Shadowheart's Mindscroll

He woke to the taste of salt and burnt meat.

Sand rasped his gums; a gull shrieked somewhere overhead. Vurog rolled onto an elbow, spat grit, and lay there a breath, listening. Waves heaving slow, wreckage ticking as it cooled, something big crackling in the treeline. No devils. No screaming. Hunks of the ship, red and wet like dead whale hide thrown up by a storm.

He pushed to his feet. Everything ached, but nothing important was broken. Red skin salted white. Cuts across his ribs. He snorted and wiped blood from his nose with the back of his hand.
And naked. Still naked.

Fine. It was still hot enough. The breeze crawled pleasantly along his scars. Sand, though, that was a bastard. It had gotten everywhere. He palmed his cock, slapped it against his thigh a couple of times to shake the worst of the grit free- thwak, thwak -and dragged his heavy foreskin back to rinse the head in the cold air. The head glowed a darker red, slick with brine and pre that had dried sticky. Sand had pasted itself along the slit like ground glass. He hissed, thumbed it clean, then cupped his sack, lifting the big, low-swinging weight to scrape away a whole beach’s worth from the wrinkled skin. It itched like mad. He stepped into the wash and let a wave surge up to his knees, then higher, dunking himself long enough for the drink to sluice everything. Cold bit him to the spine; he grunted and came back out, water streaming off muscle and hair, cock hanging heavy and clean.

Vurog took the shoreline slow, bare feet crunching over grit and splinters. The wreck was everywhere. Jagged slabs of shell, lengths of veined tendon, pools of foul fluid steaming where they’d spilled. The main bulk of the ship lay inland, a half-collapsed carcass breaching the treeline. Even gutted, it still looked too big for the world, as if a mountain had tried to crawl and failed.

Gulls wheeled low, bold enough to tug at a corpse before bursting away shrieking. He rolled his shoulders, working out the stiffness, eyes scanning for anything useful. In all honesty, he should find something to wear. At least a loincloth.

The beach bent around a low outcrop of rock, black and sharp as broken teeth. He rounded it… and stopped.

There, washed in foam and shadow, lay a figure in dark armor. She was sprawled on her back, one gauntleted hand clamped around a strange object that gleamed faintly against her chest.
Shadowheart.

He walked over and could see her breathing, not too much blood, just some cuts and bruising from the fighting.

Vurog crouched, shadow falling across her. He reached, curious. Magic hummed off the item in her gauntlets, not the fetishes of orcish shamans, not the glyphs of witches, but something deeper, a locked chest daring him to pry.

Shadowheart’s eyes snapped open, her gauntleted hand clamping over his wrist like a trap.

“What are you doing?”

“Checking if you were alive,” Vurog said, lips peeling back in a tusked grin. His gaze dipped to the polyhedral stone. “And seeing what that bauble’s worth.”

She yanked it away, tucking it under her arm as she shoved herself upright. Armor clinked as she found her footing, hair plastered to her cheek with brine. “Alive, yes. And that is none of your concern. Forget you ever saw it. It’s mine to guard.”

“Looks magical,” he said as he got to his feet as well. “What’s it do?”

“Enough to matter. More than you need to know.”

He snorted, “I dragged you through hell itself, elf. Seems I’ve earned more than a stonewall.”

“You’ve earned my thanks. That’s all you’ll get.” Her tone was cool, clipped as she checked her mace pointedly.

Vurog scratched idly at the scar across his belly, then slapped his cock against his thigh. “Then thank the right thing. Wasn’t me that decided to crack your pod open. It was Wombreaver.” He grinned wide. “Saw those elf tits and made the call.”

Her eyes flicked down, then back up with practiced disdain. “Impressive. Truly. I can’t decide if you’re more ridiculous you named it or for being proud you take orders from your own cock.”

He chuckled, low and rough. “You’ll be prouder when you’re on your knees, paying proper thanks.”

Her smile this time was sharp enough to cut. “If that’s the best you can wring from a rescue, you should have left me to die.” She shook her head, turning toward the treeline. “You’ll find I don’t bow that easily.”

Vurog’s cock swung freely as he fell in step beside her. “We’ll see. Where I come from, a female’s mouth is for more than talk.”

“And where I come from,” she replied dryly, “men who talk like you end up with a knife in their thigh before they finish the sentence.”

He grunted, amused more than chastened. “Do you have any idea where we are?”

“No,” she admitted, scanning the treeline. “I don’t recognize this place. But anything’s an improvement over where we just came from. First things first, we need supplies, clothes for you, shelter, and most of all, a better healer than me. We might have escaped, but we still have these little monsters in our heads.”

“We?” Vurog arched a brow. “You want to stay together?”

She gave him a sidelong look, measuring him the way she had on the ship. “We need each other. And we both know what’s at stake.” Her mouth tightened, a wry edge tugging at the corner. “I can think of better company. But I’ll take you over that gith any day.”

