale's shit-witch was out on the road, cloak on. She had left her knapsack behind, buried in the heart of that manure pile (it would take hours for someone to dig it up unassisted.) but with her water-skin and various ratty stolen sacks tucked into her dagger belt. She wasn't sure what she was going to do with the rest of this Long Night yet but it seemed best to assume that some degree of filthy chaos was going to ensue.

The falling sleet was starting to turn to snow, and it was sticking to the ground now; the over-long night felt as cold as if mid-winter had descended upon Lanovale early.

(She'd read about what happened when a Long Night happened during actual mid-winter. It was just as well it didn't happen more than a couple times a century on average.)

She could feel the bitter chill through chinks in her armour of filth whenever a breeze came up, and that counted as barely more than an annoyance to her now. All the muck covering her skin and saturating her clothes and hair was generating just barely enough heat to feel, and that was all she needed to be comfortable.

As an amusing side-effect, there was a faint haze of mist rising from any of her filthy form that was exposed to the air. Most of her was covered by the relatively clean cloak, so there was mist wafting out from the gaps. The choking fecal reek that was her constant companion these days had that slight fishy-vegetable tinge to it now. She found herself occasionally lamenting that her body odor, despite everything she'd done to encourage it, was currently only a minor note to the incredible stench that visibly wafted from her filthy body, but that was a very minor lamentation.

The night was as dark as a demon's soul right now, but the filthy girl's germ-sense let her see every microbe that was within a pace and a half of her, including the ones in the muddy soil at her feet. She could, in a limited fashion, see in the dark. As usual, she used her shit-sense to track down piles of fresh dung on the road and sort-of flitted from one to the next, rather like a fly, and she idly took handfuls and did whatever the fuck she her whims directed when she found them. After all, why not?

She'd had a whole scheme for what to do today. There was a spot picked out, multiple escape routes planned, and she'd compiled a whole list of things that everyone else would consider utterly depraved to do, to be done before as many people as she could attract. (She generally didn't see the things she did as 'depraved', but she doubted many would agree with her arguments.) But then this Long Night had happened.

She eventually made her way to the place she'd had in mind, which was just an unassuming-looking wide spot along Lanovale's main road, in the forlorn hope that the Long Night might end by the time she made it there. No such luck. The sky over the dawnward mountains was still no paler than the rest of the pitch-black overcast night sky. She sat down on a nice flat-topped rock by the side of the road, which was covered in snow. She didn't bother to brush away the snow as she sat upon it. The snow around her developed a brown tinge in an expanding ring. She stared up at the featureless darkness above her, and sighed.

The filthy nameless girl, back when she had been Lyran, had actually researched weird supernatural phenomena, mostly out of boredom. Thanks to having Dovian for a mother, she was acquainted with how there were several Gods whose followers saw it as their duty to keep truly weird supernatural stuff (like her) out of the eye of the common man. Dovian insisted Hethaltie was one such God. Scholars only ever officially documented the bits and pieces such groups either failed to hide or didn't think was worth hiding. Long Nights and Days were pretty damn hard to hide (and it probably helped that the scholars didn't even need to leave their desks to observe them).

One particular theory that never quite seemed to die when it came to Long Nights and Days was that there was some sort of pattern to them. There was, but all it was was a bunch of probability bell-curves for the likelihood of any given occurrence within certain time-frames, and those tended to fluctuate from century to century. Most of a millennia of analysis had made it plain that there was no deeper pattern, but someone in every successive generation of scholar would invariably insist on challenging that assumption, only to eventually arrive at the same conclusion and in turn inspire the future generation of fools.

The filthy girl's takeaway was 'don't have any expectations'. This Long Night might end in five minutes, the sun just popping over the horizon to make up for lost time. It was entirely possible that it might last another week. (The last time a Long Night had lasted that long, people had started to legitimately think the world had ended, there'd been so much chaos that actual wars had started, and there was absolutely nothing preventing that from happening again.)

