Wish Granted: The Shadows

***Author's Note***

This story is a companion piece to my earlier story "Wish Granted" and any stories in the "Wish Granted" series.

You don't have to read those to understand this story. They are all meant to make sense individually, as well as together.

This story features a character who has experienced FGM (Female Genital Mutilation).

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Hanuni took a deep breath.

What if this was a mistake? What if everything went wrong?

Her nearly-black skin was cloaked in dark fabric, her short hair covered. Fingers fumbling. Chest tight.

Another deep breath. Another. Another.

She pulled the curtain and crept inside.

“I was wondering when you’d show up.”

An old woman of hickory skin and elaborate silk garments sat at the small table.

“...but I didn’t tell her I’d show---”

“Oh, I’m just kidding!” the woman cackled. “I knew exactly when you’d arrive.”

“What--”

“Sit.”

The young woman complied.

“It is very good to meet you, mama. How are you--”

“Shhh…” the old woman held a finger to her lips, “No formalities. I know what your friend told you. I know that she saw a con artist from just the other side of Nairobi and she’s convinced she saw the face of God.”

She made a gagging sound and continued.

“Well, you were going to come here and desire what I have to offer.”

“You’re not the woman who was here before…?”

“I’m a genie!”

Hanuni screamed as the old woman appeared behind her.

“Who-- are you… are you a demon?”

“Genie. We’ve been over this. I’m a genie and you’re a newly-married twenty-year-old who longs for a sexual pleasure away from the agony. You mourn what has been stolen from you.”

“You don’t know that…”

“I know you have constant nightmares. Feeling of a fiery light scorching your very soul. Exhaustion. Fear. Arousal. Shame. But I can help you.”

The two appeared in the midst of a dim nothingness. Hanuni was entirely still, burning in her chest and face.

Breathe. Just breathe.

Wherever she was could hardly be described as a “where” at all.

Not the slightest hint of a building existed, nor of natural scenery. The nothingness went on endlessly in what seemed like every direction, yet no direction at all.

Even the concept of a floor or ground was effectively meaningless as Hanuni crept ever-so-slightly across the nowhere. She rose and descended, walking rightside up and upside down simultaneously, if such things even existed in this void.

“What is this place?”

“It isn’t.”

The genie appeared to do some sort of dance with an impossible several-toned humming.

Even in the dim light, a shadow grew behind Hanuni. She whipped around, only to see further nothingness, and soon an even larger shadow formed.

Still, nothing showed behind her.

Then a warm air flowed through her. Her muscles relaxed. She giggled at nothing in particular.

“Well, I won’t be far, if you need me, if you don’t…”

And the genie disappeared before her eyes.

Darkness trailed down Hanuni’s face, circling around her neck and melting over her torso.
She was nude. How or when no longer mattered as the shadows cascaded to her navel, filling it with endless warmth.

Hanuni was floating, cradled by the air. Shadows pooled in her eyes and through her nose, deep into her throat and soon her lungs.

How effortlessly she inhaled them, consumed them as they consumed her. They drifted lower still, streaming toward her lustful sex.

Though the practice was becoming increasingly taboo and thankfully less common, Hanuni had not been spared from the cut long ago.

Breathe. Just breathe.

The dark, warm air soon glided into her, filling her sex completely.

Further shadows slid into her bottom, and somehow shadows connected inside of her. The shadows streamed down her throat, exploring her organs, wrapping around her lungs with every bit of shadow soon touching each other.

Higher and higher she rose as the dark air spun her and began to contort her features evermore.

Her feet quivered, overtaken by the hot rush of blackening winds. It soared up her legs and to her thighs, tight and tense. It vibrated deep within her core. Her body twisted into itself again and again, her eyes completely blind in the darkness.

She gripped her own heart in her hand, which in turn was grasped by her feet, her eyes in her mouth, her mouth by her hips. Her insides were out, her outsides were in, her mind was everywhere and nowhere.

She saw nothing. She heard nothing. She felt everything.

Her entire body pulsated in the fiery silence of the shadows, whipped around in a divine, maddening hurricane.

Higher and higher and ever-faster, her soundless screams pelting every part of the endless nowhere, her boundless pleasure commanding it into a chaos of lust.

Her sex pounded. She couldn’t breathe.

And it didn’t matter.

The shadows relentlessly burrowed into her, pleasuring her in every which way until a light within her grew and grew then burst violently through the void, her mortal form shattered on the groundless, floorness nowhere.

Hanuni did not feel what happened directly after this. Her thoughts, for the time, did not exist.

She opened her eyes once more and found herself back at the earlier table.

But she felt lighter. Softer. Cleaner.

Better.

“Things went well?” the genie asked.

“Things…”

Hanuni held to the word for a moment. She lingered on it, her eyes wandering in the tented space of before.

“I… Wha…” she breathed softly, running fingers along her head, as if to make sure it was there. “I don’t… Mama, who… are you?”

“I’m a genie.”

“But…” her eyes slowly trailed the room at nothing in particular. “I think you’re an angel.”

“All right.”

“Are you an angel?”

The genie gave a sly smile and a small chuckle.

“I’m a genie.”

And the genie was gone. But Hanuni was entirely relaxed, and slept better than she ever had before.