Maladroit Ch. 01

The heavy, velvet curtains hung fixed over the single small window looking out from the cloister, blocking out the dim twilight that would otherwise have been feebly streaming in through the warped glass pane. To hold them in place against the windowsill, Dextre had used a handful of small tacks borrowed from the art class hall. Tied up in a lumpy bunch at the bottom of the deep purple curtains were his pattens, wrapped and bound with the corded belt from his novice's robes; another weight to keep out any ambient light. The wooden door to the room was firmly latched and every crack and crevice was stuffed with spare rags, the threshold itself stuffed with the bulk of his bed linens. The only illumination in the small room came from the various rushlights set about the few flat surfaces in the room, atop the desk and the bedside table, and the tallow candle burning in the tarnished brass chamberstick held in Dextre's left hand.

He was peering intently at largest of the flagstones set into the floor as he paced the circumference of the magic circle there, lately inscribed in a waxy red chalk. The soft, slow padding of his bare footsteps took him around the whole of the inscription three times before, at last, he nodded to himself, seeming assured of its integrity and craft. Making quick work of the dimly glowing rushes he put them out in their turn and, last, cupping his hand just behind the flickering yellow flame, he blew out the candle.

By quick degrees the pinpoint orange ember at the wicktip died away and the room was plunged into the sort of absolute darkness typically found only in the deepest recesses of caves. The still air, filled now with the smell of the extinguished candle, carried no sound, all entrances sealed and muffled as they were. In the darkness there, Dextre closed his eyes, though it made no difference to the fullness of the darkness. Still, it aided his concentration, and he sat the chamberstick down on the bedside table next to the extinguished rushlight.

Holding his right arm outstretched before him, palm out and facing the circle on the floor. In his left hand he clutched the pendant that hung from the silver chain about his neck. He drew a deep breath, paused briefly, and then, shakily at first but growing in timbre and confidence, Dextre sang a musicless tone. It started low, rattling his chest with the deep resonance of the note, and it grew steadily in pitch until, at the exhausted end of his breath, it ended in a dying wail that shook the panes of glass in the blinkered window.

At the edge of hearing, softly at first but growing swiftly in intensity, something like a breaking wave crashing into the surf from a great height. It could have been called an echo, if distorted and inverted, running from the terminating wail to the low rumble of his cry. Then, as though having caught fire, the lines traced out so carefully on the floor flashed and began to glow, pink as a flesh wound, tracing the careful route of the inscription as he had drawn it. The light grew in its intensity and, even with his eyes firmly shut, Dextre was made to squint further. His outstretched hand became a shield before his face against the intensity of the rose-coloured radiance.

His lips parted in a wild smile, his teeth gleaming in the glow burning up from the floor, and just as he loosed a cry in triumph the light died, snuffed like the candle beside him. The room was somehow even darker than it had been before, and now tinged with a heavy musk, like some rutting beast, but in a way that, while causing him to take shallow breaths from the power of it, made him want to breathe more deeply still. Touching his eyes, and wincing when they proved open, Dextre fumbled blindly for the chamberwick, managing only to knock it to the floor where it clattered noisily. There was the sound of the candle itself coming lose from its shallow pricket and rolling slowly across the floor away from him. Swearing under his breath, Dextre dropped to his knees and fumbled blindly for the candle, his hands moving across the flagstones as he crawled forward. It wasn't until he bumped his head that he stopped, thinking he had been turned around in the pitch darkness and had run into the soft mattress atop his oaken bedframe. Rocking back on his heels he put his hands out to grasp at the bed and lift himself up, but his palms slapped against something firmer than down-stuffed cloth, and he froze, eyes wide for all the good it did him.

"Is that any way to greet a guest?" asked a voice from above him, its every syllable like a razor made from soft velvet dragged down his spine. "I suppose you're eager to get to it then, boy?"

Dextre, mouth agape and mute from shock, looked up with a start, seeing nothing, but feeling the soft yield of flesh against his hands. He could feel muscles shift as whoever had the voice adjusted their stance. Stammering, he made out, "S-Stolas?"

"That old bird?" The voice scoffed and spat, a streak of white fire cutting through the dark, allowing Dextre to see the briefest flash of red skin.

