Pairs of Pumpkins #04: The Unseen and Unsteady

Pairs of Pumpkins Episode 04: The Unseen and the Unsteady

Author's Note: All characters involved in any of the adult situations described here are 18+.

Episodes 2 and 3 of Pairs of Pumpkins continue the story but contain no sexual acts being performed, only the sexual depiction of characters who are all 18+.

The vixen apprentice, Anastasia stood in silence as a procession departed the manor's foyer: Zarron, the raccoon sorcerer and Head of the Household led the way, followed by an odd mix of three familiar faces and three strangers. They were all on the way to a ritual that despite her continuing education in Magic, Ana was explicitly not invited to.

Zarron called out some orders but she barely paid attention. She could sense his unease if for no other reason than it's rarity. He was very old and powerful beyond comprehension but the sorceress Marmalade had him off-kilter since she'd arrived not long ago and made a weird night, weirder still. He owed her some debt that he appeared to be paying with three of the Duodecaplets, twelve, identical half-wolves who'd been trained as a fighting elite and until now, never separated.

Anastasia was one of five who remained behind: the idling Stone, their massive brute of a barely intelligent brother standing over a similar sized, armored stallion, collapsed on the floor. The horse, Zarron's bodyguard, had been apparently knocked out by poison from a confrontation with their mother, far away in the Pale Lands but not long ago at all, due to Zarron's teleportation. After so many years of uneventful education and isolation for Anastasia and her many siblings, so much had happened in so little time in so little time and it was hard to imagine anything going back to the way it was.

Nearer to Anastasia stood Duayne, her dumbfounded younger brother and their elder sister, Evangeline, still frozen by magic with her fist cocked back and ready to swing at an offending feline sorceress, now long departed. With control still of her eyes, they were straining to glare, her jaw clenched in a furious growl.

"That's not going to last long," Ana said to herself before she moved around in front of Eva and opened her arms, anticipating she may be off balance when her ability to move returned. The spell, defensively cast by Marmalade had frozen Evangeline's body, not stopped time and all the momentum of her attempted punch would be lost. She was lucky to have been frozen at a place where she was balanced enough to stay standing but she would be disoriented when the effect went away.

The teenage Anastasia was inherently off-balance herself, with the bulk and weight of burdensome breasts that dominated her upper body. Their lineage already tended to extremes, as evident by Evangeline's curvaceous figure and their mother that they'd only briefly seen, but Anastasia was far beyond either of them, thanks to the casual cruelty of Zarron's magic. He admitted to meddling with the very fabric of her creation before her birth and sometimes confessed that he had "overdone it" with her, but would follow that by explaining that his re-weaving was so effective that it was beyond the capacity of magic to undo. The wobbly Anastasia had little business trying to catch her sister's fall but Duayne didn't have the forethought to take action, nor the body mass to succeed if he did.

Waiting for her sister to return to animation, she considered the earlier stalemate between the twelve Duodecaplets and Stone versus Marmalade and her two bodyguards. Marmalade claimed to be an old sorceress despite her young appearance but she'd been afraid of them. It led Anastasia to consider what magic she might use to get out of the same situation. The Duodecaplets had trained in anti-wizard tactics and had spaced out to better resist any area effects, but with their armor, Chain Lightning may have done the trick.

Of course, one crossbow bolt could be enough. The smart thing to do, would have been to erect a Magic Barrier against missile weapons, but that wouldn't stop Stone. Teleporting would have been the safest way out, then find a more advantageous battle field. Teleportation itself was incredibly dangerous but in that situation but risk of death was better than certain death. Marmalade must not have been that kind of Sorceress.

At the far end of the hall, at the ritual room, Marmalade's guards posted up outside and the rest of them went inside. The doors closed behind them and a moment later, Evangeline's magical paralysis finally broke, out of time or out of range from it's caster.

Ana tensed and braced herself. For her overabundant bust compounded by her sister's not insignificant chest, she was more likely to provide a cushion upon landing rather than stop her from falling.

Evangeline caught herself in place. Her arms swung for balance until she found it, then righted herself and clenching her fists. Hunched forward, face hovering over Ana's cleavage, she cursed.

