Pairs of Pumpkins #04: The Unseen and Unsteady

She had seen the other two brothers post-ritual and neither had an obvious injury. Looking around, she noticed Marmalade's left hand was wrapped in a bandage as she used her right index finger to dip into the blood. Steadily then, she begin to draw on the still-stoic half-brother's chest. It was the same rune the second brother had worn and once finished, she dismissed Zarron with wave of her hand. He dipped his head and stepped back. Anastasia had never seen him obey anyone! Marmalade blew out a strong breath leaning forward, over his chest.

"Ammman zuuuuuk zalasta," the feline steepled her hands in front of her muzzle.

"Aman zuk zalasta," Anastasia repeated in her head, committing it to memory. It was an ancient language that existed only in magic now but some of the words were familiar from other, runic spells. They translated loosely to 'Temple of the Mind.'

"Joh tah zutana," Marmalade continued, reaching skyward then grasping and tugging down.

The vixen studied her, repeating the instructions. "Joh tah zutana. Grasp from the moon."

"Shalah Ran Quantulara." Feline hands clapped together before pulling in, thumbs to the bottom of her sternum.

"Shit." Anastasia felt her mouth move but no word came out. Yet another ritual that she would never be able to physically perform, whatever it did. The frustration was familiar for her but it couldn't hurt to know it anyway. 'Shalah Ran Quantulara. Thunderclap to Temple of the Heart.'

"Zuuuuk Alasta Olesta!" Marmalade reached out and planted her left hand over his heart before covered her own with her right.

"Zuk Alasta Olesta. Your heart. My heart."

"Zuk Alaste Calisima!" Her hand on his heart moved to pointed index finger, pressed between his eyes.

"Zuk Alaste Calisima." Anastasia thought through the translation. "Your... fishbucket is mine?" Such was the risk of dead languages.

With another clap, the incantation was over then Marmalade was up on all fours. Her hand reached down to grip the young canine's eager cock and she guided him up to meet her body.

"No interruptions," the lithe sorceress commanded Zarron. He gave a small nod to acknowledge.

With the ritual complete and secured to memory, Anastasia could now just watch and wait for the effect. She stepped around behind them for a better view while the pointed tip of his erection brushed the wet fur around her freshly-used feline sex. Her jaw fell open as Marmalade drifted back and nestled it against her lips before she started to sink down.

The curious vixen planted her hands on the altar and leaned in to watch as the feline's body began to swallow the taper of that slick, red monster, inch by inch, the vixen's eyes growing as quickly as the feline was stretching. She heard the slimy, failed adhesion of fluids meeting fluids and as the apex of his thickness neared her body, the building strain of Marmalade to fit his size inside her.

She didn't notice that her hand had fallen back to her vixenhood and fingers pushed into her warmth while she hovered near the strenuous coupling as her first witness to sex. She moved to the side of the altar, minding her breasts to gaze on the brother she had fawned for, his attention now lost in lust with the sharp-tongued witch.

He was loud in his pleasure but Marmalade scolded him with short breath. "Don't push. I do the work," she commanded, sounding strong despite the clear strain in her face and body. It wasn't easy for her to take him, that much was obvious. She knew her brothers were especially big and perhaps felines were less suited to larger sizes. Maybe it was just her? Mother must have taken the whole thing with Joseph as no room remained between them and she seemed to have been mostly enjoying herself. At least until their interruption.

Anastasia's thumb was pinched along her straightened forefinger with her clitoris trapped between. Her middle and ring fingers slipped underneath, trying to imagine what it would feel like for such a girth to push into her. She was a teenager with the hormones that came with that but she'd also been quite sheltered from the company of men outside of her family. This urge felt stronger than ever before and her half-brother looked like a stranger, here in the nude. She stepped around behind them for a closer look at the actual penetration, the part that thinking of made her stomach turn.

Marmalade was over the thickest of his girth and sounded like it now, with more grunting than groaning from her throat and lungs. "Hurry up and cum, you oaf," the feline complained and the half-wolf winced at the command. Maybe the blank expressions afterward had been justified after all.

There was a thrill of excitement, hovering near the couple, unaware of her and her illicit activities. Perhaps there were other opportunities she'd been missing around the house to see what she wasn't meant to. Her brothers bathing? Until Evangeline and Zarron were married, there wasn't likely be any more sex and that idea was a lot less appealing than this.

