The Creators Ch. 16

WILLOWBUD

I weighed one hundred pounds even on a good day, and I was on my ninth drink. It seemed all those years as Night Eyes had turned my poor little liver into an alcohol processing facility because though I was very drunk, I wasn't nearly drunk enough. Maybe ten drinks would turn me into the free carnal animal that everyone else became so easily, but I rather suspected it would just exacerbate my need to piss. How I was going to do that would be another matter entirely. While a few attendees at this orgy seemed perfectly content to use one another as toilets (and a few seemed quite happy to be toilets themselves), I wasn't quite comfortable with dousing a woman with my golden waste. I would've just pissed into one of the many empty tankards I'd accumulated, but there was another problem with that. Sometime around my seventh drink, I'd lost control of my transformative functions. My gender was a slave to the sexual proclivities of those around me, which meant I was flashing between cock and cunt with such speed that my crotch was getting sore. The only way to pick one was for one of my sexualities to come to the forefront through arousal, and despite the angelic and devilish beauties all commingling their flesh around me, I was far from horny. I was in fact, doing a terrible job of drowning my anxiety with liquor.

I stumbled off my barstool and staggered my way to the casks. Grabbing another tankard from the shelf, I filled it to the brim with Brandon's foamy ale and struggled my way back up onto my stool. A woman was smoking a cigarette there, watching me from a face that was very similar to my own.

"What'd'you want?" I slurred at Justina.

"I've been watching you for a while."

"Why the fuck would you do that?" I growled and poured some cold ale down my throat.

"I enjoy observing an animal operate outside of its habitat."

I snorted. "When we first met, you were sitting at my bar, looking every bit a fish out of water. I guess you couldn't resist the chance for some poetry."

"By your logic, my next step should be to fuck you brainless."

"Do you really wanna trade places with me?" I asked, glaring at her from the corners of my eyes.

Justina opened her mouth, then glanced away.

I sighed and nursed my drink some more. "You better leave me alone before I ruin your night."

"I'm trying to salvage yours."

"I thought you'd be done trying to rescue me by now."

"I'm trying to save my own ass," she said and glowered at me. "I don't trust you not to flake on us the moment the pressure is on."

"Of course. Rest assured, dearest cousin, that I am fully committed to our expedited end at the hands of a vengeful god. You don't need to fuck me to prove my loyalty."

"You don't have any loyalty."

I laughed and took a swig. "You don't know a fucking thing about me, and you've made it quite clear that it's too late for introductions, so go use your tongue where it will be more useful."

Justina twisted her lips and punched out her cigarette. "I'm sorry," she muttered.

"Don't ever be sorry. Just leave."

"I just..." she took a deep breath, "...when I found you in that ash pile, I hated that you were a victim. I knew it then, but I didn't realize it until it happened to Mom. It wasn't your fault. It was never your fault."

"Fault doesn't matter. What happened, happened, and the reason was me. Now please..." I looked into my mug, and wondered why it was already empty, "...leave me alone."

I was glad that she didn't. For whatever reason, she stayed with me as I downed tankard after tankard, and reveled in my self-pitying self-punishment. I was a masochist for it, but Justina wasn't a sadist. As the orgy devolved into deeper and deeper perversions, she wouldn't let me drown in the depths of my masturbatory guilt. She held me up until the liquor finally pulled me under, and the world went black.

"Willowbud," Justina hissed in my ear. "Willowbud!" she hissed again and shook me. Had I traveled forward in time? Where was I? Who had puked in my mouth, and who the fuck had pissed in my pants?!

"Thank you for staying with her, Justina," an angelic voice said. "You can go now; Deja is waiting for you."

I opened my eyes. My head was beating like a drum, and my face was resting in a pool of vomit. Through my double vision, I glanced up at Astrid.

"You done having fun?" I croaked.

She rested a cool hand against my forehead. Oh, it felt like heaven. "I think it's time for us to leave."

"I've been saying that since we got here."

She laughed so sweetly. Her fangs were gone, her hair was blonde, and there was not a mark on her body. Her wings were white as ivory, and her pupils were round and human. The smile that radiated from her face was the same one she'd shown me a lifetime ago atop the Gratoran Wall.

"This is another you," I hissed. "I was never really there. That was someone else."

"Then who is this?" she asked, and transformed. Now her body was covered in tattoos, visions of battle and lust all painted across her perfect flesh.

"The avatar of my regret."

"I regret nothing, Willowbud," she said and transformed back into her newest rendition, her raven hair and black wings surrounding the white patterns upon her alabaster skin. "I own what you did to me. I own your cruelty, your apathy, your spite. I am different. I am the same. I am what you made me."

