Majutsu-shi no Chikara Ch. 11

"It is not widely known you are chimera." Jachmina heaved, breathless from the delirious pain of transformation.

"No, it isn't." Esmeray grabbed-up her robes and shuffled into them, ignoring the sloppy mess still running the insides of her legs. "And for this matter only, I have shown you."

Jachmina nodded, her round face flush... though from embarrassment, excitement, or fulfillment she was not wholly sure. If either such spells were in the copied grimoire she'd been promised...

"Are you ready?" Saran gave her precious little time to ruminate on circumstances before pressing forward.

"As much as possible." Jachmina straightened her bodice and tied her hair into a low ponytail, running wild from the back of her neck. "Let us continue."

Giving only a moment for Jachmina to brace herself, Esmeray Saran began the next phase of her plan to be rid of the nymph's curse.

"Your copy of my grimoire is there." Saran motioned to a small book-stand in the undisturbed corner of the tent, just at the head of her bedroll and among the only things not battered by wings, trampled by claws, or soaking in a sticky puddle of base fluids still dripping in thick clumps from the chalice so readily overflowed. "The spell you need is marked."

Jachmina made a dainty step over one tendril of the spreading mess on the floor of the tent, scooping the tome into her greedy hands and opening at the silken marker to a page of symbols and formulae not unlike the manner in which mathematicians computed the movements of heavenly bodies, or the forces of nature. The similarities of language ended there, for the language of magic delved into other demesnes the human eye could not perceive. Jachmina studied carefully the written and non-written, the moving and unmoving meanings that built inside her mind a dull candle of understanding. With years of practice, she might be able to master such a spell on her own. Here, its base components were laid bare to her. She understood it, and knew she could make it happen with minimal risk to herself. Of course, the risk to the body she was copying was another consideration entirely.

"Are you sure you can...?" but Esmeray was quicker yet to interrupt.

"The sooner you make the copy, the sooner I can focus." Saran growled the words in her scaly throat, a wisp of smoke rising between her teeth and spilling from her nostrils.

So, she has a flame gland. Jachmina's eyes widened in astonishment, with the faintest inkling of fear for her own proximity to such an obviously... volatile Wizard.

"Killing me would not be so easy." the chimeric Wizard chuckled, seeming to read Jachmina's thoughts before they took full shape. "I am not ready to embrace my end, else I would not have sought you out. Cast the thrice-damned spell."

"Yes." Jachmina gulped hastily, nodding agreement to steel herself.

Reading through the ritual several times and practicing the incantation with small, purposeless rhythm to make the syllables more familiar to her tongue, Jachmina at last cleared her throat and shook her arms to limber her thick fingers.

"Alright, I believe I've got it." Jachmina did not look up from the page. "Are you certain you're ready?"

"Fuck's sake, woma..." Esmeray was on the verge of exasperated shouting, but it was Jachmina's turn to interrupt as she began the spell without waiting for Saran's reply.

The first course of the ritual stole into Saran's mind, Jachmina's magical grasp directed toward and latching onto the specific memory of mastering the spell of duplication -- a memory Saran could not even recall for the wards put in place by the Tower. Jachmina could see the shell warding the memory from Esmeray's waking thoughts, and noticed a few familiar veins of magic that likely belonged to others of the Tower for their intricacy and strength. The memory was a foreign thing, and did not care for being dredged-forth and studied by an outsider, but the spell kept it still long-enough that the enchantress was able to glean its significance in a fashion more durable than Saran's earlier efforts at sharing magical knowledge.

Jachmina could taste something like the smell of ebony burning, some great wooden monolith igniting behind her nostrils and making her mouth full of its oily smoke. The sound like chunks of granite smacking into a human skull, and the feeling in her fingers dragging as chains against the hull of some immense sea-faring vessel made not of wood but of iron. She could see the mass of flesh hurtling toward her from somewhere else. From inside Esmeray Saran, the raw components needed were stripped away from various bits of her anatomy. Tissues, organs, fluids... each finding its imprint stripped away, studied, copied, and forced back into place with rude, snapping shoves of energy. The blueprints called across the ether, drawing like lodestones on the components needed to fabricate the things for which they were designed.