The vixen pushed her groin into the cold, stone corner of the altar, applying pressure below her fingers. Her chest heaved over hungry lungs, unseen and unheard by all. She glanced over to Zarron who looked just as transfixed but he showed no obvious arousal or self-stimulation. He was watching like he did one of his spells or experiments and she quickly realized he was the most uninteresting thing in the room.

Sex pulled her eyes back as Marmalade and the Duodecaplet moved easier than before, with the rhythm of a ship, rocking at sea. Warmth started to grow in Anastasia's lower belly and she panted excitedly, looking over the other three, oblivious to her while her body felt ready to burst in ecstasy. A wicked smile of disbelief burst over her muzzle, surprised to find an extra thrill in having an unaware audience. She held her breath for a long moment as the heat swelled, finally boiling over. It formed a wave of bliss, like a cup being poured until it overflowed. She tensed her every muscle, bracing before the tingling warmth the shook her, shocking, soothing ripples flooding out from her sex in all directions. Her knees weakened and she planted her free hand on the altar, leaning on it for support, brows high and her lungs ravenous for air.

"I should pull out! I'm going to cum!" the brother declared with a squirm but Zarron snapped to attention. He reached out to hold the half-wolf's shoulders down, alarming him. Marmalade reacted with a panic and brought her weight down on him as well, wincing as the motion pushed him deeper into her.

"You pull out now and your mind, your soul... your very essence is just a splatter on the floor," she growled through gritted teeth.

Alarmed, Anastasia took a shaky step back, watching the two of them in profile again. The canine struggled but not enough to overshadow an inevitable, teenage orgasm. The feline rode him determinedly, clenching in a growl as she thrust down on him, again and again.

He managed to stammer out a singular "What?"

She didn't answer and his body didn't make her wait any longer. He tremored and gasped before his fur stood on end, crackling with static. Was that normal? What followed was certainly not.

Thin wafts of steam rose from his eyes to thickened into an unnatural, bluish color and increasingly opaque, like smoke. His gaze snapped to hers as the wisps snaked between clumps of his damp, matted fur before an entire, ethereal doppleganger of his form started to lag behind his convulsions. It fell further out of sync with him, drifting slowly skyward, moving with more of it's own agency, independent of the physical body. But the blueish, spirit canine didn't get any higher than the top of her head before it was caught in her attraction. Only then did the ghostly canine look down, cupping his ethereal muzzle with ethereal paws as what was presumably his soul or essence, was witnessing his body from the outside.

The wide-eyed, convulsing, physical being beneath her fell limp while the essence that had separated from it flailed now, reaching desperately but unable to hold anything in intangible hands. It was turned around in place as if by unseen winds, tossed about while squirming to resist. The struggle was futile and his pose was forced into reluctant conformity with the feline's posture. Wrestled into submission by an incorporeal adversary, it became one with her.

Her short, orange coat rose with static then and the spirit canine faded into nothing, shrinking into her. The crackle of energy filled the room beyond, lifting Anastasia's fur as well. Marmalade slumped forward, panting, her hands braced on the breathing but otherwise still, half-wolf she straddled. His expression was not post-coital but every bit as blank as the other two of them had been.

That was the effect of the ritual. His mind. His soul. His very essence. It belonged to Marmalade now. Just like their two brothers before him. Like the five other siblings at the sorceress' home soon would be.

Such magics were dangerous and forbidden, Zarron had told her many times. From a unscrupulous man like him, the warning had special weight: magic should not be used to enslave. His twisted morality had allowed many hundreds of her brothers and sisters to be sold as children, servants and slaves but none had been sent off, sapped of their free will, even when other buyers had requested it. Even he seemed incapable of something this heinous. At least until she saw him act as an accomplice to this.

Anastasia stepped back, reeling in an urge to escape, the dark energy of the room infecting her. Her hand held her abdomen, which was churning fiercely again. None of this was sexy anymore. It was horrifying and the worst thing a young woman afraid of sex could see.

Her next, blind step missed it's mark. She wobbled back on the second level, off balance yet again. It was only getting worse. Her stomach sloshed as her chest did and she caught the step but the one after that disappeared with her gaining inertia. She was falling now. And midway through, she was also throwing up.

