Outer Demon

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Don't fear what lurks in the dark. It just wants to cuddle!
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EighthSpan
EighthSpan
165 Followers

There are two things you should be aware of before reading this story. First, it contains elements that could be reasonably interpreted as rape. If that's going to be a dealbreaker for you, turn away now. However, this story occurs in the universe of Monster Girl Encyclopedia, and MGE always has a happy ending. (But what are you doing reading about monster girls if rape is a dealbreaker?)

Secondly...I'll just say it, the Nightgaunt is kinda bizarre, even by monstergirl standards. This story contains transformation elements that will probably turn some people away...becoming the husband of a Nightgaunt requires certain sacrifices. But with every species that I cover, I try to sway people over that originally didn't find them appealing, to play up what makes them special. So trust me when I say the the Nightgaunt isn't as scary as she appears. She's actually a real sweetheart!

Anyways, the disclaimer is over. Onwards to the story!

********************

He could hear the sounds of their drunken revelry, even at this distance.

Their arrogance sickened him, but Joshua's stomach couldn't find a way to tighten itself into an even more complicated knot. Hatred and revulsion washed into his mouth, tasting of ash and bile. His fingers curled into a fist as he shifted his gaze upwards to the night sky.

He saw the full moon through the branches of the pine forest, its face peering down at him with mute curiosity. On any other night, he would have welcomed the light it provided, but tonight, it was a curse. Not because he bought into the villagers' idle superstitions about demons and specters prowling about when the pale light was at its strongest, but because tonight, he was the prey, not the hunter.

But the light of the full moon hadn't mattered, thankfully. Cloaked in the misty night air, Joshua used the low pockets of fog to infiltrate to the edge of the marauders' camp. The arrogant fools hadn't even bothered maintaining a sentry, utterly convinced of their invincibility. However, while Joshua had managed to sneak all the way up to the edge of their camp, he was a single man with a longbow, and the marauder camp held a dozen thugs, each with steel weapons and armor. He knew he didn't stand a chance of defeating them alone, but who else was going to assist his rescue mission? The town militia?

He snorted. The militia of Brunswick rallied to deal with ornery schoolchildren and the occasional sighting of a wolf or mountain lion, too far into the safety of the Republic's borders to worry about things such as roving slavers or the war with the monsters. So the marauders were fools, yes, but they weren't wrong. The people of Brunswick - or at least, the ones left after the raid - posed no threat to them.

Joshua clenched his fingers into his longbow, making their tips turn white from the pressure. Hatred spiked in his mind again, contorting his face into a grimace.

He should have tried harder! He had been urging the mayor to take the town's militia more seriously for the better part of a year. The Republic was losing the war with the monsters, their borders were shrinking as a result, and the land was rife with those who sought to abuse the chaos.

The people of Brunswick were not as safe as they thought they were. If only he had been more persuasive, more persistent!

"Then...Esther, she wouldn't have been..." Joshua croaked, muttering to himself. Heat built up in the corner of his eyes, but he took in a sharp breath through his nose and stomped the feelings back down. No, he couldn't allow hatred to take over, be it directed at himself or the marauders. He had to come up with a plan.

He reviewed the layout of their camp. It was just a ways off the road that cut through the forest, being centered in a clearing that was surrounded by a ring of pine trees and ferns. They had seven tents set up in a haphazard, irregular fashion along the western edge of the clearing. A large bonfire crackled at the center of their camp. The slave cages - and the abducted villagers within them - were at the northern end of the camp, each cage being a wheeled contraption just barely big enough to hold three adults. And with the slave cages were the horses that pulled them, resting nearby. Eleven of the twelve men were drinking and guffawing around the bonfire, leaving just one unaccounted for. A lightweight who was forced to retire early, perhaps?

...there were no good options. Joshua was confident that he could approach the camp from any angle, even make it to the slave cages undetected, but they were locked, and he wasn't certain which slaver held the keys. It would have been tremendously lucky if it was the missing twelfth man, but there was no way to know which tent he was in. And drunk or not, the slavers wouldn't miss Joshua poking around at the entrances of their tents.

