The Ardor

Isabelle doesn't even bother looking up from the Book this time as your cellphone flies across the room again. Just as before, the protective rune you prudently etched on the back of the device flares up as it smashes into the barn wall, allowing it to clatter to the ground unharmed by both the collision and your white hot rage. Your girlfriend had been sympathetic at first, but now she offers you a reproachful glance as you impotently trudge over to collect your un-destroyed phone. "Ash. Stop watching that video."

"But I hate it so much."

"Uh, exactly?"

You can only grumble as you snatch up the smartphone. Not even fuckin' cracked. You'd hoped it would at least crack, so it would go right across Queen Bea's stupid face. It'd be like she was cracked. It's the perfect **** and it would have only cost you hundreds of dollars. But noooo, your dumb magic is too strong for you to be able to performatively destroy your own property in an attempt to spite someone who will not, and in fact cannot, ever know about it. That's what they never tell you about Magic. It's fucking obnoxious.

Isabelle's right, though. You were useless all afternoon, and so far you've been useless all evening. She's been hard at work pouring over the Book, searching for edges you can get in your meeting with the other witches. Jenny has been hard at work, too; she informed Rhys he was going to be teaching her whatever he knew about combat, and there's no denying Jennifer Park when she sets her mind to something. You suspect that if the summit Thursday doesn't go well, Jenny absolutely intends to just full-on beat up the other three witches. Honestly it's a pretty respectable plan.

But you? You've just been watching and rewatching this same video over and over, hating the vlogger and her stupid cool haircut more and more. There was a brief ray of hope when you decided to scroll through her comments, finding one way at the bottom from someone with the handle 'TorranceShip<3' that simply reads 'Mallory Price is the best ur a fuking bitch'. You love this person, because they are a goddamn saint. But then you had to scroll back up again, and that meant you had to watch the whole video over again. And then you had to violently throw your phone again.

It's gone on long enough. There are too many important things going on for you to get sidetracked by this bullshit. And besides, you're pretty sure you're scaring the Woo Girls. Usually at least a few of them would be lounging around the backroom in case you wound up suggesting something fun, but your mood has sent them all scurrying to less intimidating endeavors. Just let it go for now and move on.

Maybe just watch it one more time.

No! Just, fucking...no. You shove your phone as far down into your backpack as you can manage in defiance of your own obsession, letting out a huff of air and flapping the neck of your GYM+GOTH shirt to cool yourself down. There. All this anger has gotten your goddamn boobs sweaty. "Sorry Isabelle. It's just...yeah. Sorry."

She offers you smile, scooting over as you drop down beside her on the couch. "You love your mom. It's not your worst quality."

"Yeah?" You slip an arm around her waist, the girl leaning against you to squish your heavy breast into her side. "What is, then?"

"Hmm." She makes a show of considering it, tilting her head to one side to catch your lips in a quick kiss. You briefly thrill as her clever little tongue darts against yours, Queen Bea completely forgotten as she pulls back to tease you with those sparkling green eyes. "I dunno. Probably that you're a big ol' dork."

"You're a dork!"

Isabelle gasps in affront, giving you an admonishing little smack on the side of your fat rack. "How dare you. It's almost like you don't want to hear my amazing and huge discovery."

You flutter your eyelashes at Isabelle. "It's not that I don't? But for the record that's exactly what a dork would say."

She reaches up to give you a little flick on the nose before shifting the Book towards you. "Check this out."

You squint down at the pages, doing your best to make sense of the semi-translated text. It would be hard enough to make sense of it if the only issue was the Book having to translate the words inside your brain like some sort of mystical Google Translate. But the writing is so small and scribbled that trying to **** your way through it always gives you a headache. Isabelle is much better at this part of witchcraft than you are. Still, you try to put in the effort. "'The Ardor'?"

Isabelle nods. "Yeah, that's how I translated it, too. It's not exactly right though; if 'ardor' is, like, a hot coal? What this is referring to is the heart of a volcano. It's a passion that boils up from the very essence of Life, that you fuel even as it eternally devours everything that is you. It can be directed and then released, but after that it can't be controlled or contained until it's run its course."

You let out a low whistle. "Well, what about it?"

"I'm pretty sure this is what happened to the Great Mother."

That seems like big news. "Wait, really? How do you know?"