Whatever she did next, she needed to take the non-trivial possibility of an abrupt and inconvenient end to the darkness in mind, just in case. So, nothing too risky.

She glanced up towards the lights of Lower Lanovul, spread out over a relatively gentle hillside, then at the wall-enclosed terraces of Upper Lanovul. She tried not to spare Castle Lan any attention, though it was still uncommonly brightly lit.

She hadn't gone into town yet, and now seemed like one of the better times to try. She'd have cover of darkness, but it wouldn't be suspicious for people to be out and about, since it was technically day time. Furthermore, most of the town used the streets as its sewer system, so even her stench wouldn't be all that noticeable.

And she had also had an idea about something she could do in Lanovul. An idea that was so enticing that she couldn't get it out of her head, even though it was one of those terrible ideas.

She stood, and started heading towards town. No. No, she was not doing that. Come on. That was a level of both crazy and stupid that went too far, even after all the crazy and stupid shit she'd already done. It could end so badly. But... dammit, the pieces were all there! And the idea of doing it filled her with a weirdly jittery, lustful sort of anticipation. A feeling she remembered well from back when she had covertly played with shit in Castle Lan, and from just before she'd jumped into the privy before running away.

Oh, Gods. She was legitimately considering it.

She wanted to streak through the streets of Lower Lanovul, to do the foulest things she could think of, surrounded by full-on gawking crowds. And she wanted to do that in and near the most affluent part of Lower, where they used chamber pots instead of using the street as a dumping ground. She'd literally have more fresh shit to play with than she'd even know what to do with.

There were so many reasons why doing that was a terrible idea.

She wasn't very familiar with the town. The Long Night could end any minute. There was an actual presence of Lanomen in town, and private guards watched the affluent neighborhoods. If she did it, she would piss off a lot of people, and a lot of those people might feel motivated to help hunt her down, and she would have to try to either hide or escape. If hiding or escaping failed, then she'd have to fight her way out using magic, which would completely ruin her long game. And to top it all off, she'd established by now that she got too nervous in the middle of exhibitionistic stuff to actually get off from it, so it wouldn't even be worth all the trouble. She wasn't actually doing it, plain and simple.

All she was going to do in Lower Lanovul was a bit of exploring, to try to get a feel for the place. She'd been there before, but there had always been chaperons with her, ensuring that she was on her best behavior. Just how nice would it be to explore the place while free to do anything she wanted to do?

Not that she intended to misbehave too seriously! She was only pretending to be completely out of her mind!

Yep, she still couldn't stop herself from thinking about what she wasn't going to do as she walked ever-closer to the place where she absolutely wouldn't do those things.

She attempted to distract herself by focusing on her stink and how good it felt to be as wonderfully filthy as she was (especially since she was nice and warm), but that just deepened the horniness of her own thoughts. It felt like it had been a long time since she'd played with any human shit besides her own, and yeah, what she was considering was risky, but she'd pulled off risky stuff already. And it would pay off so fucking much if she got away with it. People would never stop talking about it...

No!

She stopped to masturbate on the side of the road as she made her way towards town, and in the clarity that followed her orgasm (an orgasm in which she couldn't stop fantasizing about doing the thing she absolutely wasn't going to do), she tried to think of something that wasn't trying to lead her down a path that could only end in disaster and wasn't even worth the risk. Like what she would actually do when she got into town. She knew there were several illegal drinking establishments hidden around, maybe she should try to find one and convince the proprietor to serve her her first ever beer! Yeah, that sounded like a more manageable sort of crazy; she should try to figure out how she might accomplish that!