The naked, teenage vixen stumbled off the lowest level of the platform, her every limb leaving the ground entirely. She crashed backwards into the perching gargoyle, her immense, wobbling breasts coming into her own view after a small amount of vomit escaped her mouth but was outrun in mid air. She hit the statue's pedestal hard and it fell back, then the gargoyle tipped forward. Zarron and Marmalade both turned their heads in slow motion, the gargoyle clipping her shoulder on the way down, shattering on the stone floor.

Fire swelled in Zarron's eyes in recognition, a brewing storm of destructive rage.

"Aaaaaannnnna..."

He was calling her name as he raised his hands, clenching them so tightly that they tremored. Never had she seen his total loss of control. She didn't know his true power or age but she knew that she was in terrible, terrible trouble to witness him in such an fury.

"...Staysssshhhhh...."

Marmalade was still frozen in the fact that she had been deceived at all, reminding the young vixen that for any lack of spine Zarron may have had with the young-looking and pretty ritualist, he was the veteran sorcerer in the room.

Ana needed to leave. Somewhere safe. Anywhere. This moment was the last advantage she would have. Maybe ever. Magics churned around his fists, swirling, brownish maelstroms of a spell he had never revealed to her. Dimensional magic? Destructive unweaving? Would he send her to a pocket realm or scramble her body like an egg yolk? Teleport her into the stratosphere and let her fall to her death? He wasn't in a state she could trust for any kind of reasonable punishment. Her curiosity spiked even with her life in danger but the adrenaline retook her focus.

Escape. Safety. The sigil she had drawn in her bed chambers! But that would only buy her a few more moments. Unless it was her bedroom in the Pale Lands, so many miles away. He didn't know that she could Teleport! If he had found the hidden sigils, she would have been disciplined for learning forbidden magic. They must be intact. He couldn't know she could teleport and he'd said earlier that her mother, Portia had destroyed every teleport sigil in the house. Every one he knew existed.

"...aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!"

It was her last chance before her fate was in Zarron's hands. If her mother had somehow found the seal and destroyed it, she wouldn't go anywhere. If her mother and brother were standing in the room over the sigil at that moment, all three of them would be merged into a monstrosity of interdimensionally overlapped flesh and bone before dying, either mercifully fast or in torturous, prolonged agony. That chance was far less likely to end her life as whatever Zarron was about to do.

Magic swirled. She was out of time.

Anastasia closed her eyes and nodded sharply, focusing on the sigil in her mind.

The world turned white. Then black.

Silence.

At first, she could not open her eyes. She felt nothing for a moment but feared the worst regardless. Was she in a pocket dimension? Did she still have eyes at all or did he turn her into the gargoyle she had shattered?

As the adrenaline thinned, sharp pain throbbed from her shoulder where the gargoyle had hit her. She at the very least, still had a shoulder and so one eye cracked cautiously open.

It was her bed chambers, in The Pale Lands! Thousands of miles from her Master's Estate in a room smelling of ozone, she had successfully teleported farther than ever before. She gave an excited smile of disbelief before collapsing on the floor. "There isn't a safe way back to the Pale Lands..." she repeated what he'd said after fleeing from her mother the second time. Her grin popped with a laugh. "Not for you, Zarron." It was a relief to hear her own voice again.

She rose with the usual effort and looked at herself in the full body mirror in one corner of her bedroom. Breaking the spells had erased the runes from her body as expected and all trace of the charcoal drawings was gone. She turned to her wardrobe and fetched another purple robe, this one a heavier material, more suitable for the harsh winter that awaited her outside.

Once dressed, she stepped out into the hall. "Joseph? Mother?" she called out but there was no answer. She descended the spiral stairs with her usual care, down to the main floor. She yelled for them several more times but there was no reply. A quick Detection spell revealed that the house was in fact, empty. In the time it took for the familial arguments and three rituals, Portia and Joseph had already packed and gone.

Her stomach gurgled again, reminding her of the time since her last meal, accelerated from the unintended emptying of it. She walked over to the couch and slumped down, only to realize that the corner legs of it had broken off and the whole thing was crooked, including now her.

Anastasia sighed and folded her arms atop the giant shelf of her ungainly bosom. She looked around and blew out a breath. She was far, far away from her Master or the fate he had planned for her. Quite unexpectedly, she was free.

"Okay. Now what?"

THE END