Isabelle flips further back into the Book, running her hand down what looks to you like just another wall of garbled script. "I don't have all of this figured out yet? But this seems to be some sort of...I don't know. Automatic record or something? The bits I've been able to work through are all the histories of different groups that wielded these powers, but it's like the Book itself wrote them. Here, look,"--She flips back to the end of the book, flapping the last several pages--"I'm pretty sure these last entries are about us. But whenever I try to read them in depth I get the worst fucking headache.

So...the Book is like some sort of quasi-Akashic record? Or something? Oh shit, does it start from when you first got it?! This is...okay, yeah. Wow. That would be a fucking wild read. "Okay, so how does this all tie together?"

"Because this part,"--She flips back to her previous page--"Is about The Ardor being used."

"What happens?"

"Well here, why don't we find out together?" She spreads her hand out across the page, a soft alabaster glow forming around the Book and passing up her arm. You clutch your girlfriend a little tighter as she begins to hum, her voice splitting and stacking into nine ringing notes before the magical chord blossoms from her mouth, the visible music taking shape to reveal an irritated man in a tunic scribbling something out at a rough desk. This is just like the vision Isabelle created at the science lab, but so much more...you don't know, more. You can hear his reed pen scratching for one; unlike the prior display, this one has full audio. It's like he's actually fucking there. You squeeze in a little closer to Isabelle as you settle in, the drama of the past revealing itself before you.

Balbus swore as he smudged the rough parchment yet again, the cheap clumpy ink rendering his tabulations useless. Gods, how he hated this. He was Hostus Flavius Balbus and he did not belong here, wasting what should be an illustrious military career with the fucking Auxilia. Once he had dreamed of parades in his honor, of laurel crowns and accolades, of accomplishments that could forever wipe the smirk off of the face of his fat little wife and her fat, rich little father. But now? Now he dreamed of a single fucking day without rain. It was always raining here, leagues and leagues away from anything close to civilization.

And it was too fucking easy as well. Oh sure, at first he was a little relieved. Even a military prodigy as obviously gifted and unfairly overlooked as Balbus had heard the horror stories out of Gaul, of the warlike men who would begin doing horrible things with your corpse before you'd even fully died. But the people he'd found here? They barely put up a defense. They actually seemed confused by the idea that they were in any danger at all. And they gave up so quickly! He'd only managed to put a handful of them to the sword before they'd begun surrendering. So much for glory. He'd put a few more of them to the sword in an attempt to raise his mood, but of course it didn't fucking work. It didn't help that the ignorant savages who were supposedly his soldiers were so fucking **** about it all. Worthless brutes could barely slur out a sentence of civilized language on most occasions, but of course now they could mutter darkly about pacts and accords and airy fairy superstitions. The absolute fucking cheek of it all. He could only trust that that nonsense had been squarely flogged out of their apelike minds by now. If not, there was always more flogging. That was one part of military live that had fully lived up to Balbus's expectations, at least.

He'd crumpled up the useless parchment and begun begrudgingly starting anew when a junior officer burst into his tent, nervously saluting as he remembered himself. Gods, what now? "Yes?"

The young man swallowed, looking deeply unnerved. "Prefect, um, it's the prisoners. The, um, you know, sir, the um..."

Balbus slapped a hand down hard on his desk, causing the young man to jump as his commander gripped the bridge of his nose. He sat in silence for a long moment, the junior officer shifting anxiously as his superior settled himself. "Start over." he lifted a threatening finger as the young man, nearly a boy, opened his mouth. "And if you say 'um' one more time, I'll have you flogged. Understood?"

The boy swallowed again, nodding quickly. "The prisoners, sir. Specifically the..."--he trails off, swallowing again at Balbus's threatening look--"...the leader. She's doing...something. It has the men riled, sir."

Balbus snickered. "Who, you mean the one they insist is a witch?"

"Yes sir, the, um--"

He trailed off in a strangled noise as his superior's eyes flared, deciding his best course of action was to simply clamp his mouth shut and nod. Balbus could only shake his head in a annoyance. These fucking savages. Oh well. This was his life, apparently. The prefect rose from his chair and belted his sword around his waist, taking a moment to adjust his thinning hair into what he imagined was a more authoritative arrangement. "Fine. Whatever. I'll go and deal with this."

The boy seemed relived. "Yes, sir."

"And afterwards, we can discuss your punishment."

The boy swallowed. "...Yes, sir."

