Witchsong Ch. 01

Author's note: I have a decent part of this half-plotted out, but always willing to take thoughts on what readers would like to see, or what they think might be hot...after all, it is, ultimately, an erotic story. No guarantees anything suggested will be added, but I'll definitely use it to fuel the writing machine. Everyone involved in the erotic content of this story is over 18. Don't like don't read warning: this story is going to contain elements of mind control, transformation, non-consent/reluctance, brother/sister incest, mild erotic horror, and will also have male/male pairings as well as female/female and male/female. Also, obviously, non-human, but that's a given so I hope no one is going to take me to task in the comments about that. I haven't decided who will end up paired with who, but all genders are fair game.

This first part doesn't quite show off the non-human part, but there are plenty of hints as to what it's going to involve. More to come...

#

The Waypoint was a sandstone building, tucked away in the forest deep enough that visitors were rare but not so deep that the sunset, brightly burning, didn't paint the walls with gold. Merrilee and her brother, Keppet, sat upon the walls this sunset, sharing their bread as they watched the sky darken. Around them, the bustle of the night's preparations continued: the guards set the great firepits upon the walls to burning as the Waypoint's wizard checked the wall's wardings. Neither chore could be skipped or hurried. They were all that stood between the sanctuary Waypoint offered to travellers and denizens alike, and the terrible dangers that lurked in the forest surrounding.

"I don't think the stories are true," said Keppet again when Merrilee didn't answer him the first time he said it, busy watching the wizard working below. "If there are so many witches in the forest, why haven't we ever seen one? And why's a witch worse than a wizard?"

Again, Merrilee didn't answer him, Keppet biting into his bread as a rare temper chewed at his mood. His sister, twenty-three and moon-eyed for the daft wizard below in his frayed robes and his smudged spectacles and his way of conjuring coins from children's ears while looking just as shocked as the children that it worked, was a source of great joy and frustration to him. They were both wards of the Waypoint, orphans of the forest brought here for safety nineteen years ago, never to leave. It was a fate that he rebelled against; while Merrilee was content to stay where they'd been raised in love and comfort, dreaming of making little wizards with the goofy creature assigned to their home, Keppet wanted to see what else was out there. Past the forests and the mountains.

There was a whole world to see beyond their sandstone cage.

"I'm just saying, Merry, I think--" Keppet began.

Merrilee finally spoke, showing that she'd been listening to him all along: "No, you don't," she said with soft, mild rebuke, fixing him a long that was loving but tired. "You never think. You're going to go thoughtlessly into ruin, my buck, that's what you're going to do. Fancy thinking a witch is anything like a wizard." She gave her man below another lingering stare, cheeks pinking in a way to make Keppet sick. Wizard Felix annoyed him to pieces. It wasn't right that--if the stories were true--their safety relied on someone so silly. "Wizards are human, for one."

"Seems like if I wanted to make people hated, I'd start by telling everyone they're not human," Keppet countered. "Or I'd tell them that they steal babies away and change good humans into beasts. The pictures of witches in the books the sisters showed us in school look as human as me or you, or as human as Felix."

"That's purposeful," said Merry. "But they're not, really. Not anymore. They only used to be. And that's what'll happen to you if you keep getting ideas about going outside the walls! If they catch you and think you're pretty enough, they'll give you to their patron to turn you witchy too. And if they don't have a mind to let you keep yours, they'll make you a familiar and you won't even have a brain left to be stupid with. Seems like an awful lot to lose because you happened to have a thought that you're cleverer than everyone who came before you."

Keppet's turn to blush, he knew, though his was from the shame of being so gently dressed down by someone he loved so much.

"I personally think Keppet would make a very handsome familiar," came a dry, sardonic voice from behind them, the siblings turning to see who was joining them: Keppet's closest friend, Jude, and his wife, Hollybrook. Jude had their toddler slung under his arm like a sack of spuds, the boy upside-down and giggling; Hollybrook, heavily pregnant, carried their newest within her. As Jude flung himself down with lackadaisical grace next to Keppet, he tossed the toddler into Keppet's lap, who tickled the child to make him giggle more. "Don't you think, darling?"

"Oh, yes," said Hollybrook. "I hear they turn their familiars into animals as they hex them. What animal do you think Keppet would be if a witch got him, Merry?"

"I'd hate to think," was Merry's uncomfortable answer, looking away. But Jude missed her discomfort.

"A squirrel for sure," he teased. "Nothing in his head but forgotten acorns rattling about."

Hollybrook elbowed him. She, at least, had seen Merry's expression. "Enough of that," she declared as Jude, quietened, joined Keppet in over-exciting the child. "I heard the sisters gossiping yesterday that a certain wizard was asking one of them about a certain acolyte's intentions."

"Oh!" Merry almost covered her blush but stopped herself and, somehow, retained what dignity she had left. "He didn't, did he? Oh the cheek of him. He'll make us the gossip of the Waypoint."