***

She reached the duskward outskirts of town, which were some of the nicest parts of Lanovul, built on what had started as craggy sheep pastures but which had recently become a few neighborhoods of wealthy people's homes, most of them with extensive gardens that were walled-off and gated; practically fortresses to keep out the riff-raff. She had her shit-sense and germ-sense active to supplement her vision in the gloom, which also meant that she happened to see jars full of human waste sitting on a few porches. The labourers whose job it was to collect the 'nightsoil' wouldn't be picking up until the sun came up. There was so much lovely excrement there for the taking...

She made herself count her footsteps, and she forcibly kept her attention on the road.

What she considered to be the actual town of Lower Lanovul started abruptly, with people's walled-off gardens butting up against tightly-packed wooden buildings. All the buildings in Lower were made out of wood, there was a law specifically requiring it (and the reason for that law was kind of fucked). The second storey of just about every building protruded out over the road to gain a little extra floor space; many buildings were close enough that opposite neighbors might shake hands out their upper-storey windows, and a few even arched over the road. It made a lot of the streets feel more like tunnels.

Since it was technically day time, quite a lot of windows were lit and so cast a dim ambient light onto the road, and there was a decent amount of traffic. The area she had entered was a modestly affluent area, with nice woodwork and paint that was often barely flaky at all. Some shops were open. Most seemed content to wait out the Long Night. Maybe the ones that stayed open regardless were more desperate to make money.

The filthy girl had known that within the town, various household wastes were simply tossed out people's windows onto the street. The last time she'd been in Lower Lanovul had been during the summer, and she remembered these very streets being thick with refuse. She remembered the smell being practically a miasma, and remembered having to pretend to be disgusted by it while she fantasized about rolling in it.

What hadn't occurred to her until now was how the nigh-constant autumn rain, and the hillside the town was built upon and perhaps even some deliberate design of the streets, meant that the slops just got washed away at this time of year. It had been raining fairly hard until less than an hour ago, and there was some fecal refuse on the cobbles, which had mostly gotten churned into a nasty brown slush through the passage of people and carts, and that wound up being enough that the filthy girl could infer the layout of the streets around her, some of the time. It was a lot better than nothing, but it wasn't nearly what she had expected.              

Plus, thanks to a layer of snow and the Long Night's chill in general, the smell here wasn't the miasmic stench that she remembered it having been. And meanwhile, the effort of her walk and the heat from her new spell had made her sweaty and a lot of the shit that covered her had dried, which allowed her various body odors to establish themselves and meld- she was approaching the height of her stench right now. She smelled incredible, and she loved the idea of flaunting it, but she hadn't expected to be quite so obvious about it. People definitely noticed her, and she started to worry about what drawing too much attention to herself might lead to. She slunk off to some quieter streets.

Overall, she was annoyed, and felt like a bit of an idiot for making a fundamentally incorrect assumption and proceeding forward like it was bound to be fact. How very Lanovin of her. It didn't matter all that much in this case, but it felt like exactly the sort of fuck-up that could get her killed, or worse, if the stakes were higher.

If there was going to be an illegal drinking establishment in Lower Lanovul, then the worst part of town was probably the best place to start looking, and she had a pretty good idea of where that was. She started to make her way there.

The truly bad part of town was a collection of a few dozen especially ramshackle buildings crammed into about five jumbled blocks. It was a real sight by day, but hardly any of the windows here were lit, so the filthy girl only saw hints of how the buildings were mossy, rotten, sagging, and occasionally had gaping holes in them. This neighborhood happened to have been built on a relatively level spot on Lanovul's hillside, which meant that the filth from uphill tended to accumulate here.

Here was finally a place nasty enough that the shit-witch could see the streets all around her with shit-sense, though the buildings and even the hillside, like luminous brown ribbons suspended in an infinite black void. It was a surreal and strangely beautiful sight. And she could see other people skulking around in the gloom from the filth on their feet, and the depressions their feet made in the slushy muck. She could tell that about half of the people out right now were barefoot. That seemed like it would be highly unpleasant.

