Deviant Mage Pt. 04 - Diueshet Mines

That person must have joined the Hands after she'd 'gone soft', which narrowed the number of people it could have been down. And she doubted that person was very smart. They probably hadn't covered their tracks well, if they'd even bothered at all.

The next day, while in the process of figuring out which prick among the Hands had told tales about her (which involved cashing in favours and threatening to stab people), she heard the news that Stench had gotten herself arrested, and had thrown herself into the River Lan while trying to flee.

To her surprise, Apega found her already bad mood compounded by a depressed, hopeless funk once she had concluded beyond doubt that yes, that had happened. There was no word of anyone finding Stench's body, but not a trace of her had been seen since. No one could survive the Lan's frigid rapids, and there was no way Stench could swim.

There had been a part of Apega that had wanted to strangle Stench herself, and was angry that the disgusting, infuriating, baffling degenerate had gotten herself killed before Apega had gotten the opportunity to try! But another part of Apega (the horny part of her) remembered Stench's bizarre declaration and had been looking forward to seeing her again. That perverted side of her dared to dream that all this- the humiliation, the freezing nights and hungry days and promise of bloody work to come- might just have the thinnest of silver linings, if she got to see that disgusting deviant again, and the lewd, filthy fantasies she now couldn't get out of her head might be realized before she inevitably met her end.

Now that would never happen.

So that was in that mood Apega was in, when she ambushed that loudmouth in the dead of night, stunned him with a cudgel, nailed his tongue to a fence-post that was near a Lanoman patrol route, and then left him pinned there with a piece of broken glass jammed in his pocket, to consider while concussed the various methods by which he might free himself.

No surprise; that prick, apparently just as dumb as she'd figured he was, was a tongueless mute the next day.

Deviant Mage, part 4: Diueshet Mines

The abandoned Diueshet Valley copper mine was a three-hour hike away from Lanovale, uphill nearly the whole way. Snow from the Long Night lingered on the ground there, soaking up the rain but not appreciably melting, and a constant chill wind howled. Hiding out up here among the ruins likely would have been a miserable experience to anyone else.

After about a week spent up there, Stench was mostly just starting to get bored.

She'd explored, and had found little worth exploring. Diueshet Valley was almost totally barren, and was little more than a craggy, gravelly crack that had been eroded between two mountains, one of which just happened to have once had a vein of okay-quality copper ore under it. Poking around the ruins of the copper mine's various works had been interesting for exactly a day, and if there was anything else of note to be found, then it was well-hidden.

The narrow valley was cut through with a stream that had once been dammed, but the dam had long ago crumbled. There were fifteen ruined buildings scattered about, a shit-ton of big piles of mine-tailings that not even the hardiest weeds dared grow on (the rainwater runoff from those piles was greenish), and five mine tunnels bored into the mountainside. All five of them had caved in. Stench, who had... issues with underground spaces, wasn't overly heartbroken to discover that. A few of the ruins were intact enough that they provided some overhead shelter, and Stench had made her camp under an old and mossy, but still solid (she'd checked), set of stone stairs. Her camp consisted of little more than a fire pit. She didn't need anything else, with her warmth-germs to offset the cold. Even the fire was only for cooking.

Thanks to Stench being present within it for an extended period of time, the inside of that ruin had steadily acquired various shit-smears and filthy hand-prints and the occasional not to herself, until nearly every surface was to some extent befouled by smelly brown-black dirt, patches of which were going moldy.

It was peaceful up here in Diueshet Valley, which was the idea. After the week she'd had before, Stench was happy to have dirty fun in peace. But the peace wouldn't last forever. She only had so much food, and had to return sometime.

Stench was sometimes entirely too good at not thinking about inconvenient little facts like that.

A lot of what she kept herself occupied by during her time hiding up in Diueshet Valley was experimenting with her powers.

Back when she'd been dangling under that bridge, further disaster one errant breeze away and horribly aware of that fact, Stench's shit-sense had activated by accident, and she'd seen something with it that she absolutely hadn't been able to see before- the air tainted with her stink, trailing well-away from the noses of her pursuers. It had been like the answer to the prayer that she had utterly refused to make.