"I'm so fucking tired of magic!"

Ana reached out for Evangeline's shoulders to help her find her balance but she twisted away. "How did Mother get the best of Zarron? He's supposed to be some great wizard but he got beat up by a deadbeat slut?!" In a lucid moment, she looked pointedly to Anastasia. "He said she had a charm?"

"She must have. Probably relagite or espum. Either one would work." Ana's arms fell and she blurted out the words, then stifled a wince. It might not be wise for her hot-headed sister to know how to resist both Zarron's and her own greatest strength. "Relagite would be something she'd be wearing. It's a metal. Espum she'd have had to consume in advance." It fell out of her mouth. Not often did Evangeline have any interest in the kinds of things she studied. It felt good to be able to show off.

Duayne, the red fox, their younger, half-brother and the least dangerous person in the room hovered behind the raised voices and confrontation that preceded but now with the room clear, he hurried to Evangeline's side and threw his arms around her waist, looking up between his two sisters. "You really met mother?!" he said with a loud whisper, looking over his shoulder to confirm Zarron's absence.

"I wouldn't say we met her so much as we interrupted her having sex with Joseph!" Evangeline hissed. Duayne winced in disgust and Eva appeared to relish in his revulsion. "Your brother, Joseph. Her own son! Are there no lines that witch won't cross?"

"Why would Joseph do that!? Why didn't Zarron kill her, right then and there?" the young, red fox barked incredulously. Anastasia craned her head aside, listening. "Couldn't he make mother fall over dead with a blink?! Or a fireball?"

"Relagite or espum," She repeated, more shortly than last time. "Why would he try to kill her at all?"

Eva cut in. "He's probably HER best customer, Duayne. She sold her unborn children, he bought them and now grows them to sell off as slaves and servants. I just thought he would have more care for the ones he helped raise. Like us." She swallowed visibly and dipped her head toward the floor.

"Zarron said she sold him all her eggs twenty years ago." Anastasia said with a dismissive shake of her. "Zarron had other business with Mother. Business he didn't want you and I to hear."

"Well, they're both awful. I'm sure there are other evil schemes they're working on."

Ana looked between her three siblings: The black-haired Eva, simmering with rage and Duayne's pining need for the eldest sister's approval. Stone stood, blank-faced without orders and that's what it took to put him in motion. Per Zarron's command, he waited for Duayne to ask him for help with the sleeping, monster of an equine, still sprawled out on the foyer floor, unconscious. Her eyes darted back to Eva, the only one left she had any chance to reason with.

"Zarron gave away three of our brothers right in front of us and he didn't find that worth hiding. But a conversation with our mother needed to be a secret. Zarron wasn't expecting her. He thought she was an intruder at first! Remember?"

"I'm not going to try to make sense of a woman who sells her children for servants and slaves, Anastasia. Use your brain, for once."

Ana inhaled slowly through her nose and out through her mouth, the kind of calming, ritual breathing she learned as a child when mastering the energies required to perform magic. She closed her eyes and spoke distantly. "'Do I know you?'"

Evangeline's muzzle twitched before she recoiled in confusion. "Have you lost your mind? I'm your fucking sister."

"'Do I know you' was the first thing Mother said to Zarron when she saw him. Would she forget the face of the man she sold her eggs to?"

"Zarron must've been much younger and less disgusting way back then."

"He hasn't aged physically in our lifetimes but she didn't recognize him. She was in HIS house and didn't know it," Ana spoke matter-of-factly, glancing back to the now closed doors to the Ritual Room. "Why would she... be having sex in the living room if she expected us to find her? And why would she have sex with her own son? None of us had ever met mother until tonight, including Joseph. How would he recognize her? How would she recognize him?" She looked back to Evangeline pointedly. "Zarron is hiding something about mother. The only thing you know about her is whatever he wants you us to believe. And you hate her for it."

"She sold us all for slaves!" Duanye tried his best to add his outrage.