"Surely you can tell the difference between his crusty twigs and these fine, shapely thighs?" The flesh under him moved again and Dextre pushed back and away, falling backward to land squarely on his tailbone.

Wincing as he struck the hard floor, Dextre said, "I drew his circle. I sang his song."

"You certainly drew a circle and sang a song. But if I'm any judge of a daemoniac seal, you have a few errors over here. Oh, you can't see where I'm pointing can you?"

There was the snap of what Dextre presumed to be fingers clicking together, and the candle on the floor flashed into life, its flame burning black, but somehow bright enough to light the whole room with some sort of inverse of daylight.

Standing before him in the centre of the arcane glyph on the floor stood a woman of some two meters in height, even taller if you counted the prominent black horns that jutted from the sides of her head, not unlike those of a bull, nearly scraping the rafters above them. Her hair was, in sharp contrast, white as new-fallen snow, swept back from her face, a curtain down her back and over her shoulders. The skin showing, and there was so much showing, was the red of fresh blood and with just the same sheen. Dextre's eyes were locked on her own, a violet pair gleaming like those of a cat catching the gleam of lanternlight. Centred on her forehead was a third eye, burning pink and wide open and staring.

She pointed again, turning to look down and away, at the southernmost arc of the inscription. "See, there? You transposed two of the runes. It should read," and here she spoke words unutterable to any mouth equipped with a mortal tongue, "but what you've written says 'Lamia' and that," she said, turning to look back at him, the long, slender fingers of her right hand touching the space between her breasts, "means me."

"But...but I was so careful. I copied it down just as it was in the tome." He grunted as he got to his feet and moved the few steps back to his desk, lifting the heavy book. He squinted, peering at the image on the page, shaking his head lightly. "I don't understand. It's the same as there on the floor," he said, gesturing absently.

"Mind if I take a look?" Lamia asked, head cocked to the side. "I'm a dab hand at this sort of thing."

Dextre looked at her, debating with himself, before giving a shrug and walking back to the outskirts of the binding circle, and holding the book open before her.

Lamia studied the page, leaning forward slightly, the tips of her horns glowing with a pale, blue fire, the only visible sign of the power of the seal. "Ah, there's your problem, my young summoner," she said, pointing a long finger at the parchment. "The whole thing's inverted. Looks like a printer's error. Must've been a copy of a copy, yeah?"

She drew a rune on her hand, the first syllable of her name, glowing hot pink in her palm, and showed him. Then she pressed her other hand down atop it and lifted it to display it inverted on the other palm. "Must've been some apprentice maybe? Or just your run of the mill fanatic who didn't actually know how to read the runes."

Lamia looked at him over the top of the leather-bound book, her eyes squinting as she smiled. "I'm supposing you can't read them either, else you wouldn't have botched something as simple as that, hmm?"

Dextre flushed almost as red as Lamia's skin and quickly slapped the book closed, tossing it onto his bed. She laughed, not an unkind sound, and his skin prickled with gooseflesh at the lilting sound of it.

"Look, boy, you may have messed up your plans with grumpy old Stolas, but look at it like this," Lamia said, trailing the fingers of her left hand around the stiff maroon nipple jutting out from her right breast. She watched his eyes follow the movements of her fingers and smiled more broadly, her teeth gleaming sharp and nacreous. She drew a line from her breast down her ribs and across again across her taut, flat stomach, circling now the shallow cup of her shadowed navel. "Surely you have things you'd rather do than study with a stuffy old owl."

Dextre swallowed hard, eyes fixed on Lamia's fingers as they brushed the thick white hair trailing down her stomach and into the hoary thicket that spread across her groin. Slow and slowly by aching centimeters she dragged the backs of her shiny, black-clawed fingers lower down until they brushed the thick shaft of her soft, meaty cock. It hung there, a darker crimson than the rest of her, flaccid, but well girthy and long enough to make Dextre swallow hard a second him, eyes transfixed.