Now, Jachmina's eyes filled with a heat and the focus of her gaze felt juggled-about as she struggled to keep her attention rooted to the magic on the page before her. Her hands slipped, once, and the spell wobbled and spat as the burning end of a jester's flaming baton caught on the wrong end. Rather than take a breath to steady herself, Jachmina forced her lungs to draw air across her vocal chords and chanted several verses on the intake, in effort to ignore the pain and give herself the momentum to correct the minor miscalculation even as the flesh of her shoulder blistered painfully. Saran screamed with uncloaked agony as the magic whip-lashed against her, flaying flesh from bone along hip and ribs. The frightful, uneven seams in her grafted skin separated and wept, forces pulling at her from the inside and drawing outward toward the simulacrum.

Both hands cracking with the effort, Jachmina righted herself and continued with the next verse -- the monotone crack and boom echoing the breaking of Saran's bones even as Esmeray's eyes scrunched tighter against the pain. Jachmina found the angles easier, now, and the words easier across her tongue -- if not in spite of the magic, perhaps because of it -- as she entered into a portion of the spell that was more familiar to her own memories. Here, her strength of will smoothed the ragged edges of unpracticed spell-casting, and the many wounds in Saran's flesh seemed to stick, freezing in time as the simulacrum formed alongside her.

As the spell ended, Jachmina could feel the stinging defilement of someone else's magic rushing through her veins. It sickened her such that she doubled over, dropping to the tent floor and vomiting bloody bile. She thought, at first, that Saran had duped her somehow... that the former Wizard of the Tower had laced a poison into the spell to kill the caster that Jachmina had somehow overlooked. Then, as the cold-sweat burning in her lungs eased, she recognized the more obvious signs of her own over-exertion.

"You..." she spat a clot of phlegmy blood to the floor and stared angrily at Saran, who lay spent and barely breathing in the drying pool of body fluids now reeking of urine and festering. "Could have warned me about that last bit."

"Would you have done it?" Esmeray's voice was only just audible, likely owing to the dragon's strength in her voice than any human capacity could manage. "If I'd said, would you have hesitated at the end?"

Jachmina spat again, ignoring the acidic tang in her mouth and further ignoring her own admission that Saran was likely correct. If she'd understood what the last part of the spell had meant before casting it on another being, she wouldn't have done it so freely. Instead, she would have tried to evade the influx of Saran's energies as the Wizard's soul momentarily fractured before welding back together to imbue the copy with a reflection of Esmeray's very being.

The doppleganger opened its eyes, Esmeray Saran's perfect copy... or near enough that Saran hoped the nymph's magic wouldn't know the difference. At least until the copy was obliterated and the weight of the curse shifted back to the original. Troll-skin, the hardy armor possessed of innate regenerative properties, is much-prized among the arcane (and even the more fool-hardy mundane) artisans able to shape such a thing into weapons or armor able to harness such power. Far from easy, and further still harder to copy as Jachmina had just done, the junior sorceress laughed bitterly as she climbed back to her feet and examined her work.

"Well, well. Look at the two of you." Jachmina snorted, the blood, piss, and semen pooled on the floor wrinkling her nose in disgust, though she was inwardly much pleased with this success.

"Fuck you both." The copy struggled to its feet, but Esmeray Saran made a few sharp movements that blurred between them.

The words might well have been written by mortals, but Jachmina could not remember them no matter how hard she tried... Esmeray's dragon speech too quick and complex for her ears to separate the sounds before the spell shunted Saran's nymph curse onto her double.

The effect was immediate, as the duplicate collapsed under the intense weight of primal lust. By contrast, Saran... the real Saran, Jachmina reminded herself... stood with a smoothness she'd not demonstrated previously. A deep, rumbling sigh emanated from her, the wounds that identified her as different from her copy closing swiftly as the troll-skin did the work of restoring flesh and viscera damaged or lost during Saran's duplication.

Jachmina angled her gaze into the ephemeral, seeking-out those misty constructs spinning lazily against the nymph's curse. Too difficult to see without Saran's help, Jachmina shrugged and turned her attention to the true Esmeray Saran.

"So, that is True Duplication?" Jachmina licked her lips, wondering if she ought use a spell to restore her own vitality after the ravages she endured.

"Yes." Saran looked at her with those elfen green eyes, the hunger gone from her face, and the weariness likewise absent. "Let's go. My copy deserves to die in peace."

"Really?" Jachmina gave a dispassionate glance at the writhing duplicate on the ground between them. "Couldn't I study this curse a bit longer?"

"Fuck you, you diseased cunt." The copy ground fingers into her crotch urgently. "Fuck off, rot, die, and burn in the Pit, both of you."

