Evergreen Forest Ch. 18

The sprites lifted her fellow dryad up, bracing her head so the one straddling her face could continue to do so. Crypta thought she could hear a slight moan of protest, but it was indistinguishable from within the pleasure swarm. Once a sprite pack really got to work on you, there was nothing you could do. The lust auras became unbearable.

Speaking of which, more and more of Crypta's sprites were beginning to swarm around her. Crypta frowned. She hadn't ordered that. Then her frown vanished, replaced by a look of bliss as two succubus-like sprites' nimble forked tongues replaced those fingers of hers down below. She started gasping and whimpering as the auras took their toll, filling her mind with a hunger and emptying it of everything else. Fuck. She was so glad she'd devoted so many resources to bringing lust sprites to the Evergreen Forest. Now, more than ever, she knew that the Chosen had to be stopped.

Nobody took her sprites. Certainly not those delusional Chosen, with their human-centric rhetoric. The sprites belonged to the fey, just like the humans did. Sprites understood that. They understood—"ohfuckohfuck," she gasped—their place.

She fell to the ground. Her last glimpse of Stylis was the dryad coming onto of the bridge. And cumming onto the bridge, most likely. The dryad wasn't resisting anymore.

Crypta realized she was buried in sprites at this point. They were crawling all over her, drowning her in their lusty magic. Her every body part—lips, neck, pussy, tits—had been rendered unbearably erogenous by their magic. She couldn't see. She literally couldn't see anymore. Either her eyes were closed, or the pleasure was just overloading her senses. She couldn't tell.

But she noticed when she started to cross the bridge.

"nnn," she gasped. "No!" She started to kick. She started to scream. It felt so wrong, so horrid. She felt like the river itself, melting away, washing with the current. She felt like the river, though a quarter-mile below and with two meters of solid stone separating them, was rushing her very essence away. "No!"

The sprites paused. They didn't put her down, but they didn't let go, either. She kicked one of them in the face. They didn't react, aside from the one she'd kicked falling over with an, "Oof." They were communicating with each other, she realized. That made her struggle all the harder. She had to get out get out of here get off this sodding bridge—

Then, a gorgeous, crimson-haired, emerald-eyed face filled her vision. "Crypta," Stylis whispered, smiling, "it's alright. Just let them take you."

"S-Stylis?" Crypta's eyes widened. And then she felt Stylis's tongue slip inside her mouth, felt Stylis's wonderful little moans against her lips. She found her eyes closing. Where was she? Everything felt so good. So nice.

She felt tongues and lips against her. Felt Stylis wrapping her arms around her. That was all that mattered. She surrendered herself to bliss.

~~~~

The sprites giggled amongst each other. People always said lust sprites were dumb, but their hiveminds could be terrifyingly clever, in an inhuman, computational sort of way. They knew their mistresses' weak spots, alright.

The sprites obeyed Crypta's earlier orders and carried them across the bridge, encountering no more resistance from their mistresses. Their lust auras were too strong now. Crypta had finally given in.

They made it to the other side.

And then the fifteen of them kept fucking for, like, two hours.

~~~~

Yilra's mind had not wandered much as they made their way through the dark passages. She wished it would. The memories of Calystegia and Nipper together would not leave her mind, no matter how hard she tried to make them.

She looked around. Nipper was carrying a brightly burning torch, though she and Snatch both claimed they could see in the dark just fine. Yilra couldn't. Thus, the torch.

The passage walls were covered in bones. Human bones. Knitted together like ghastly garlands, they swung up and down across the walls in a disturbingly neat order. Rib bone, tibia, collar bone, three she didn't know the name of, skull. Rib bone, tibia, collar bone, three she didn't know the name of, skull.

There had been plenty of kindly gods of death, Yilra knew. But she'd never heard of any that decorated like this. These catacombs were almost definitely from one of the bad ones.

The gods were all dead now. Even the gods of death. Nobody knew how, and nobody wanted to. Certainly, nobody was glad of it. The gods had been like breath—they had suffused all aspects of life for everyone on the planet, even those in other dimensions, like the demons. They had been as much a part of the world as soil, or sky. They could never possibly be gone without all life at once becoming lost and meaningless. But now they were gone. And life went on.

Yilra had never known the gods. Some her age claimed they had—nobody seemed to really know when the gods died, either, and it sort of confused her how vague it was. Her cousin, her own age, claimed to remember the day the gods had perished. Her parents spoke of how their grandparents had told them stories of the day. Her little sister, seven years of age when Yilra had left to become a Toxin Ranger, had claimed one morning to have felt the god's passing the night before.

It was as though the gods had been as much a part of the world as time itself. You might as well have ripped the hour hand from a clock. Nothing seemed quite as solid anymore. The whole world was left in limbo. Life had ceased to make sense.