"I needed help..." he said, trailing off for a moment before rallying and tearing his eyes away from her crotch and back to Lamia's glowing eyes. "I was working on my thesis and hit a stumbling block. I was hoping Stolas and his access to ageless wisdoms could, well," Dextre shrugged helplessly, sighing. "But this is no good. I don't have any need for, for that," he said, waving dismissively at Lamia's cock, looking somehow even larger than when had first locked eyes on it. And it was growing, he noticed, twitching with a heartbeat, impossibly thickening and beginning to lift the glistening eye up from staring at the floor to arc slowly, beat by beat, until it faced toward Dextre, thick head bulbous, round, and seeming to radiate a heat. Certainly, the room was filling more densely with that musk that had started to rise up when the summoning had finished, and he was feeling the effects of the polluted air, growing more lightheaded by the moment.

"Come now, boy," Lamia said, wrapping both hands around her stiffening cock, with a surprising amount of length still showing proud and deep red. "Won't you at least give us a taste before you cast me aside?" Her voice purred from her finely sinewed throat like a cat the moment before it pounces on an unwary songbird, pecking out its lunch, oblivious to its immanent predation.

She jiggled her impressive shaft, waving it at Dextre, her heavy, pendulous testicles bouncing from the movement. A dribble of precum lubricated the slit carved into the fat cockhead and it rolled down the curving underside of her cock, coursing along the underside and abutting against her fingers. There it pooled and began to drip wetly on the floor below, each splash releasing more of the fragrant, musky perfume. It was so much the scent of a rutting beast, sour and persistent and weighty with desire. It hazed the close air of the chamber like an abundant, blooming flowerbed in the hottest hour of the day, the reek of it repellant and alluring in equal measure. The stench of a rotting orchard of pear blossoms and fruit, a paradox of the natural order, filled Dextre's nose and lungs and clouded his mind.

Suddenly, there did not seem to be the pressing need for study or getting his name on a new treatise or even finding some castoff palimpsest. No, now was time for movement, for action, for doing whatever Lamia wanted him to do. And what it seemed she wanted, more than just about anything, was for him to step forward and...

Dextre shook his head fiercely, trying to clear his clouded mind, and found himself kneeling on the floor, hand outstretched, ready to wipe away the seal that bound Lamia and kept him safe from whatever it was she was planning to do with that monster staring him in the face, dripping and turgid and needy. He shook his head again, standing and stepping back, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.

"Your magics won't work on me, creature," he said weakly, drawing shallow breaths to try and stave off the seductive odors pouring from the demon. "I am trained in the seals and the arts and...and..." His voice was slow, unsteady, just as the gait that took him stumbling forward again, dizzy and dazed. "You can't...You won't..."

Lamia smiled, her fangs gleaming, and she stroked the air to her left, revealing a flaw in the seal, the same flaw that seemed to be letting her vapors leak into the room.

"My boy," she cooed softly, a grin breaking out across her face like lightning flashing across a black summer sky, "I'm as good as in you already."

She struck out to her side with a clenched fist and there was something like soundless thunder. The force of the exploding barrier flung Dextre to the floor where he clutched his ears as if to muffle the soundless, deafening pressure.

"Sweet child," she purred, stepping from the broken seal, "Let's see how deep we can get, mm?"

Reaching down with one long, sinuous arm, she gripped him by the front of his robes and threw him bodily onto the bed where the ropes under his mattress creaked in protest. She moved quickly before him, him still dazed from the breaking of the seal, and with her clawed hands she tore at his robes, easily rending the cloth, only here and there drawing blood from his soft, coppery skin. When she was done, she stood back and soaked in the view, a wicked smile playing on her lips.

"My boy, my boy," she said, kicking his unresisting thighs apart with her knee, "You look good enough to fuck until you die." She aimed her massive cock as his furry, dampening slit and moved to penetrate. But it was at that moment another soundless blast filled the room and Lamia was thrown against the far wall where she crumpled, crying out, her hands clutching her tender cockhead.

"Oh, you bastard. You utter, terrible bastard!" she cried, rocking and moaning. "You sealed that cunt up nice and tight, didn't you?"

"I took the necessary precautions," Dextre muttered, getting to his feet, one arm across his small, pert breasts to preserve some modicum of modesty. "It's dangerous for a boy to go walking the streets of an evening trying to find the right apothecary, you know?"

Dextre stepped forward, drawing in the air with his free hand another seal that sparked and flashed as the lines came clear and bright from the tips of his fingers.