"Are you making a point?" I hissed at her. "How many times do I need to ask forgiveness?"

"It will never be enough," she whispered and lowered her face to mine. "And there will be some who will deny your apology until the last star fades, but I have never sought it. For every second of every day that I have been with you, I have loved you. I have loved your cruelty and sadism as much as I have loved your compassion and gentleness. To me, Willowbud, every hateful and tender act was one of love, and everything I did was the same. Perhaps you owe the world everything, but you owe me nothing. We have always been even. We always will be."

I couldn't tell if my drunken vision was seeing two Astrids. My tears had blinded me. "I can't be the woman you want me to be, Astrid. I'm just the drunkard in the corner watching everyone else live. Watching you live."

"You are my life."

"That's so fucking sad."

She kissed my lips and tasted the foulness of my breath. She slithered her tongue into my mouth to savor it. Her fist wrapped in my hair, she lifted my head from the table, and her other hand came around to hoist me from my stool and press my soiled crotch to her naked flesh. The world washed away, and the universe became the joining of our mouths and bodies, nothing but taste and sensation. Her cheeks were wet against mine, and her hot tears salinized my open lips. When she parted, her eyes were glazed, staring at me from those beautiful blue pools, so depthless and vulnerable.

"I love your sadness," she whispered.

She carried me through the paradisial rainforest of Ofan, where the moonlight bathed the palm trees and shimmered off the caldera lake. She stripped me of my clothes, and bathed me in hot-spring waters, singing lullabies in a dead Ionan language. She brought me up on the beach, and she curled me into her arms. I felt something new pressing against me. Something hot, and hard, and throbbing. When I looked into her eyes, there was no desire there; only a longing so deep that it seemed to smolder from her soul. I became female for her. She opened my legs, and with the expert caresses of her fingers, she made me ready. When she eased me onto her lap, I whimpered at the intensity of the pleasure. She stole the whimper from my mouth with a kiss and laid us upon the sand. There, I rode her, shifting my hips back forth and moaning to the lonesome moon. She harmonized with me, softly chanting my name all the while until she cried it out upon her final note, ascending with me in a mournful crescendo to fill me with her molten lust. I fell atop her, panting my exhilaration in time with her thundering heart until the cadence quieted to a thrum. She wrapped her arms around me and whispered sweet words into my ear. I wept silently, though not from grief. I did not know why I wept.

With the lunar glow bathing us in soft hues of blue, I nestled my face upon her breasts. Exhaustion took me. My eyes closed, but my legs stayed splayed around her, and her organ stayed hard inside of me. We fell asleep like that and made love to each other in our dreams.

TERA

I'd assumed that finding tiramisu in an orc war encampment would be nigh impossible. I was wrong. Apparently, tiramisu was a staple of orcish cuisine, which was just my fucking luck. I'd planned to lose Aiko in the endless quest to find gourmet dessert in the Gratoran Desert, but the first fat fuck with a spatula had it on ice. So with no exit plan and no opportunity, I decided that my best course of action would be to simply fade away once I'd delivered my package. It wouldn't be too hard. With Diamond shooting her piss like a rifle at any poor fool who caught her eye, I was sure to go unnoticed, and vanish naturally into the dark of night.

"Bullseye!" Diamond cackled, holding her cock in her hand as an orc dropped to the sand, a steaming hole between his eyes. "Saso, bring me more of Mommy's prisoners!"

Saso dragged another condemned orc from the lineup, and Diamond leveled her weapon.

"What was his crime, Saso?"

"Loitering. Your mother sentenced him to a day's hard labor."

"Oh, that's far too lenient for a crime as horrible as loitering! Rapists and murders at least get things done, but loiterers are just in the way!"

"Please, Water Dancer!" the orc blubbered. "Let me prove my worth to you! I can serve!"

Diamond cracked a smile. "Tell me a joke. If I like it, I'll make you the king of all orcs. If I don't like it..." Diamond shot the orc next to him through the chest, "...I'll still get a laugh out of you."

The orc shuffled in place, then cleared his throat. "I know one good joke, Water Dancer. An elf, a dwarf, and an orc are pissing off the side of a bridge. "The water sure is cold,' the elf boasts. 'And deep too!' proclaims the dwarf. The orc puts his cock back in his pants, and buttons his fly without a word. 'Well, orc,?' the elf asks. 'Have you nothing to say about the water?' The orc just mutters, 'the river takes a bend a few miles upstream.' The elf and dwarf laugh. 'Come now, orc, you take the joke too far!' the elf teases. The orc sighs and sheds a tear. 'Not anymore.' The dwarf looks at him incredulously. 'What do you mean?' The orc gives the pair a despairing glare. 'There are snapping turtles below the bridge.'"