Ana sighed and looked to the young fox. "Did you hear what Marmalade said? A Runaway Princess. Zarron never said anything about that. If our mother was a Princess and she had the wits enough to defeat Zarron twice, wouldn't she have grabbed some jewels or gold before running away from her palace or castle? What royalty would be so desperate to sell the possibility of ever having children?"

"Because she didn't care about us!" Duayne whined.

"Or because she never wanted us." Evangeline snapped and spat. "She wanted to be a whore without the risk of pregnancy."

Anastasia shook her head. "It doesn't make sense, Eva. We're missing something important." She glanced to the far end of the hall to the Ritual Preparation Room. She was missing something else too.

Evangeline drew a quick, wide-eyed breath. "What about Joseph? Did I get that wrong too?!"

Ana looked back to her sister, considering for a moment. She swallowed and brought her hand to her mouth with a momentary puff of her cheeks. After a pause and a long blink, she nodded. "No, that happened. But I don't know..."

"Disgusting woman," Eva interrupted with a hiss and Ana turned away from them, toward the outside of the room.

"Perhaps," Anastasia gave a shrug and another impatient glance to the Ritual Room doors before excusing herself without announcement. She headed towards the nearest staircase, one of the smaller side ones toward her chambers.

"My sister. The know-it-all." Eva threw up her hands before spinning and storming off in the other direction, leaving Duayne and Stone alone in the foyer to manage the unconscious stallion.

"I know more than you," Anastasia muttered before starting up the stairs, holding the hand rail for support.

While reserved in demeanor, Anastasia's brilliance escaped none in Zarron's house, which irritated her older sister endlessly. Eva's destiny was to be wife where Ana would be a wizard.

A Prodigy of the Magical Arts, Anastasia was slinging spells from her toddler years and now in her late teens, she was as competent an apprentice and understudy as Zarron could have wished for. The only thing in the way of her being a truly perfect prodigy was some clumsiness in his study thanks to her over-abundant physique. After some accidents of expensive and rare things being swept off tables by her turning this way and that, the two of them had summoned the Duodecaplets to rearrange the tighter spaces of the room to better accommodate her. They also raised some of the lower surfaces to prevent her chest from brushing over any of them.

With such a sharp mind, few would be surprised to learn Anastasia's memory was a trap of which little knowledge escaped but the vixen had been wise enough, young enough to keep that fact to herself. Zarron needed to have total control of her training lest she become a threat to him and he had strict rules about what magics she could study. She was not allowed to visit the library unattended, though she could check out books he approved of, to read in her bed chambers on her own time.

To not endanger access to his collection, he couldn't know how quickly she consumed and retained knowledge from a spellbook. She played along with the plan since five years old, learning fast but not suspiciously so. She even learned to pretend-forget things at times to avoid suspicion and she had been doing so for long enough now that she was quite convincing.

Her biggest obstacle to mastery of magic came from the same place as her clumsiness in the lab: her chest was not only massive enough to clear workbenches with an unplanned turn but it's tremendous bulk limited the range of motion of her arms. So much so that a number of common spells became impossible to perform, thanks to the broadness and angles of gesture they required to cast. Some of those, she learned as a young girl and still committed to memory but were now denied to her, post-puberty.

Anastasia's thirst for magical knowledge was insatiable, making her an ideal student but also why Zarron insisted he traveled with her when he did: he said it was because his apprentice shouldn't leave his side but she knew he was afraid for her to be alone with his library.

She commonly learned every spell in a book she checked out when she was meant to be only studying one of them. Others she was only allowed to study while supervised. For a few, key spells she was determined to know and forbidden to learn, she found she could sneak books out of the library under her robes and hide them from detection with some simple, concealment magic and her very large chest.

She arrived at the top of the stairs with audible breath, the young woman soft from a life of study and little exercise but still carrying several stone of extra bulk. She kept on, along the second floor where the Duodecaplets had deployed, then down a hall, towards her room.

There was a spring in her step the moment she was out of view of the others. She'd studied all manner of spells but rituals tended to be more tribal knowledge and poorly documented. Whatever Zarron, Marmalade and three Duocaplets were about to do was probably not written down anywhere in Zarron's library.

She had to see it herself, with or without invitation. Her secret studies of things Zarron had explicitly forbidden prepared her well and the plan was forming before she reached her room.