Since coming up here, she'd worked out more or less what had happened back there. There had been times when she had accidentally activated her shit-sense in the process of daydreaming about crap, and the same thing could now happen if she thought particularly intensely about her smell.

Her shit-sense now let her see her own shitty stink as it tainted the air. She quickly learned that she could telekinetically control the direction her stink wafted, if there wasn't a breeze. She could only control the smell coming from her filthy body and her own crap. She had found some fairly fresh deer shit in the woods, and determined that she could neither see nor control the smell coming from it (and she'd also messed around with the dung, of course. The little balls of deer crap could be made bouncy, of all things).

More than anything else, Stench was confused. This was new. She absolutely hadn't had the ability to see, yet alone control, her smell until she'd been dangling, in pain, under a bridge while terrified those Lanomen would smell her. She would have noticed it before, she used her shit-sense all the damn time. So why the fuck had it changed, and why had it opted to change then?

She had suspicions about the first, but was nothing but mystified about the second.

This wasn't the first time her powers had grown. She'd started out with her ability to control germs- that was how she'd cured that serf-boy when she was little. That had somehow grown into the ability to control shit, but only after she'd learned of her shit-loving deviant nature and had acted upon it shamelessly for around half of a year.

And now, she could control her smell. Why? If she had to guess, it was because of how much she utterly and deliberately reeked now, and her powers had grown to reflect her identity, just like they'd done after she'd discovered her shit-loving nature. But that was just a guess. And then there was the mystery of why that particular moment had been when the change had occurred, which she had no answers at all for.

Gods, she wished there was someone around she could actually ask about this kind of stuff!

Less confusingly, she had found that one of the germs she'd collected could be commanded to eat away at organic matter much more quickly than just giving it the 'more' command (and of course she was discovering this now, rather than back when it would have actually been helpful to be able to do that). It was a mold, she was pretty sure she'd picked it up from one of the compost heaps she'd messed around in. Her warm body was not a very good place for it to live, but it had clung to life in the fringes of her shitty hair, and with some encouragement and by reducing the quantity of warmth-germs in her hair, it now thrived. Her crusty, clumpy, brown-black locks were now streaked with fuzzy white, particularly around the tips. It didn't eat away at her actual hair unless she specifically told it to, but she had to forbid it (she could maintain that passively, thank fuck) from eating away at her rags, bag and belt.

Naturally, she only discovered how voracious this disintegration-mold was after it had eaten away at a bunch of her left dress sleeve during a moment's inattention. Though it was kind-of impressive to watch as it reduced an entire tree stump to powder in about thirty seconds.

(She did not want to know what it would do if she set it loose on an animal or person...)

So that was two supernatural germs that she'd found, despite having spent days mentally screaming any command she could think of at the thousands of varieties of microbes that lived in the filth on her body and the dirt at her feet, in the hopes that something would respond. It seemed her initial theory, that every germ had supernatural potential, was wrong. Special ones seemed to be scattered randomly about the world, and she'd just been lucky in finding the warmth-germ. She supposed that meant she needed to actively hunt for more. Fine by her, but Diueshet Valley clearly wasn't the place to hunt.

Of course, the other thing that she occupied herself with as she hid up in Diueshet Valley (the name came from one of her ancestors' allies, back when the Lanovins been warlords. Stench wondered if immortalizing that name had actually been some sort of mockery) was smoking her witch-hemp, and it became very easy to keep herself amused once she was high. After all the trouble she'd gotten into the last time she'd smoked weed, she was a little hesitant to smoke it again, but there was very little trouble to get into up here. She rolled her first joint on her third day in hiding, using a piece of a page from her journal as the paper. It was sloppy, it tasted like burning paper as much as it did weed, but it worked.