This place didn't just smell like crap. There was something about the smell here that brought misery and despair to mind, a note to its fecal and urinous reek that the shit-witch couldn't identify, but it pressed at her. She scraped up a handful of muck from one fetid, slush-covered puddle, sniffed it, shrugged, and smeared a handful of it onto her left forearm and worked another handful of it into her crusty hair, mostly as token gestures. There was a lot of grit in the street-muck, it wouldn't have felt nice anywhere sensitive. This was the part of Lanovul that she felt like she belonged in the most, but she found that she didn't overly like it here.

As she considered this place and its denizens and the lives they must lead, she happened to wander down an especially narrow and mucky road that wound between the backs of buildings. Did it count as an alleyway? Not paying much attention, she passed a person. She saw them vividly with her germ-sense; they were pretty dirty. She didn't think anything of it until that person dropped something metallic onto the ground, making a clattering sound. And a group of maybe five people, not far in front of her, suddenly dispersed. They'd been gathered in darkness, and she wouldn't have seen them without her shit-sense letting her keep track of their footprints as they fled down the filthy streets around her. All but one of them was wearing shoes.

The filthy girl turned back to the lookout, who still stood there. Annoyed, she went up to them.

"That wasn't necessary" she hissed.

"Dunno what you mean, lady. Just clumsy, is all." The voice was female, and wasn't a child's. Just someone who was short. "And holy fuck, you stink."

"Nice, isn't it?" the stinking girl casually responded, trying to convince herself that she'd just heard flattering praise instead of a weak attempt to insult her. "You heard of me yet?"

"Uh, no?"

"Well, damn."

"What do you want, Stinky?"

The filthy girl bristled at being called 'Stinky'. She didn't hate that word because because it was inappropriate, but because it sounded far, far too silly.

"Just sneakin' around. New to town, ya know? Gettin' a feel for the place. Plannin' on stayin' a while."

"I don't fuckin' care. That accent sounds fake as fuck, by the way."

"Oh. Does it? Son of a bitch." If she spoke in her normal accent, she was worried it would sound posh. She tried to hide it with a slight lisp and some nice vulgar profanity.

"Go bother someone else, Stinky. You're interruptin' important business."

Again, the filthy girl hated the word 'Stinky' as soon as it came from the other girl's lips. The idea that that was the name that might spread to the lips of everyone in Lanovale was... offensive! It made her angry to even consider that it might happen!

"Hey, don't call me 'Stinky'. Call me 'Stench'!" the filthy girl shot back. And then she carried on down the alleyway passed the lookout, towards where that disrupted meeting had taken place, with barely even a thought towards what had been there that she had interrupted. She found she had larger matters to ponder.

'Stench.' Her stench was one of the parts of her new identity that she most loved. Complex and ever-changing, yet always as foul as she could make it. And there was something about the word 'Stench'. It was a word that meant something powerful. A word that no one would have the slightest difficulty associating with her. And she liked the actual sound of it; it sounded punchy and vulgar and filthy.

Heh. You know? Why not?

Just as 'Lyran' had died and was now rotting in a cesspool, 'Stench' was born in a mucky alleyway in the worst part of Lower Lanovul.

Stench grinned wickedly, delighted by this development. Her new name had come from a chance conversation and pure impulse, and yet something about it felt like it had been inevitable, but in a good way. It felt like she had always been destined to become Stench! Another fundamental part of the new identity she was building for herself had slid into place, and she hadn't realized how incomplete she had felt until now; the void in her soul where her name had been, now filled with what she wanted to be called! She needed to think of a scheme where she let lots of people know her name, and she needed to do it soon!

In the wake of this moment of self-discovery, she almost forgot about the meeting that she'd accidentally interrupted. Almost. But, as she contentedly breathed in her own powerful smell- no, her stench!- that overwhelmed even the filthy alleyway, she also breathed in an odd herbal note to the cold, still air. It was something that didn't seem wholly unfamiliar, but she couldn't place where she'd smelled it before.