He unslung his longbow, gripping it in his left hand, running his fingers over the smooth, dark wood. It was a fine piece of fletching. It was without a doubt, his greatest creation - precise, sturdy, and reliable. Perhaps he could use it pick off two or three of them from the woods...but then what? The life-or-death adrenaline rush would sober the rest, and he could not fight nine armed men by himself. Joshua was just a hunter, not some divine hero of the Order.

Perhaps piety was the answer? Joshua knelt down, inclined his head, and splayed the fingers of his free hand against his chest in a gesture of servitude.

"Divine Aeris," he muttered. "I know that I am a stranger to you. I am not a devout man of faith, and you have no reason to help me. But the people that these monsters have taken are not strangers to you. They love you. They trust you, and they place their faith in you. Even now, I am certain that they remain calm, awaiting your salvation. I beg of you, Divine Aeris, give me the strength that I lack, so that I may carry out your benevolence. Lend me the power to rescue your faithful!"

Silence.

An owl hooted in the distance.

Joshua swallowed his saliva as uncertainty boiled up within his knotted stomach.

"If I am unworthy," he continued, "then send someone else! It need not be one of your valkyries, or one of your chosen heroes! A rider from the capital, a passing stranger, the town priest! Anyone, please!"

"Please," he begged, voice choking with emotion. His chest and eyes felt like they held hot coals behind them. The spikes of hatred in his mind that had taken over as his heartbeat became weaker and more irregular.

He couldn't do anything. Nobody was going to help him. Nobody was going to save the captured townsfolk, nobody was going to save his sister...

"Damn it all!" he hissed, pounding his fist against the trunk of a pine tree with too much force. A flash of pain tore through his hand, fading into a dull, throbbing ache.

A particularly loud set of hoots and cheers drew his attention back to the marauders' camp. Joshua's brow furrowed, his eyes flaring with fury so terrible that they threatened to ignite a forest fire with a simple glance.

Wait...

A fire! Could that work?

Joshua pressed his hands against his pockets and toolbelt, quickly searching himself. Was it...yes! He still had his infinite firelighter, a magical bauble that his father had left him. With this, he had a new option. He couldn't defeat all of the marauders, and he couldn't free the slaves without the keys.

But what if used fire? The marauders would have to go to sleep eventually. If they found the sense to post a sentry, he could easily pick off one drunk and drowsy man from a distance. Then he could trap the rest in their tents, and burn them alive. A horrific end, but the vermin deserved no less.

It wasn't a great plan, but it was all Joshua had. He was alone, and the gods did not seem interested in weaving a miracle. There was a good chance he would fail, a strong likelihood that he would die. But Esther was all the family that he had left. If he lost her, too...

Joshua firmly shook the thoughts away, for they would do him no good. He had made up his mind - a surprise fire attack was the way to go.

"Might as well creep a bit closer, then," he muttered to himself. "Gonna need to be absolutely certain when they've gone to sleep."

Joshua crept towards the camp while crouching low to the ground, bow held in one hand. He treaded gently, being well-accustomed to silently stalking his prey. His boots deftly avoided twigs and leaves, even though he was certain that the marauders couldn't possibly hear the sounds.

You just never take that kind of a chance.

His ears tingled, chilly in the cool, misty air. He utilized his sense of sound to its utmost - every time the wind brushed through the pine branches, every time a fern rustled in the distance, Joshua paused and altered his course. He couldn't be certain where that twelfth marauder was. Perhaps he was the one member of the group who had the wisdom to realize that they needed a sentry.

But if the twelfth was out here in the forest with Joshua, the man was outmatched. Ironically, it would be his caution that assured his death.

Joshua paused again. He heard something moving - the sound of a creaking branch. The branch shook up and down, rustling its leaves. Definitely not an owl - they didn't have the force to shake a branch like that. So what in the world was that?

The sound of rushing air reached his ears like a faint whistle. He turned in the direction of the sound, and then-

A powerful force grabbed both of his shoulders and yanked him backwards! Had the twelfth managed to get behind him?!

Joshua flailed and tried to kick back at his attacker, but a sickening lurch in his stomach revealed that whatever was holding on to him was not dragging him backwards, but upwards.