With that, Balbus swept out his tent and began a brisk march towards where the prisoners were begin housed. The men eyed him resentfully as he swept past, many nursing their raw and dripping backs. Good. They should be scared of him. Hostus Flavius Balbus was a citizen and a noble and a prefect, and they were merely fodder. He wished his fat little wife would ever look at him that way. Maybe when he returned home, he could give flogging her a shot. Who knows what sort of looks she might offer, then?

Ugh. His wife. As Balbus pushed his way into the prisoner's quarters, he couldn't help recalling her in disdain. And the barbarians he'd conquered, primitive and crude as they were, didn't help him remember her fondly. Because while they might have been from a worthless backwater, the women who had been crowded into the fenced-in pen were to a one gorgeous. And Gods above, some of them had the largest breasts he had ever seen. He had ordered these barriers constructed less out of fear of anything they might do and more to keep out what he'd imagined would be the rapacious lusts of his enlisted men. Even one of these women should have been enough to drive common soldiers cunt-mad, but to his deep surprise they seemed **** to come anywhere near the beautiful captives. Undoubtedly they preferred goats to human women.

Their loss. Balbus had already picked out the first one he was going to stuff with bastards. She was young and fresh with long curls of brown hair and tits the size of her fucking head. If it would almost have been worth the scandal to bring her home, just to be able to watch her little stomach swell up again and again. There was no way she wasn't a fertile little mink. Balbus could smell it on her. He could smell it on all of them.

Unfortunately, he was on official business at the moment. No time for fun and pleasure. What was all this nonsense about the so-called witch? He pursed his lips as he paced out into the middle of the pen, doing his best to work through the scene before him. All two dozen of the captured girls had moved to the edge of their pen and turned away, showing their backs to the one among them to not join in: the woman who was supposedly their leader. She was a fine woman too, though not to the outlandish extent of some of the others. She had short-cropped red hair and suitably heavy breasts, and fat lips that Balbus dearly wanted to see wrapped around his cock. It was difficult for him to appreciate her beauty at that moment, however, because she had fallen to the ground and begun chanting in her ugly native tongue, writhing in place as she pulsed up and down on her knees.

This was the problem? Fucking stupid. He was Hostus Flavius Balbus, and this was how he was being wasted. He could only hope that his junior officer would learn something from his decisive example, at least. "In the future? When this sort of problem happens, just stab the problem until it stops being one. Understood?"

The boy hesitantly nodded. "U-understood, sir."

Balbus waited for an impatient moment, the gestured in annoyance towards the writhing woman. "Well? Are you seriously going to make me wait longer?"

The boy gave a start. "Oh, you mean you, um, want me to--?!"

Balbus cut him off by merely shoving him out of the way, grumbling as he drew his sword from its sheath. Absolutely fucking worthless. Why did he even bother? The prefect stomped towards the barbarian woman as she continued to chant, taking a moment to eye the doodles she had drawn in the dirt around her. The man briefly considered mucking them up with his foot, wondering if such an act would be beneath his dignity. He couldn't stop himself from jumping back in alarm as the woman abruptly stopped, her wild blue eyes shooting open to affix him with a scornful gaze. Gods, it was almost like she could sense his intentions.

Well now Balbus was annoyed and embarrassed and maybe a little scared. It had been his original intention to just run the bitch through and end things quick, but there was no chance of that now. Who was she to give Hostus Flavius Balbus a look of such disdain?! Right then and there, the prefect swore that her passage to the next life would not be an easy one. He surged forward, wrapping his fingers into her hair and roughly dragging the woman to her feet. Fuck, why did she still look so arrogant?! Balbus sneered into her face, his sword pricking into her side just enough to draw begin drawing blood. "I hope you're ready, whore. This is going to be the longest night of your life. I'm going to--!?!"

Whatever Balbus intended to say with the rest of his taunts was lost even to him, because at that moment the woman pressed forward and locked her lips onto his. The prefects sword clattered forgotten to the ground as his hands desperately grabbed hold of her body, pressing her womanly abundance as tightly into him as he could manage. It was as if he had been seized by some sort of mania, a sort insane fervor that could not be quenched by anything other than the sweet lips of this woman, and the soft breasts of this woman, and the boiling hot cleft of this woman. Such was his all-consuming need that as something passed from her mouth into his, all he could manage was a helpless whine and a shudder as he ejaculated all over himself.