"Seems to me like he's trying to get ahead of the gossip because the gossip has you bedding him on every available surface," said Hollybrook sensibly. "Mercy knows how fast the sisters will have you tied to him if that happens."

Keppet pulled a face at Jude, who made one back. It was a relief to Keppet that Jude might be a man married now but he hadn't grown up that much; stuck as they were in the middle of nowhere, many of them married young, if only to avoid falling afoul of the scorn of the sisters who ran the Waypoint. The sisters, a virgin order devoted to the protection of travellers, were also devoted to the cause of minimising unwanted babies. Jude had been caught in Hollybrook's bed two years ago, and the sisters had had them both under an altar before the infirmary nurse had even confirmed Hollybrook's resulting pregnancy. It was a warning enough to Keppet, who planned never to let the sisters catch him charming a lady out of her pants. Getting married would cage him just as surely as the walls already did.

"Imagine getting married to him because of some old biddy's wagging tongue when you haven't even kissed the man yet," Keppet said. Jude's toddler, a prodigal thief, had lifted the bread right out of his hands and was making a terrible mess of eating it. Keppet let him.

Merry lifted her nose, refusing to bite on that. Keppet hoped that was because she was being snooty and not because her and the silly wizard had been doing daft things in the corners of the Waypoint. He didn't want his sister married off by force either; he wanted her to come with him, to be free and see the world.

He'd wanted Jude to come too, but see how that had turned out. He doubted his friend would risk the forest now he had one born and another to come. And he couldn't help but resent Hollybrook, sweet and funny as she was, for her part in the separation to come, just the same as he resented Felix--silly, charming, lovable, goofy Felix, who was the favourite of every child at the Waypoint and who always had a kind word for everyone--for the way he threatened to take Keppet's sister from him too.

In the forest surrounding the walls, which were no longer painted with sunset's gold and, now, instead, were a dusky nightfall lavender, a wolf lifted his voice in song. They all listened, even the toddler, who drooled on his mouthful of bread as he stared, enraptured, at the trees below. It was a strange cry, that wolf howl, like no other Jude had heard. It truly almost was like song, as though if he listened closer he'd hear words in the air, maybe singing about love or travel or a life of freedom... he strained to listen and felt the oddest, lightest feeling in his head, a whispering catch to the howl as it continued: the promise of words becoming a promise of something else that set his heart beating quick and a small, bright fire in his veins that made him want to drop from the wall and walk towards it. To meet the singer and bare his throat.

"If a witch caught me for her pet, I hope she makes me into a wolf," said Jude into their startled quiet, shattering it with ease. Keppet shook himself sensible again, heart still beating hard. He had no idea what had come over him. "Even if I'm to be possessed, I'd like to retain my charming air of mystery."

"You'd be lucky if they let you be a flea," was Merry's sharp retort, which was so unexpected from her that the four of them laughed, all their unease left behind the wake of such a bright sound.

#

Keppet had strange, fleeting dreams that night. He dreamed of the four of them together in Jude's sleeping quarters, before the toddler was even a thought. In his dream, Keppet was lying on the rug watching Jude dance with Hollybrook in the firelight, which cast grasping shadows on their entwined bodies. The only light in the room was the fire, the only sound the crackle of heated logs slowly slumping together. Merry sat on the other side, visible sometimes, not always. Keppet watched Jude's face, his lazy smile, his long brown hair loose around his face as he never wore it now. He was a thin, angular man made of sly points and idle glances, his dark eyes set in a pale face, wide mouth always smiling or on the brink of it. He'd passed that ease of smiling onto his son. Hollybrook, by comparison, was also tall and dark-eyed, but her hair was red and her smiles, when they came, anxious.

Half-waking, Keppet turned in his blankets, feeling the sheets clinging to his sweaty body. Even this late into fall, with winter's cold coming, he slept naked. Half-roused, he noted only that he was aroused before tumbling back into the cloying grasp of his firehot dreams. Jude and Hollybrook, still dancing, but they weren't dressed as they usually were in rough but workable wool-spun clothes, cut modestly: Jude wore nothing but his pants, beltless, held to his slim hips with nothing but Keppet's desire not to see his friend naked; Hollybrook wore a dress so thin he could see everything below the sheer gown, the flat plane to her stomach which in this dream had never been rounded by pregnancy, the endless coltish legs she wrapped around Jude as he lifted her, her round shoulders, the muscles in her arms clearly defined, her breasts tight and round with the nipples hardened to points.

Keppet stared at her breasts, aroused now in his dreams too.