Cold air rushed around him, scraping at his face as he rose higher and higher into the air. Pine branches brushed against him, leaving sticky scrapes on him. Joshua opened his mouth and tried to scream - illogical, he knew, but sheer animal panic had overtaken him. But before he could make even a squeak, something cool and slimy slapped against his cheek and stretched across his mouth.

Higher and higher he rose, barely aware of how high he was being taken as he struggled against his airborne assailant. Joshua shouted into his gag, trying to bite at whatever covered his mouth, but the substance simply squished under his teeth. Another cool, slimy thing slapped against his forehead and stretched to cover both of his eyes, stripping him of his vision.

His captor was doing something to him, but his panicking mind couldn't discern what it was. A heat spread through his body, as if his heart had become a warm ember. His limbs went slack, sapped of the strength to struggle. As his vision went dark, so did his mind, and Joshua fell into unconsciousness.

********************

His mind stirred back to consciousness. Joshua was in a void, deprived of light and sensation. Whispers drifted across his mind, memories floated up like bubbles. His shoulders ached from his captor's mistreatment of them, and a deep exhaustion had cradled into the back of his skull.

What had happened to him? Whatever his captor had used to blind and gag him were gone. And for that matter, where was his captor?

Joshua opened his eyes, not expecting to see anything. But the moon provided for him, bathing the area in enough light to glance around. He was on the floor, leaning against a rocky wall at the mouth of a cave. He tilted his head to his left, towards the forest. The tips of the pine trees jutted out, forming a sea of green as far as the eye could see. This cave was obviously quite high up, so he concluded that he must have been taken to the hills to the east. With the full moon still high overhead, not more than an hour could have passed. Wispy clouds of mist drifted across the sky, briefly concealing the moon before moving on.

"You are awake."

His head snapped to the right. Against the opposite wall of the cave, a dark figure stood, leaning against the wall. Joshua stared at the figure for several seconds, but blinked and shook his head. Their side of the cave was concealed from the moonlight, and the figure remained shrouded in darkness. A buzz started to drone in the back of Joshua's mind, as if a bee had flown inside his ear.

The sounds of dripping water echoed from somewhere deeper in the cave. Plip, plip, plip.

"You are not in danger," the figure assured. A monotone, feminine voice. Was this his captor? Or had she rescued him from whatever had taken him into the sky?

"Who are you?" Joshua demanded. "Step into the light."

The figure hesitated. Joshua grimaced and tried to ignore the increasing buzzing inside his head. The hairs on his body were standing on end, anxious.

Something was wrong.

"You are not in danger," the woman repeated. "I will not hurt you. Please do not scream."

The woman stepped into the moonlight, causing the buzzing in Joshua's head to grow into a grating screech.

The woman had a black body. Not dark-skinned, but utterly black, as if her very being devoured light. Joshua could not tell if the blackness was her skin or her clothing, for it wrapped around her body like a suit. If the blackness was meant to be clothing, it did a poor job of it. The suit pressed against her very tightly, accentuating her impossibly perfect body. Her pillowy, ample breasts strained against the suit. Further down, the suit curled around her wide hips, and pressed against her shapely legs. On anyone else, he might have found these features immensely attractive, chalking the strange suit up to the woman's exhibitionist quirks.

But her beauty only highlighted her impossibility.


The woman - if she even was one - had wings. Her bat-like wings grew from behind her shoulders, their membranes made from the same black substance that her suit was, both of them tipped with a number of dark, purple spikes. Her wings curled up behind her in their resting position, but Joshua could tell that they were muscular and powerful. Fully extended, they would give her a wingspan of at least six feet.

His eyes drifted towards her head, the only part of her body that was not covered by the dark suit. The black material ran up to her neck, exposing only her face. Long strands of obsidian colored hair that fell to the back of her neck covered much of the right side of her face. Her bangs, which fell from her forehead to her nose, held a single ribbon of purple hair that was the same color as her wingtips. Only a sliver of her face was visible - revealing her left eye and part of her mouth. Her skin was light and unnaturally pale, practically a brighter shade of gray. Her mouth was flat, her expression unreadable.

Her exposed eye blinked at him. She had a purple iris, the same color as her hair.