"You don't want to be here, when she begins to lose her mind." Saran shrugged. "But do as you will."

"Fascinating."

"Pig-fucking, dog-ass-licking, troll-cock-sucking..." but Jachmina followed Esmeray Saran from the tent and ignored the incensed vitriol of the duplicate consigned to death.

...

"It's still alive?" Jachmina looked into the darkness where the tent had vanished from sight half a league away.

Esmeray only grunted, once again sheathed in the durable black glass skin that moved over her body like oil and reflected nearly no light such that only the white hair on her head and crotch; and the glimmering green of her eyes marked where she stood in the shadow of the road marker.

"Ser Wizard?" A tentative voice called, approaching now close enough that the shadowy form on the road had the shape and limbs of a man.

Perhaps a bow-shot separated them, and Jachmina realized that the man approaching was one of her sweet Remfry's hirelings. She gave a faint pout at this, as her husband's retinue would need filling once this poor, hapless fool was sacrificed to serve Esmeray's needs. It was a paltry sum, considering the book of spells that Esmeray had paid to her. Jachmina could easily justify near rivers of blood and scores sacrificed to attain such a prize... and she was losing only one paid bodyguard for her husband's trinket shop. Most of the past hour she'd spent in careful study of each page as Esmeray Saran prepared the space for her ritual.

The elder Wizard employed a rather tedious method of storing possessions in the non-space around her, but it gave truth to the barren, featureless tent with only a sleeping space and her payment waiting in the wilderness removed from the road. Given the circumstances, perhaps she, too, would have done the same. In all honesty, Jachmina admired the sheer determination and not inconsiderable amount of luck for Saran to have survived the nymph curse as long as she did.

"You are alone?" Saran stepped away from the marker stone, emerging into the moonlight as a midnight slash cut across the gray-white grass and gravel of the roadway.

"Ser Wizard bade me travel alone." He puffed his chest. "One does not turn down the gifts of a Wizard, nor run heedless of their warnings."

So, that's the lie she sold him. Jachmina's lopsided grin skipped across her face as she considered how the man hadn't seemed to notice her. "Indeed, one does not."

But he gave no start or sign of hearing her. Jachmina frowned, wondering when Saran had befuddled the man's senses without her notice. Perhaps Esmeray had done so while Jachmina was still busy reading. A dagger of suspicion cut into her, a chilling fear that, perhaps, Saran had played her the fool more than twice-over. Saran had given her no heed, either, and embraced the sell-sword with all the apparent warmth Jachmina would give her sweet, doting Remfry. Jachmina knew it for the lie it was, but the illusion was well-executed in Saran's every movement.

"I confess, I am not one to be easily smitten." Esmeray caressed his cheek and kissed him fully, her tongue forcing its way into his mouth eagerly.

When she let him take a breath, he asked after her plan for the wee hours of morning -- if she aimed to make good on her offer to imbue him with great strength and skill of arms.

"You shall be a most fearsome bodyguard. Peerless." Esmeray grinned at him with true affection, though he did not know her attentions were for another being. "Cherished... desired..."

"You outdo yourself, Saran." Jachmina called from the side of the monolith, still lit by moonlight and her eyes magically keen to continue her study of the grimoire. "I should think you had a daemon's heart, for your facility to murder."

Saran ignored the jibe, instead focusing on luring her quarry into the ritual space with promise of power and slaking of their mutual lusts. Indeed, she needed him to spend himself at the instant she cut his heart from his chest. The daggers she needed were there, tethered as it were, in the ethereal space near her hands -- ready for the exact moment. Coaxing him, she laid him upon the matted grass of the circle where she'd made all ready. Lost amid the folded and crushed stalks, sigils carved in the dirt spiraled with profane meaning, their form and function a desecration of the earth itself. Filling these lines were silver, gold, iron, and blood -- the exactitude to which they were measured prescribed by the fiends whose essence would use this portal to fashion a bridge from their damned realm to that of mortals and physical beings. Saran used her own blood, freshly spilled in each place demanded, and the precious metals cultivated from the purest sources she could find among her possessions and the outer bazaar of Renks Cairn.

Covering the central seal, a thick leather mat was the bed on which she mounted her human tribute to the fiends of the Pit. Jachmina moved the silken marker to the page she was studying and gently closed the grimoire, turning her eyes up to watch Esmeray's performance of the ritual to summon and bind a daemon.