"But it's more than just stopping a bad dick, you see," he said, smiling and standing over the groaning demon. He caught her three eyes and gestured, grinning, at the large red cock jutting from his groin. "It does a marvelous job at doing just what you wanted, my dear, and gave me every inch of that fat cock."

Lamia stared in confusion and started as she felt her own cock begin to shrink and fade and altogether vanish from the soothing clutches of her hands. She was left, smooth as a doll, staring at the dick that had, just moments before, been her pride and possession.

"How did..." she started to ask, before he cut her off, slapping her with a meaty thwack across the face.

"I told you, I know the seals, demon," Dextre said, looking down at her. "This was all a ruse, you see, to get what I needed."

"You needed my cock?" Lamia asked, confused. "Surely you could just conjure one?"

"Not just any cock would do, my fine demon," Dextre said, smearing her face with his precum. "I needed the Seed of Lamia to finish my thesis."

"But Stolas?"

"Fuck Stolas. No. You know what?" He smiled, his eyes hot with lust and power. "Fuck me. Fuck Dextre. Why don't you go ahead and show me how the Lamia gets what she wants?"

"But I've nothing to-" Lamia looked at him, confused, her own pheromones turned against her. "Oh, well, I supposed I could be bottom." She shrugged and braced against the wall, getting to her feet. "But boy," she said, wagging a finger in his face, "I'm not stopping until you're dead." She snapped her fingers and the dull light remaining in the seal went out as the candles and rushlights in the room burst back into life.

Dextre's face split into a wide grin, and he bounced the cock between his hands. "I've always wanted to try one of these out."

"Me or the cock?" Lamia asked, eyes flashing.

"Why not both?" Dextre laughed, and moved to the bed, sitting on the edge of it. "Come, demon. Come and swallow my fat cock."

"Don't you tell me what to do, mortal boy," Lamia said, though she moved to him. She ran her hands down and along the throbbing red shaft, eliciting a shiver from Dextre. "I know how to use this cock to get what I want, and whether it's buried to the balls in your hot little quim or my throat, I'm going to pull the very life from your bones."

"We'll see, we'll see," Dextre said, bouncing excitedly on the edge of the bed. He reached out, surprising himself in his boldness, and pulled Lamia close, applying enough pressure that she indeed began to bend the knee.

She knelt before him, stroking his shaft from the base to the tip, both of her long-fingered hands wrapped around the hefty rod. "You won't know what star has struck you when I'm finished with this," she growled lustily, leaning in and licking the underside of the head. Her eyes began to glaze over as she got to work, moving from licks to kisses before she pulled the beastly cock level with her mouth and, seeming to unhinge her jaw, took the thickness into her.

When her long tongue snaked out and wrapped around the cock, rubbing the head and joining her hands at rubbing the length of it, Dextre couldn't help but release a low, heavy moan, a tremble of excitement, and not a little fear, pulsing up his spine. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall that abutted his bed. This was so much better than anything those other boys in the cloister could muster up, if they ever even offered their faces. They always just wanted furtive handjobs in the shadows of the arches lining the walkways or to try and stick him one. But he was saving himself for greater glories, for things that the little men that surrounded him just couldn't offer. But this Lamia creature, now that was something he could work with.

Bold as anything he reached out and, taking her horns firmly in his grip, he pulled her further and down the length of the meat jutting from between his thighs, groaning from the feeling of her tight throat ballooning open and around him, so tight and firm and wet and hot and so many other adjectives that he was having trouble concentrating on conjuring up.

Lamia didn't resist, didn't even gag, her hot drool sliding from her mouth with her tongue, lubricating the shaft as she swallowed over and over, drawing the cock deep into her throat, impossibly deep, sending sensations that only one born to this could manage shooting along the length of Dextre's cock. She nudged her breasts higher with her arms so that their soft flesh would gently caress the cock, her nipples, hard as carborundum, sensuously scraping the sensitive skin.

Hands still gripped around the horns Dextre got to moving her face along the length of his stolen cock, grinding the shaft into her throat and out again, relishing the feeling, the tongue, the hands, the lips, even the hot breath snorting out from her nostrils. He was so slick, so wet, so ready to burst. He had to clench every muscle and nerve to keep from cumming so soon. With a sigh he pushed her back and off him.