And once she got high off that first poorly-made joint, she decided to just keep smoking them whenever the fuck she wanted, and spent most of the next two days floating around the valley in a perpetual haze, cheerfully going along with whatever filthy and/or lewd impulses she had, and she had lots. So many, in fact, that she kept distracting herself. She still fiddled with her powers, and there was also a scheme she was working at, but she rarely stayed on-task for long.

She felt, after two days with only her own shit (and exactly that one pile of deer crap) to mess around with, that she wasn't nearly dirty enough. Since she'd lost her cloak, she'd had to stay under cover as much as possible, lest the persistent rain risk washing her clean, and even then, the poo that she delighted in smearing all over herself inevitably dried and flaked away, and she didn't feel like she had nearly enough of it. Her urine was plentiful enough, and she gave herself a golden dousing every time she pissed (she liked to sit with her shoulders up against a wall, ass in the air, and piss herself so it all trickled down her torso, all so her crusty rags, hair and grime could soak up as much as possible) but despite how that made her reek amazingly of stale piss, it just wasn't dirty enough for her.

After three days, there were large patches of her skin that were barely grimy anymore. It was... difficult to describe how she felt about that. Incomplete, maybe. She saw the filth on her skin as a fundamental and treasured part of herself, and seeing it grow thin and patchy like this made her feel exposed. Except she'd been naked and exposed before a gawking and jeering crowd of strangers and she'd loved that sort of exposure, but didn't like this.

Being a filth-loving sexual deviant was weird...

While high, she had the idea that she ought to bulk out her supply of shit with mud, and that required that she go find some mud.

There was a slightly marshy area just outside of Diueshet Valley, with a couple good patches where her feet sank down into nearly black, cold, slick mud that smelled of wet earth and rotting vegetation. She churned up a her-sized patch of the muck with her feet, and then crapped into the smelly ooze and worked her excrement into the ankle-deep black goop. And then she flopped down into the shitty mud, and proceeded to cover herself in slick, sticky, stinky muck; the chill of the cold clay offset by the heat her warmth-germs made. After getting her ragged dress properly filthy, she stripped it off, kicked her shoes off, letting the stink of her sweaty, crusty stockings waft free for a moment, before smothering them in the relatively scentless mud. Once it dried, the stink of her feet would be back with a vengeance.

In just her knickers and stockings, she rolled contentedly in the smelly, shitty mud, enjoying the feeling of the slick ooze. She filled her knickers up with the sludge, and then sank her hands into the muck to pleasure herself. Filled her pussy up with cool, slick mud. Covered herself completely in the black goop, but also made an effort not to displace too much of the crusty shit already upon her.

She brought herself to orgasm with every part of her body coated in smelly black ooze. She ran her hands over her slick tummy, breasts, ass, encouraging the flaky dry crap on her skin to mix with the mud. Stroked slick fingers over muddy lips. Sadly, in her enthusiasm, she'd probably stripped most of the crust of shit on her skin away, replacing it with this filth that, though very nice, was lesser to all the filth she had enjoyed so much back in Lanovale. She emerged from the swamp as filthy as she'd ever been and relishing the various sensations, but she lamented that she was barely stinky at all. Though, as the mud dried, her stench grew potent once more.

Day by day, she kept returning to that mud pit, and the pit stank more and more each time she returned. Rolling in the stinking mud, piling fresh filth on top of the flaky, powdery, muddy crust of dry clay and shit upon her flesh, there was no question that the swamp was being befouled by her. After a few days, it was almost as good as rolling in manure. But still not quite.

After most of a week, where doing stuff like that was the most excitement she could hope for, Stench was really starting to miss Lanovale for its plentiful supply of excrement of all kinds. And there were... parts of her that bemoaned her currently uneventful existence and missed the excitement. Parts of her. Probably the craziest parts. The somewhat saner parts of her dreaded her eventual, inevitable return to civilization, and the dangerous chaos that was certain to ensue when she did. Her little holiday up here was merely a break in her plans, and she needed to get back to them. And she was getting down the last third of her food. She'd have to leave any day now.

But she didn't want to go yet.

One more day...