Diamond burst out laughing, and quite by accident, shot a spurt of urine that blew the king of the orc's brains out of the back of his head.

"Whoopsie!" Diamond exclaimed, then leveled her black eyes on me. "I see my waitress has returned in a very timely manner. I suppose you think you deserve a big tip."

I glanced down at her cock. "I take it someone else is picking up the check?"

Diamond cackled. "Where do you keep those massive balls of yours hidden?" She turned to the samurai. "Kito! Aiko! Become chairs! Tera, come over here and have a nice little chat."

I sauntered over to the Water Dancer, fearing what a 'nice little chat' would entail. Kito and Aiko sat cross-legged on the ground, and Diamond made a seat of Kito's lap and beckoned me to do the same to Aiko. I made sure to grind my ass deep into her lap and sneak my tail between her thighs. She tensed and hissed when my appendage rubbed her rim, and I teased it with a leer over my shoulder before finally penetrating, and pushing deep. She held in her scream through gritted teeth, and I slowly began my way up her rectum and into her colon, savoring every twitch of her face as she tried not to react, tried to stare right past me, tried not to moan as the aphrodisiac-tipped tail squirmed in her tight filth, and rubbed between her virgin netherlips. I would've spent all night tormenting her until her mind broke and she gleefully threw off her white robe and joined her mother, but my desire for survival ranked just above my desire for vengeance. Kito proffered the tiramisu from my hands, and Diamond opened her mouth to be spoon-fed like a toddler as she gazed at me.

"I've been hearing stories about you," she said at length.

"Not any good ones, I hope."

Diamond grinned. "Not a one. You're a very, very naughty little devil, Tera. I'm glad I didn't kill you. I'll need someone to have fun with while I'm here."

"Julia likes to have fun."

Diamond snorted. "Mom is the most boring person in the world. I thought Corruption might've loosened her up a bit, but it's always preaching, preaching, preaching."

"So why come back then?"

Diamond sighed and tapped her head. "The lady upstairs has an agenda."

"And that is...?"

"Heck if I know. She leaves for a while, and then I go back up and try to free myself, then she comes back and it's all better. To be honest, I really hate going back there." She screwed up her lips. "I wish my non-corrupted self wasn't such a goodie-two-shoe."

I narrowed my eyes. "If Corruption leaves you, your meld should be broken."

"She corrupted a Tethered One and merged our minds to keep me prisoner." Diamond summoned the water from the air and formed the aqueous shape of a snake-haired woman. "She is so much more powerful than I am. There's no way to escape her."

"What in the fuck are you talking about? How can a Sentient do that?"

"Who said she's a Sentient?" Diamond quirked her brow. "Why do you think Mom's patterns are black?"

"Diamond... what you're saying is impossible. Only gods give patterns to others."

Diamond shifted the water in the air, changing the snake-haired woman into a profile of herself. "See any gods here?"

"That doesn't explain a damned thing. What happened behind that door?"

She dissolved the aqueous figure and shrugged. "I don't know. There's a gap in my memory. One second, I'm opening the last door, the next, I'm in Drastin. I'd say it's pretty obvious what happened though. After a million-billion years or whatever of being stuck in the astral plane, Corruption got it in her crazy head to be the meld that held together the bondage of two gods. Why? To steal my fricken power, that's why! Those patterns should be mine!"

I looked her over, puzzling over her explanation. It adequately filled in most of the gaps, but there was one glaring hole in the story. "Diamond," I said, "you were never a Creator."

Her smile turned dangerous. "I was always special. Corruption didn't make me; I made her. She stole from me. Remember that, Tera."

Someone shouted. Someone rang a bell. I whipped my head around. From the great maw of Droktinar, emerged a small white figure wreathed in black flame. A commotionand rose from all around, cheers and cries of jubilation, trumpets, and drums all sounding at once.

"She has done it!" Yuntok exalted, tears streaming down his face as he held his wife and daughter. "She has brought us home just like she promised!"

"Praise be to the Holy Mother!" shouted a cleric.

"Praise be to Sister Julia!"

"Praise be!" thundered the crowd, and the sound echoed across the desert as the news swept through the millions, carrying the euphoria of an orphaned people who had finally found their place in the world. Julia raised her arms to greet them, then turned around, and exploded like a black supernova. A great wall of heat shot from her flowed into the mouth of Droktinar, and then erupted from beneath the earth like a volcano, sending the shattered bowels of the orc city miles into the air. The shockwave blasted through the crowd, sending everyone careening to their backs with the force of the infernal gale. In the wake of the deafening roar, there was only stunned silence. The citizenry of the Gratoran Desert stared at the black mushroom cloud that had once been their last hope for civilization, then down at the god who had led them there.