A pair of horns just about half a foot long jutted out from the sides of her head. They curled up and back down again, making an arch that ended in a purple tip. A swaying motion from behind her legs brought his attention to her tail, a long and slender thing that originated from somewhere behind her waist. It reached down to the floor, curling itself around her left leg like a snake. And like her wings and horns, it ended in a purple tip.

Plip, plip, plip...

Joshua's jaw dropped as he came upon a realization. The dripping sounds that he had heard were not, in fact, water.

They were coming from her.

The blackness covering the woman's body - it was moving! Ripples undulated through her suit, and it seemed to squirm around and move of its own accord. Drips of the black ooze fell off of her, splashing onto the cave floor. The dark ooze moved slowly, thick like molasses. Every part of her that had a purple tip - her horns, her tail, her wings, and even her fingers, he noticed - oozed as well. But that substance was dark purple, and seemed considerably less viscous, flowing more freely from her body. It was the drops of the purple substance that made the splashing sounds, falling into small puddles of purple slime on the cave floor and echoing throughout the cave.

She simply stood there, looking down at him. The moonlight reflected onto her purple parts and puddles of ooze, making them gleam faintly. She was an impossibility - Joshua's mind could not comprehend her, so he stared blankly at her.

Joshua blinked at her. She blinked back.

Somewhere far in the distance, an owl hooted again.

"Are you well?" she asked, breaking the silence. She had a soft voice, not much stronger than a murmur, and it lacked any trace of genuine concern. "I am certain that I did not injure you."


The...the thing was talking to him. It was talking!

Joshua's expression cracked. Half of his face curled up in an insane grin, the other froze in abject terror, and he began to croak out a hoarse laughter.

"Heh," he muttered. "Hah...ahaha. Hahaha!"

The thing could talk!

Joshua's laughter grew louder. He slapped a palm against his face, shaking his head in disbelief. So, the elder's tales weren't just idle superstition. Demons really did prowl the woods during the full moon! Whatever this creature in front of him was proved that.

Joshua had never seen a monster before. He knew of them, of course, seeing as his country was currently fighting a war with them. He had even seen sketches of them, detailed profiles about the various species, that warned him how to avoid them and gave advice on their weak points. The soldiers and priests of the Divine Order were always happy to hand out lectures and reading material whenever they passed through Brunswick, warning of the corrupting influence of the monsters.

But...this? Even among the most convoluted species of monster he had read about, this was just...insane! She was impossible!

But as impossible as she was, she was real, standing in front of and looking at him with expressionless eyes.

The thing took a step towards him, eyebrow narrowing as she examined his body for obvious wounds. Joshua's face twisted in panic, his hands scrabbling against the cave floor as he pushed himself backwards. He collided into the cave wall, sending another stab of pain into his shoulders.

"Please do not be alarmed," she said. "You may accidentally cut your hands if you do that."

"Get away!" he cried. He turned his body to face the mouth of the cave, and pushed himself upwards with his hands, moving to run away.

"You must not," the thing said, louder and more firm than before, her voice still devoid of emotion. Her hand shot out and gripped Joshua's wrist, holding him tightly and pulling him back towards her.

"I do not want to hurt you," she said again. "Please just-"

"Let me go!" he shouted, tugging hard and trying to shake her free. He had to escape while he still could! Her grip on his wrist tightened to an uncomfortable level, making him wince and struggle that much harder.

"Help!" he gasped. Joshua inhaled a huge gulp of air, intending to yell for help as loud as he could. Of course, the only people around to save him from this creature would just as soon enslave him, but he was far beyond the point of rational thought.

"Someo-" he managed to get out, before the thing gave him a strong tug backwards, wrapping her hand around his mouth and silencing his scream.

"Stop," she said calmly. "They will hear you."

Of course they were going to hear him! That's what he wanted! Someone would hear him, and someone would save him from this monster!

Joshua flailed in her grasp. She wrapped her other arm around his stomach, pulling him into her with a backwards hug. He struck his elbow back hard into her gut, hoping to knock the wind out of her, but the black slime covering her body absorbed the force of his blow. It stuck to him like tar, making it difficult to pull his elbow back.

EighthSpan
EighthSpan
165 Followers
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