Keeping her hand movements as hidden as possible, Esmeray murmured the incantation as sweet nothings into her victim's ear, licking and nipping at the tender flesh to elicit his growls of pleasure and approval. His thrusting she fought against, slowing him down that he did not spend himself until the moment she was ready. This seemed to excite his desire, though it thwarted his satiation, and he grinned and bit at her breasts as she dug her fingernails through his hair and scratched his scalp in places. The rankling stench at the back of his nose briefly distracted him, and the language she was using wasn't quite a tongue a person should pronounce. She had said she would make him powerful... but the twist of doubt found the depths of his stomach. Esmeray worked her hips with heavy speed, now, plummeting down on him and driving his cock to a depth he thought perhaps he'd never really felt before. Crushing against him again and again, he felt she wanted to pierce herself to the lungs and heart with his rod -- and he dearly wanted to make it so, if that would please her. But the doubt gnawed into wriggling fear, and when the doubt's teeth found the fear's flesh -- the great worm in his guts thrashed in pain and terror with dread realization that he couldn't quite place.

"Wait..." he grasped her hips, so close to climax now that he couldn't stop himself -- but he held her waist and stopped her dropping down his length again.

White fire exploded in his chest, his eyes blurring as his breastbone cracked from the force of the blow, and the air stopped in his lungs as blinding pain tore into his neck. Wracked with spasms, he lurched and pushed, but his hands were limp at his sides from the lightning-fast slashes severing the tendons there. The pain of his heart, cold and naked in the night air, fought with the rush of ecstasy from his cock as his balls emptied into Saran's body. The air in his lungs grew stale, the blade blocking his throat scraping against the bones in his neck, and blood filled the back of his mouth. He tried to gag, but the dagger's steel capped both windpipe and esophagus, and the squishing force of his stomach and lungs pressed against each other... his last breath, trapped inside him, mixed with the acid of his gut.

"...Nabid..." Esmeray whispered the name against the still-beating flesh of his heart, then plunged her second dagger through the pulsing muscle.

...

Staring at the prostrate, senseless double of Esmeray Saran on the tent floor, grunting feebly and weakly straining to pleasure itself despite the raw and bleeding flesh of its crotch, Nabid grinned with fang-like teeth.

"Have I told you how much I fucking hate you?" Nabid's tone belied the words for a perverse affection, as it regarded the mangled chimera copy of its master.

"Break the curse, break your fast, and make yourself more presentable for traveling in mortal company." Saran began walking away, the faint gray light of the moon vanishing behind a thick wall of clouds rolling south over the distant coast.

"You don't want to stay and watch?" Nabid's face turned to follow Esmeray, disappointment or confusion evident. "I think it would do you good... see what's waiting for you."

"Get on with it." Saran called back over a black shoulder. "I'll be waiting by the standing stone, where I summoned you."

"Listen for it... I'll make her sing." Nabid grinned again, disappearing into the tent.

Esmeray choked-back bile as the infernal speech reverberated from the tent. Without fanfare or flash of light, she thought she heard the nymph's curse snap and dissolve under the punishing onslaught of daemonic power. She quickened her pace, but even the standing stone was not far enough to escape the screams. Jachmina had fled before Saran had reached the standing stone, having the good sense to escape as soon as she'd regained her senses amid the wretched screams of agony in the distance. Nabid prolonged the poor double's life until sunrise -- or so Esmeray assumed, as it was shortly after sunrise that the fully formed and very naked daemon came jogging toward her through the tall grass toward the river. She shivered with genuine disgust, and a sliver of grief for the fate of her duplicate. Nabid trotted to a stop before her, some three paces away, smiling toothily.

Nabid's daemonic flesh was near fully formed and, as she'd instructed, shaped more akin to the host whose soul had been supplanted from this body. Though the skin was an unnatural, bloated-corpse purple and black, it was smooth but for the lines of bumps hinting at daemonic spines running in lines the length of each limb and all about the chest, neck, and face. Saran might have likened it to tribal scar-art, but knew that no Wizard or priest would ever be fooled by such a claim. The sexless crotch of Nabid's chrysalis was replaced with a daemonic appendage Saran was pleased elicited no physical response from her body. Doubtless she would make use of it, at some point -- knowing the impossible euphoria of infernal pleasure -- but Esmeray was much more enamored of her freedom from the nymph's curse. She would enjoy not abusing her groin for many days.