Well, at least Yilra wasn't thinking about sex anymore.

"Hey, Snatch," she said.

"Yeah?" Snatch was ahead of the two of them. He was the traps expert. This was his domain, and strangely, he did seem slightly more comfortable here than in the forest. How anybody could be comfortable in a place like this was beyond Yilra.

"You sure you wanna hang onto that amulet the whole time?" Yilra frowned. "The dryads said it's 'corrupting'."

"I know. I feel it." Snatch shrugged. "I can hold it off."

"Huh." Yilra raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, I actually kinda wanted to ask you 'bout that."

"'Bout what?"

"'Bout how a common adventurer-thief manages to resist three Evergreen Nymphs for as long as you did." Yilra crossed her arms. "And then manages to resist the likes of Crypa, the nastiest orchid dryad in this whole forest. Not to mention breaking away from a Gray Wraith and taking off a piece inside of you."

"So? Quit distracting me, ranger. This is a dungeon. That means traps."

"So no human can withstand shit like that!" Yilra snapped. "And I've been waiting the last thirty minutes for you to start acting weird with that amulet—y'know, standard tics: talking to yourself, calling it your 'precious', that sort of thing—and not a peep."

"I got a strong will. Lotta stubbornness."

"I wish I was like that," Nipper mused. "I mean, not being a cranky jerk all the time. And not, uh, a lot of stuff about you. No offense!" The catgirl's hands flew to her mouth. "Oh, that came out so wrong. Not that I wouldn't want to be you! Er, I just mean—

"That can't be all!" Yilra insisted. "The only people who can resist shit like that are, like, Cloistermage Monks and Nuns and shit!"

He looked back at her sharply. "Real, proper Cloistermagi are a lot stronger than me. Trust me. I'm just an asshole who doesn't wanna be controlled."

"Bullshit!" Yilra snorted. "Snatch, 'Alrek', whoever you are—"

"I don't wanna talk about this," Snatch said, scowling. "I can manage the amulet. That's all that matters."

" . . . Okay." Yilra held up a hand. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

Snatch turned and started walking again.

"So," Yilra said, "where is Larya?"

Snatch whirled around, eyes wide. As he did so, he took one more step forward. And then a lot of things happened in a very precise order.

Click.

"Fuck," Yilra and Snatch said together.

A panel in the ceiling opened right above Snatch's head. "Uh—" Nipper began.

Dozens of angry hissing snakes came tumbling out. Yilra whipped out a bottle from her pocket. Snakes?

"—oh," Nipper finished, biting her lip.

Yilra gave the bottle a quick shake. She could handle snakes.

The little serpents started to land on Snatch, who let out a startled scream. One of them landed on his shoulder and turned, eyes glowing white with magical compulsion, to his exposed neck.

Yilra uncapped the bottle and hurled its contents onto Snatch. "Gah!" Snatch flinched away as the liquid splashed all over his face. A strong stench roughly resembling a mix between skunk musk and squished ant filled the area.

The glow in the snakes' eyes faded almost instantly as instinct overcame decayed magics. They started falling off Snatch like he was a hot iron. Yilra and Nipper backed up as they slithered away, hissing angrily.

Snatch turned to Yilra, eyes bulging. "What the—"

"Deyuantier drought," she said, holding up the half-empty jar. She capped it. "Snakes don't like it much."

"Neither do I," Nipper said, her ears wilting. She waved a hand in front of her nose, which seemed to shimmer. Her pupils dilated as her ears perked back up. She beamed. "Much better. Can't smell a thing now!"

"Don't distract me!" Snatch shouted, drought dripping down from his chin. "This is a dungeon! The place is probably full of traps."

"How did those snakes even survive?" Nipper wondered, leaning over to look up through the hole in the ceiling. "These dungeons don't make much sense."

Snatch rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath. It sounded like "surface dwellers".

"Okay, sorry." Yilra grimaced. "That was my bad."

"Yeah. It—" He stopped. After a moment, he turned and spat to the side. "Let's just keep going. Just . . . watch out for snakes."

There was another click. He and Yilra whirled, Yilra nearly falling over in the process, to see Nipper standing several feet ahead of them. She smiled guiltily at them. "Oops?"

"Catgirl!" Snatch hissed. "Stay behind me! For fuck's fucking sake!"

All around them, panels started to open in the ceiling. A qlilting melody filled the air as animate skeletons fell through. They landed on the ground with loud clatterings and, singing a wordless tune, raised long, rusty swords towards the intruders.

"Um, yeah," Nipper whispered. "That's my bad."

~~~~ ~~~~

TO BE CONCLUDED