"Holy cow!" Diamond giggled at me, sprawled out atop the toppled Kito. "Now that's more like it!"

The ash began to snow upon us as Julia turned around, and raised her arms. "Children of Gratora!" she called. "We have journeyed long together, but I have journeyed alone for far longer." She paused and set her eyes upon Diamond, and though a smile broached her red lips, she did not stall her sermon a second more. "My journey began when I was a child, and stood over the ashes of my mother and father. It was then that I first felt the Holy Mother. When I was in Sister Septina's orphanage, I joined the Maternal Order, and through my piety and discipline, I learned self-restraint and control. I learned... lies. These lies infected me, shaped me, caged me. These liars made me believe that my gifts were the work of evil, and yet, none of them had ever felt God before. I have. I felt her when I scorched my mother and father's flesh. I felt her when I burned Passion alive. I felt her when I turned Drastin to ash. I told myself this feeling must be the devil's work, for the Maternal Order taught me that pleasure and euphoria are sins, and I feel such delights when I ignite. I did not know until now that I was wrong."

"Children of Gratora, I have led you astray. On our journey here, I was so confident of my interpretation of God's own will, but I was still not ready to hear her words. Still, she led me here, and she tested me. I walked through the bowels of Droktinar, and I faced the effigy of Honor, and I burned the liar alive. I opened the door to the spirit of your people, and I saw the mockery he had made of you, and turned his realm into embers." There were tears in Julia's eyes, and they ran in thick black rivulets down her face, yet her smile was euphoric. "Children of Gratora, my lonesome journey is finally over. For from the embers of Wrath's realm, the seraph Corruption emerged! And upon her flesh, is my mark, FOR I AM SOULBOUND TO GOD'S DELIVERER! AND FROM THE SERAPH'S LIPS, DID GOD SPEAK HER HOLY MESSAGE IN CRYSTAL CLARITY! DAMN THE WALLS OF MAN! DAMN THEIR KINGDOMS AND THEIR TEXTS! DAMN THE VERY LANGUAGE THAT THEY SPEAK! BURN IT ALL DOWN UNTIL THE CHILDREN OF THIS WORLD ARE FINALLY FREE!"

Postlude: The Greatest Leap

CORRUPTION

Xaya sat in my lap and purred like a kitten as I absentmindedly stroked her. Though I detested written language, my other hand was occupied with a book. It was a reinterpretation of one of Wisdom's most complex ideas, now condensed down from a mountain-sized tree into a five-hundred-volume encyclopedia. I flipped through the pages with my thumb, scanning thousands of words in a second, digesting all of the monotonous drivel the former academic had written on the subject of my interest.

I had never truly understood the power Julia possessed until it was erupting around me. Untamable, unyielding energy so great that it could scorch the very thoughts of man, and the woman who wielded it was just as volatile. I needed her destruction to cleanse the astral plane of the last two Sentients, but her daughter alone was more than capable of sowing the chaos I required in the realm below. Her water dancing would bring castles crumbling, and her kiss would send the liberated souls streaming from the wreckage. My power was so great that I could now pass my gift like a virus, and with practice, Diamond would soon discover the ability for herself. When the horde broke through Droktin's Pass, it would bring my liberating plague with it, but I didn't know how much longer I could play with Julia's fire before it betrayed me.

She was dogmatic, Julia was, and jealous. Just beneath the surface of her soul, her pain raged interminably, screaming the names of Lucilla, Passion, Mom, and Dad. I nurtured that pain like it was upon my breast, for that pain was our love, but that love was so very dangerous, so very close to a truth that would kill me. Julia Gendian had finally reached the end of the Maternal Path; she had seen the face of God. If she ever knew it, our love would shatter, our bond would snap, and I would be dead. She already knew the name 'Vitanimus.' The secrets were well-hidden, but they weren't lost. Knowing that name was the greatest leap one needed to take before learning the name 'Petranumen.' And with each passing day, my infection wore at her sanity. She had a strong mind, much like Tera, and she could endure me for a while, but eventually, she would fall, and then there would be no controlling her fire. If Julia learned the truth about me, then death would never need to be conquered, for there would be no more life to feed it. That was why the Heat Bringer needed to be gone. Not dead, but gone. Only one of us needed to be bound for me to survive.