***

Just before mid-day on the second 'one more day', six days after Stench had started hiding in the Diueshet Valley ruins, a bunch of people showed up.

Stench immediately assumed that they were a hunting party out for her filthy hide. She did, however, have an escape plan.

She was in the process of grabbing her stuff in preparation for a hasty flight when she noticed that none of the interlopers were anything resembling huntsmen. Just ordinary-looking, reasonably well-off citizens. They had stopped a ways down the valley. They had a train of donkeys with them, and those donkeys were all carrying wooden liquor casks.

It could be a trick, but if it was, then it was a pretty weird and rather pointless ruse. She paused in her preparations to flee, and opted instead to watch the interlopers. It was a clear, cold day. Her camp (such as it was) was a quarter-mile away from where they'd stopped and had a height advantage, so she saw them, but they almost certainly didn't see her. The wind had been blowing the wrong way for them to catch a whiff of her, and Stench directed her stink straight upwards, to the limit of her range, so they wouldn't possibly be able to smell her even if the wind changed. Very convenient to be able to do that now, but it still infuriated her a little whenever she had to hide her smell from people.

It was a bit of good luck that Stench hadn't had her cook fire lit, or else they probably would have noticed the smoke. There were plenty of other signs that Stench had been hiding up here for a week, but the newcomers clearly weren't interested in poking around. As it was, they looked to have no idea she was here.

The interlopers busily unpacked their donkeys, and set up a bunch of folding tables outside of one of the mine tunnels. One that Stench knew full-well had collapsed a dozen or so paces in. But then the people started to file down into the mine shaft, leaving only a few behind on the surface, who kept working; laying out various tools and pouring measures of liquid from the full casks into the empty ones. All the people going down into that supposedly-collapsed mine shaft had, in addition to miner's lanterns on their heads, what Stench recognized as mushroom-picker's baskets on their backs, well-worn but in good repair. The first one had been carrying something fairly large under his arm that Stench hadn't gotten a good enough look at to identify.

These people were with the mushroom-picker's guild, weren't they?

Not long after the first person descended down into the mine shaft, one of them emerged, their basket full of large white mushrooms with glossy dark yellow gills. They almost looked like they were made of carved white marble and gold. And then back down the mushroom-picker went, while a few people on the surface unceremoniously chopped the beautiful mushrooms up into tiny pieces and dumped them into the casks. And then more and more of the pickers emerged, and did the same.

Stench watched all that happen while trying to avoid drawing attention to herself, which wasn't difficult to do, as those people had all seemed pretty focused on... whatever it was they were doing. As entertainment went, it was pretty lackluster, but boredom was preferable to any excitement that might come from getting caught.

That said, with literally nothing to do but watch some distant strangers conduct their business, she eventually got bored enough that she decided to risk rolling a joint and smoking it. She just had to make sure the smoke wouldn't be noticed.

She did this by using her new, maddeningly mysterious yet quite useful, stink-control power. She commanded all of the smell her filthy body created to stay contained in a half-pace bubble around her (it was more of an egg-shape) and she lit her joint. She couldn't normally control any scent that hadn't been a part of her, but by containing her smell within this bubble, she trapped the smoke from the ember with it, and once the smoke mixed with her stink, she could control the mixture.

The smell of her whole body was concentrated into a space about a pace across, her various odors mixing with the smoke. It was a stench that was dominated with stale piss, with aging shit in the background. Her crusty feet, shitty sweaty armpits and nasty wet crotch. Now with a smell of wet earth, mold, and pungent witch-hemp smoke. It felt like she was getting high off her own stink. The potent concentrated smell fed her arousal, and it generally didn't take much to turn her on.

Joint still in one hand, she started stroking her crusty, gooey cunt with the other. She had crapped herself a couple hours ago, most of that shit was still oozing in her knickers. Her body was covered in smelly mud, a lot of it dry, but other patches were damp from soaking up rain and her nasty sweat. She enjoyed rubbing her shit-slick pussy, but soon found herself wanting more, so she telekinetically formed the filth in her knickers into a brown phallus.