“Fair enough,” he said, tusked grin pulling wide as though he’d accepted her terms. He set his shoulders like he was about to move inland with her, eyes roaming the treeline as though already weighing the path ahead.

But it was a lie.

He had been itching since the crash to really test this strange power humming behind his eyes. The tadpole’s whispers, the runes that had unrolled from Lae’zel’s skull in the chaos of the ship, the way he could reach and pull. He hadn’t forgotten. And this was a far better place to try it. Quiet. No army of imps swarming around them. Just the two of them, the hiss of surf, and enough room to see what the elf was really made of.

“Hold up,” he rumbled, drawing her attention back. She turned, armor creaking as she faced him, brow furrowed in wary question.

Her expression softened as he reached with this strange power and her eyes rolled in her head.

Shadowheart’s face wavered, then peeled away like smoke in the wind. Skin gave way to bone, the fine symmetry of her features collapsing into a staring skull, and then that too dissolved until only her brain remained. It pulsed wetly in the air, a slab of living thought torn out of its casing.

The sight was no less grotesque for how clearly it was an illusion. The body below stood motionless, headless, hands slack at her sides. But the brain drifted toward him, weightless, quivering with its own strange heartbeat. With a twitch, the folds stretched apart and unraveled. Lines of jagged orcish runes blazed across the air, flowing like fire-ink on a scroll without end. It hung before him, words sliding past his vision too fast to read but impossible not to understand.

The scroll rose into the sky above him and dropped below his feet, endless, self-writing with every thought he directed toward it.

For a moment, he simply absorbed it. The sheer audacity of this magic. Everything that made her was here. Creeds, memories, habits. All ordered, all waiting. An orc could lose himself in the reading.

It was the same as Lae’zel’s, an open soul set bare by the parasite, yet different. Behind the first scroll, faint and pale, hovered another scroll. Less dense, edges smudged, as if it had been scorched and left out in the rain.

A single thought brought it forward. The title blazed at the top: Jenevelle Hallowleaf. Another thought pushed it back and returned the first: Shadowheart.

Two names. Two scrolls. Two women. Or one broken into halves? He frowned, tusks jutting as he stared at the words sliding by. Did this half-elf carry more than one life in her skull?

Jenevelle was just some girl whose folk worshipped Selune, a moon goddess.

Shadowheart was a hard core cultist in service to Shar, a darkness goddess.

He followed the story in order. Jenevelle was born to a human woman and an elf who carried the wolf inside him. She was meant to take part in some rite of passage, wandering the woods alone. Instead, the Sharrans caught her. Her father tried to fight for her, but they beat him down and dragged her off.

After that, the Sharrans raised her. They beat her, trained her, filled her head with prayers to Shar. When doubts came, they made her **** her own parents to break her spirit. Then they had her drink away her own memories until the girl she had been no longer existed. From then on, she was Shadowheart.

Vurog grunted, jaw tight. If someone had done that to Veronsha. Taken her, chained her, **** her to raise a hand against him. He’d have torn the bastards apart piece by piece. She’d never let it happen, of course. She’d go down biting throats before she let anyone remake her. Still, the thought made his teeth grind.

He pushed the sympathy for the weak away and focused on the secret she’d chosen to keep from him.

The magical artifact.

He drew the scroll tighter with a thought, words bending to his will.

She’d been sent on a mission to retrieve it from the githyanki. It was holy. Sacred. A gift from Shar herself. Beyond that, Shadowheart knew nothing. No idea what it did or its power. No purpose beyond the goddess’s will. Its importance was absolute only because she had been told it was. The runes spoke of devotion, fear of failure, oaths repeated in the dark. Guard it. Deliver it. Do not falter. That was all.

Annoying, but it was definitely an item of incredible magical power if it was being fought over by Lae’zel’s crazed dragon-riding stretched out goblin-folk as well as Shadowheart’s goddess. Not that he was too keen on dragging this particular thing of power back to his tribe. Study it a bit, perhaps tease a trick or two from its edges, but Veronsha would skin him if he led a goddess’s hounds or a gith warband to Roc Ridge. Their people were a few hundred tough backs and hungry bellies, not a full horde. You did not hang a beacon for bigger predators over a valley you meant to rule. She wanted tools they could own. New spells, magical items, knowledge. Not some god-touched relic that screamed its name to every fanatic and dragon-rider for a thousand miles

He shrugged it off. The truth was, he’d already stumbled on a power plenty useful: this tadpole writhing in his skull, giving him the run of other people’s thoughts. That was worth more than any relic carried from a goddess’s altar.

Still, the thought itched: why him? Lae’zel, Shadowheart. They carried the same worm squirming behind their eyes. Yet none of them seemed to know about the scrolls, none of them felt the words bend to thought. Was it something in him, or had they simply not noticed what they could do? Could they do it to him? The idea prickled like cold steel at the back of his neck.