He clutched the woman even tighter, barely able to manage a gasp as she suddenly exploded in his grasp. He could only grope blindly through the cloud of prismatic dust that was all that was left of her, **** to fill his arms with her missing softness and taste her burning lips for one more second. He sucked in a huge gasping breath as something began to boil deep inside him, the rainbow shimmering that had been his prisoner spiraling down his throat as if inexorably drawn by that strange churning ****. He briefly gagged as the last of the cloud vanished down his gullet, eyes wide as he shakily turned around to face his slack-jawed junior officer. The long man did his very best to say something, to say anything. Eventually, he did the best that he could. "Um..."

It wouldn't have mattered, anyway. Balbus cut him off with a bestial groan as he threw back his head, his thinning hair erupting in a flaxen cascade even as his tunic began to strain around his bubbling, fattening chest. He managed to grab hold of his blossoming breasts, squealing as his swelling nipples throbbed against his palms and squealing again as liquid gushed down his leg, a brand new vagina erupting from his pulsing groin and already squelching out a river of girlcum. His tunic did its best to stretch around his explosively changing body but was quickly outmatched, ripping first as his massively expanded hips and ass stretched in a caricature of femininity and then again as his utterly huge and still growing breasts burst from their confines to slap heavily against his plush little tummy.

He staggered, suddenly unable to balance with hips wider than his shoulders and wobbling tits the size of watermelons, then found himself unable to do anything other than drop to his hands and knees. The prefect groaned in confused pleasure as his quaking breasts gave one heavy swing beneath him, then grew so large and ripe than they actually began squishing into the ground beneath him. He blearily looked up at his horrified junior officer, doing his best to form words with his addled brain that he would actually be able to pronounce through his newly overgrown lips. He shuffled forward a few feet, grunting as his outrageously oversized udders dragged across the ground and his fat pussy shuddered in another leg-drenching orgasm. He needed to get a handle on this. He needed to find some way to fix this. He was Hostus Flavius Balbus, and he did not belong here.

He abruptly stopped, unable to help himself from snuffling his nose at his transfixed junior officer. What was that...entrancing smell? And why was it coming from his crotch? Balbus sniffed at the boy again, not realizing until he had managed to awkwardly turn himself all the way around and present his bulbous rear and sputtering womanhood to him that what he smelled was his dick.

Because he was Hostus Flavius Balbus, and he needed to get fucked.

The boy must have felt the same way, because a moment later Balbus was shrieking in delight as he felt two hands grip either side of his jutting hips and roughly shove a thin cock into his already spasming pussy. It didn't even matter that the junior officer was small; the prefect's brand new vagina gripped him with the tightness of a boa constrictor as he desperately pounded away at his superior's ridiculous backside. He could hear voices calling out and the stampede of feet nearing, but none of that mattered. All that mattered at that moment was the trembling cock pressed deep within him as it spurted, his ravenous womb devouring his meager offering with a zealot's need. It wasn't enough. It would never be enough.

Balbus whined in despair as he felt the boy slip out of his folds, managing to shuffle back around in time to see the boy writhing and groaning on the ground as he began to sprout tits of his own. He supposed he could also see the barbarians of his Auxilia fleeing their posts, leaving their belongings and trappings behind as they vanished into the surrounding landscape. But who cared? The officers had stayed, drawn to him and his scent as neatly as flies drawn to honey. Balbus screamed in bliss as the first officer to free his straining erection shoved it into his poor empty pussy, the deserters and the prisoners already forgotten as he humped gleefully back against this new cock.

He dimly noted that the junior officer had joined in on the fun too, now as beautiful and wildly stacked as that young, fresh prisoner Balbus had once dreamed of impregnating. One of the other officers had snatched him up and impaled the former boy on his cock, managing to bounce him a few times before the boy's overripe breasts splurted milk directly into his partner's face and the man began exploding in muscles, his legs spreading around swelling balls and the boy's stomach visibly swelling with his superior's newly enormous cock. Lucky bitch. The dick inside Balbus was already shrinking away to nothing, shooting the last of its cum into his hungry snatch.

Oh well. There was already another cock ready to take its place. And for once, Balbus wasn't worried about his illustrious military career, or his fat little wife, or anything at all really. His mind was bubbling away to nothing under a tide of fuck and milk and cum, and before he lost himself forever he only had time for one final though: He was Hostus Flavius Balbus, and he was exactly where he belonged.

It takes you a moment to decide what to say when Isabelle's projected vision ends. That was...wow, yeah. It just was. "So that's what happened to her, then?" Isabelle quietly nods, and you continue on. "So...do you have any idea how to fix it?"

"None."

"Okay. Well, maybe let's just make a point to not give that spell a try."

"Agreed."