Zarron didn't want her to learn to Teleport like he did with such ease, professing the many, well-known dangers but it was too powerful of an ability to ignore for a then, twelve year old Ana. After some months of being mindful of the Conjuring section, she found the book she needed and snuck it back to her room. The risks had not been exaggerated, neither from Zarron nor the repeated warnings in the spellbook: To teleport into an inanimate object could kill her instantly and to do so into another being would be worse.

As such, she had only tried in the same room and used target sigils for extra precision at her destination. The symbols provided a focus for the spellcaster and were meant for long distance, pre-planned travel as Zarron had done to get them here but for shorter trips, they theoretically acted as another layer of insurance. After learning Teleportation, she drew a few such sigils hidden around her bed chambers both in this house and in her room in The Pale Lands to practice. She tested teleporting to them with her eyes closed and back turned, to be sure that she could without risking actually going any distance or through any obstacles.

Zarron also refused to teach her any Metamorphosis spells. He cited their danger and but was also aware of what the at-the-time, violently pubescent vixen's intention would be with those kinds of spells and rituals when her breasts grew beyond all normality and kept growing until they dominated her young frame.

A fourteen year old Anastasia dug around on her own until she tracked down a suitable spell to permanently alter her own body. First, she tried it by growing her own head hair, which she promptly cut. Next, she changed its color, one way then another before changing back to her natural one. She tried her coat after that, doubling the length of her fur in a way she had yet managed to reverse before she attempted the big job: reducing her oversized breasts to something reasonable, so she might blend in among normal people someday.

That spell failed to do anything at all and she later learned her attempt to change herself was nullified against the more potent magic of Zarron's which made her that way in the first place. With her body fur inexplicably long and thick the next morning, she had no choice but to confess to that particular incident. He forgave her, professing sympathy to her motivation though he claimed to be unable to undo it himself. She didn't believe him but didn't press her luck. With a promise it would never happen again, she was forgiven.

It happened again. The failure to normalize her obscene and impaired figure led her to one of the most valuable spells she could steal: the ability to make herself both invisible and silent through archaic, runic magic. She found that one in a tattered, old book, one of many Zarron collected only to neglect: a tome of power runes of an ancient era. Reading it over time, his disregard made more sense. There existed more elegant and recent solutions to spellcasting than drawing symbols in blood or ash all over one's home, weapon, enemy or own naked body. Modern magic offered cleaner, faster versions of most of its contents but for true invisibility, there were no other options she'd found.

She considered Marmalade's words about magic for profit as she hurried into her room. With her accumulated sorcerer's knowledge, she had potential to make money and maybe a lot of it. Enough to support herself without Zarron, should the isolation of her existence ever become so dire to be worth cutting herself off from his vast, magical library.

With the door closed behind her, she unbuttoned her robe and shrugged it off. Her naked form was exposed to the empty room and her vanity mirror now, her thick fur a creamy ivory with a white belly and charcoal-colored socks from the elbows and knees down. Both her and Evangeline looked to be similarly patterned as their mother.

The robe stayed in her grip until she reached her mattress, where she stuffed it behind the pillows. Should anyone come to check on her, it should seem she was out of her room and not running around the hose naked. She kicked off her sandals, launching them under her bed.

With a firm gaze toward the unlit fireplace and with a flick of her fingers, the prepared stack of unburnt wood ignited into a full flame. Any elemental writing would work for the runes she would need: natural dyes, animal blood and squid ink were easy enough but had a tendency to run in her long fur. The accuracy of the lines mattered for keeping the results predictable so she preferred charcoal.

Not knowing when she might need to use rune magic, she always kept a few thin branches among the thicker logs on the fire, ready to write with. She let it burn for some moments before reaching in and taking two of them. She raised them to her muzzle and blew them out.

Anastasia hurried to the mirror, then turned and drew the first symbol, across her lower back. She always started with the most difficult one and drawing on her own back was the worst. The invisibility rune would have to be drawn twice: on her chest and on her spine, else she would only be invisible from one direction, thanks to some ancient technicality.