The dream changed. His friends danced closer, falling out of rhythm with the music Keppet knew must be there even if he couldn't see it. Suddenly, it was barely a dance at all, as the fire wrapped their bodies in claws of light and Jude slid his hand up Hollybrook's thigh, lifting the dress as he went. Up, and up, and up, and up, until she was wrapped around him with the dress lifted above her hips, Keppet dry mouthed as he stared at the flickering glimpse of red hair briefly shown to him between her legs as she rode his friend, as she undid his belt to bare him to her, as she threw her head back and made a sound like a wolf's howl.

The fire darkened. Smoke in the room, making Keppet's eyes water. It writhed around the two as they fell into abandonment, tumbling down into a feral kind of fucking like none Keppet had ever imagined. There was a wolf behind Hollybrook's eyes as she bit Jude's throat and he snarled back, fur blurring his smile away and leaving it cruel.

Horrified as blood began to stain the rug below them, Keppet staggered up, unable to look away as Hollybrook sheathed herself on Jude's hard cock, taking him between her legs even as she drank from his throat. As Jude, in turn, bathed himself in her blood in return, his eyes without any humanity.

Keppet, realising he was naked and erect himself, tried to leave the sight, to walk away from this dream, but no matter which way he turned, they were there, the wolf was howling; and then he looked past them and saw his sister bared too, kneeling as she looked upon Jude and Hollybrook's ruin and her hands before her in a picture of perfect piety. As though praying for their salvation. Except she was naked, her breasts smaller than Hollybrook's, the nipples petite and brown, her hair black instead of red, her eyes green instead of dark, the snatch of hair between her legs brown too.

With a surge of heat and dream-driven lust, Keppet's cock jerked upright with longing. He was horrified and, in a vague, discordant way, appalled at how he responded to even a figment of his sister. But still he looked upon her as she bowed forward, as though to genuflect, as though to hide her body from his horrified, hungry eyes. Still he looked as a shadow came out of the smoke and, in one firm movement, drove itself inside her.

The same cry of feral wolfish pleasure fell from his sister's dreaming lips as she looked straight into Keppet's eyes, face twisted into inhumanity, teeth lengthening in her open mouth, as the man draped in shadows drove himself deep into her again and again and again, ruthlessly, possessively; a single glint of firelight sparked on the man's face, against glass he wore before his eyes, as Keppet sprang forward with a roar of dismay that his sister was being stolen from him--

--and woke, burning hot and with an erection that wouldn't be ignored, his body wound up moments from spraying the sheets with his excitement. The dream muddled immediately from waking, blurring the faces of all within it until he knew nothing except that he'd dreamed of strangers fucking, and that he also desperately wished to be fucked.

As his hands sought a reckless, unstoppable pleasure, he kicked all the bedding off so that he could move freely, thrusting into his hands as ferociously as his half-remembered dream self had thrust--in his mind--into the praying woman, as the dancing woman had driven herself onto him. It was fast and messy. He didn't even have a mind to aim as his pleasure spilled over, letting it mess his hands first and the light hair on his lower abdomen. Panting, breathless, he lay in the breeze from the open window enjoying how the croon of the satisfied wolfsong outside thanked him.

The door burst open, Keppet shaken out of his mindless repose as he yanked a sheet over himself. The man who'd let himself so unceremoniously in swept naked across the room, Keppet startled to be faced with another man's arousal so swiftly after waking, and slammed the window shut.

The crooning, seductive sound that Keppet realised he'd been hearing now for what seemed like hours snapped away, leaving a quiet that was deeper than silence. Suddenly, he felt cold and sticky under the blankets, the mess of his seed now evidence of something beyond him.

The newcomer waved his hand impatiently and the lamp beside Keppet's bed lit up, revealing a bed-headed Felix still with the shape of his pillow dented into his cheek. His glasses, which were all he wore, were crooked upon his nose. It was a startlingly mundane detail when compared to the rest of him, which was the sparse, wiry figure of a wizard who gave all his body had to the demands of his magic, and the already flagging erection which, though Keppet hadn't wanted to look, he had and felt somewhat annoyed again to be shamed by the wizard's size.

"I didn't open that window," Keppet said before he could be scolded. "I wouldn't! We all know no open windows at night."

"I know you didn't," said Felix grimly, no trace of his usual cheeriness behind his neatly trimmed beard and untamed red-blond hair that tumbled messily about his broad face. "Unless you opened every other window in the Waypoint, too."

Keppet went still at the implication. Every window, opened? He thought of the wolf song that had seduced him. He thought of the other stories: that witches, before doing anything else, liked to charm away a settlement's children never to be seen again. And that anyone who fell to their song once could never be trusted again.

"No one is missing," said Felix, Keppet blowing his air out in a gust of sick relief. "But it can't happen again because I don't trust our luck will hold. Put clothes on. We need to figure out what we're up against."

As he leapt out of bed, hoping Felix didn't see the mess he'd made of himself, Keppet asked, "Is it them? Is it witches, finally, after all this time leaving us alone?"

Felix didn't answer. He just said, his tone anxious, "Pray that it isn't, because if it is we've all heard them sing now."