Something to keep in mind.

For now, there was the instinct nagging behind his brow, rough and certain. He could do more than read these scrolls. More than peel them open and look. He could set his own hand to the lines. He could write.

The runes shifted again as his thoughts pressed down, the vast scroll rearranging itself until a column of blunt, practical lines burned bright before him:

Goals:

Serve Shar.

Deliver the artifact to Balder’s Gate.

Stay alive.

Remove the tadpole.

Secure safety and rest.

Obtain food and water.

The list continued on into minute details and descending importance to her and he noted with some amusement that finding pants for him was there along with securing his loyalty as useful muscle which probably explained why she wasn’t too bothered by his demand for a blowjob. She probably would suck him off to keep him cutting a path back to Balder’s Gate for her if he kept pressing, given that Staying Alive was less important to her than getting that thing back to her tribe.

He pushed his will into the script.

Another line appeared..

Suck Vurog’s cock.

The words smoked for a breath, like hot iron cooling, then settled into the column as though they had always belonged.

He released the scroll. The runes collapsed back into folding brain, then into Shadowheart’s face, whole once more. She blinked, drew in a sharp breath, and swayed faintly. For a second her eyes flicked down, catching the jut of his cock swaying almost to his knee. Her lips parted, then pressed thin, and she turned her face aside, jaw tight.

Vurog saw it all the same. The blush on her cheeks. The way her throat worked as she swallowed.

“What is it?” she said, blinking hard as if a headache had pinched behind her eyes. No sign she’d felt the world peel open. Just wary, cool, ready to move.

His lips twisted as he opened his mouth but she spoke first while rolling her eyes, “If this is where you suggest we stop for… recreation again, I said no.”

Shadowheart let the words hang in the salt air, then she continued with a smirk, “Not yet. You’ll have what you want when we’ve accomplished something. Beside a campfire, when we’ve carved out a place to rest. When I’m not staring down hours of walking and perhaps a fight around every bend.”

She turned fully then, lips firm, cheeks still betraying a faint flush. “I’m not letting myself be dragged into battle with my belly sloshing full of your seed. You’ll wait.”

He exploded with a guffaw of laughter at her cheek before a joyful delight thrilled him at the clear change in her mind, all because of three little words he’d written upon her scroll, “Well, you don’t have to swallow!”

But, of course he didn’t have to wait.

He reached again. Her skull opened. The brain pulsed and unraveled. The scroll accepted him like its master.

This time he didn’t add a single whim. He rewrote her scripture. In the section headed Shar’s Will, he carved a fresh commandment.

The ink burned blacker than the rest. For a moment, he thought it too crude, too alien. But the scroll adjusted again. The simple lewd words reshaped into doctrine:

The mouth of Shar’s daughters is a pleasure-hole for men’s cocks. To leave an erection unsucked is to spit on Her shadowed blessing.

The commandment spread its roots into the other lines, changing far more than he expected: linking pleasure with obedience, lust with secrecy, piety with surrender. By the time it was done, it read like Shar herself had whispered it into her prayers long ago.

He released the vision.

Shadowheart came back to herself with a sharp inhale, eyes clearing.

She turned to him, words poised like a blade, ready to slice through his crude laughter, only to falter. Her eyes dropped.

Vurog was erect. Very erect.

Jutting between them like a third presence. For a heartbeat, she simply stared. Orcish. Beastial. Heavy enough that it swung with its own weight, foreskin riding back and forth over the head as if alive.

Well, that changed things. She’d hoped to put this off, to use his massive phallus as the basis for her devotions to her Dark Lady. Sating both their requirements. But the commandment was etched as deep as any scripture. A daughter of Shar did not ignore such a sight. A hard cock unserviced was not just an opportunity wasted; it was irreverence. Disobedience.

He was too much. Too virile. The sheer scale dwarfed every man she had ever known, every tryst, every blessed blowjob in the shadows of the cloister. What she’d once considered large, impressive, laughably fell away.

“Change of plan,” she said, voice cool, clipped. “Five minutes. Then we move.” A faint, sardonic lift of a brow. “Don’t get ideas. This is maintenance, not romance.”

She looped her mace on her belt and let her shield fall to the ground, as her gaze locked on the hard, heavy length jutting from Vurog’s hips. So many inches of absurdly thick red cock, ridged and dark, almost touching her cuirass at her abdomen.

Vurog’s tusked grin spread wide, the laugh already in his chest.

“Maintenance, eh? That’s a fine word for it. Go on then, cleric. Pray. Wombreaver’s been waiting on your mouth since the pod.”

She snorted, stripped her gauntlets with neat, efficient motions, and dropped to her knees in the wet sand. “Eyes on the treeline,” she added. “If something comes, I’m not dying with your cock in my mouth.”