The Itch She Can't Scratch

Sleep cracks like glass in a moment and she snaps awake and alert. Not normal to wake so fast and so sharp in her own den, dream fading and at least in part already lost. Not long since she’d dosed off either, by the look of moonlight through the tree roots. This is not the fading ripples on the pond, this is not the lightning bolt. This is a first pull blow and a second pull shatter. Thumping drumbeat, waking mind.

For a moment the form of her is a thimbleful of a couple of things. She rankles and squeezes, pushing herself into the ones that work. The predator mind walks, trying to find the words and analytics. A simple throbbing pulse motivates her movements, she assumes in error that it is her heart. She can’t find the words and analysis. This can be an ill, this can be nothing. She straightens up, rising from all fours to walk as a human. Her clothes take shape around her. As the consciousness centers behind the eyes, she places the beat and pulls the hem of her clothing down.

Her sharp ears bend down like a furrowed brow. The practiced gestures of showing her emotions with her face forgone. Her tails twitch. Peaking one of her breasts, a small patch of Corpsebell purple spreading out from a stone at the center. She reaches down and grabs the stone, fingers sinking into the jelly, but they come away empty when she tries to pull. She tries and fails a dozen times to grab it. When he fingers find purchase, they slide off of the perfectly smooth surface. More often, they find none. As she pulls, as she tries, it keeps the pulse thrumming through her. Each small cell of it pulls at the skin, the pulling most intense where the skin is the most sensitive. Like the kneading suckle of being milked, small and constant. No inhale and exhale, just tugging. Occasionally growing stronger like trying to dig down into her, never backing off, just establishing new normals. Heightening.

With great focus, she wraps her fingers around it and digs the tips of them under the round stone floating just above the nipple. She finally gives a pull that finds purchase and it makes her legs give out.

The more she pulls the more it pulls, latched to a sensitive spot it’s like invoking lightning. Her tails twitch and flutter with frustration. Left alone, it goes back to the gnawing but painless tugging from before. When she tries to pull it, it makes her wish she wasn’t. She starts to realize that she’s fallen into a trap again. Paralytic poison, hunters snare, but no hunter to appease. No assailant to overcome. A bodily malady which makes her own skin the hook.

She finds the rational mind. She lets go of the covering, breathes, and straightens her clothes back up.

After a few seconds she managed to have a fire burning. Some wet leaves and sticks on top of the dry to make it belch smoke which trailed up along the roof of her den and out through the rabbit hole at the base. She tried to avoid it when she could, but some things were best treated with smoke. She slipped from her robes and stood naked in the path of it for several minutes before giving up. The blue flame died away as quickly as she’d risen it.

She tried to change her form in some way, doing away with or at least reducing her breasts as much as she could. She hadn’t expected it to work, these things which she did away with didn’t actually leave, they merely moved. What she didn’t expect was the difficulty which it took to change. This too could have been an ill or it could have been nothing. But even when she finally did, she only found the sensations to have been put in the background, as if they were happening far away and she was stretched wide as a mountain range. In some ways, it made them worse, but not in all of the ways. When she slid back into her resting form, she found the blob grown slightly if anything.

Ahri slid her clothes back on, simply covering the blemish in entirety as if to do away with it by the gesture. It sat and gently continued to pull against her skin as if in defiance, but it was so quiet as to be something which she could ignore. She realized internally that it couldn’t be ignored permanently, but what mattered is that it was better shrugged off attached to her here and now. Aside from the momentary slipping of form she needed to leave her den in a hurry (again taking longer than expected) she could hold off on transforming.

The river ran cold and close from a mountain glacier down past her home in the woods to meet the sea. It ran steady and quickly as the bed of it rose and fell down a trail which bent and split. Often she had lay floating and drifted softly to the mouth of the deep ocean or ran her hands along the troughs and mounds of the mud as she caught fish and lavished in it. In rare cases, in the deep of the night, it could be cold enough to shock as she needed it. She unsummoned her clothing and flopped sleepily into it, willing to let it carry her as it wanted. For the first moment it shocked her to the bone, but as her body adjusted she dove down to the bottom and ran her hands along the spawning beds as the current drove her through the night.

In itself, here, there was denial. She kicked her legs and drove gracefully through the water with the mind of a fish as she needed, never fighting the current to make herself flounder and lose that ease and fluidity. All the while she would glance down at her chest to see if the thing on it would change or detach. All the while it remained there. The cold of the dark night water just that much colder, that much more whipping and biting like wind. Her nipples both pointed out in the cold, but the one covered seemed to feel everything more. The raw sparking churning through her, always an undertow resting below the animal mind, rumbling in her stomach and up her spine like a malaise.

And perhaps that’s why she stumbled into the net.

A slow trawling boat slid along the surface of the water, catching the light of first dawn. She may have dozed, time had moved without her seeing. The moon and the sun both hung distorted through the stream in the lows of the sky as a net that dragged the muddy bottom wrapped about her. To escape it was to fight the current. After a moment’s panic, she accepted the reality of it. The thrashing had drawn the boat’s attention, and she felt herself cutting gracelessly up through the water, whole net of scaly wide-eyed fish about her.

The lone fisherman dragged up the net and released it onto the deck without seeing the contents of it. When he turned, what he saw was a mound of spawning fish nowhere near the collective size he intended to meet and a single naked woman shivering in the cold. Long black hair flowing about her face like a frame and draping over pale skin. He gaped as she sized him up both as prey and predator. In that moment, that he was alone doomed him.

As his mouth made words that didn’t matter she rose and sprang on him, knocking them both to the deck. She laughed like a nymph and kissed him, biting away sputters of confusion and indignation as they rose up his throat. She held a perfect moment in her hand as she straightened up on top of him and pushed her hair back from her face, long pointed ears flicking in the steely blue morning light. As his eyes flicked down and lingered on the colored mark on one of her breasts, it partially slipped from her grasp. Before he could speak she charmed him, leaving his mouth to hang open with short heavy breaths as she leaned down and kissed him again, reaching down into his pants.

Nothing in the old magics said that sex and feeding needed to be paired, but she rarely separated them. Once, she hadn’t. The memories and words she had gotten then all spiked and spiced with fear still felt bitter on the tongue. It had almost put her off of words entirely.

His cock pulsed in her hand, a tangible heartbeat on her skin like a radiant spirit. He raised his hands, fumbling with her body confusedly. His hands were red-hot, she guided them to her hips. As soon as she let them go they rose off of her hips and fumbled toward her breasts. She frowned, but let his warm palms close around them, both the infected and the clean alike. Where his hand sank into the purple the sensations bloomed more intense, only making the desire worse. For a moment she shuddered, imagining the whole of a fishing crew coming from below decks suddenly, all stunned and entranced by the sight of her. Charming them one by one and luring them in, or perhaps all of them coming to her of their own accord, presenting their cocks to her. Maybe they knew she would feed on all of them as well, maybe they didn’t care. All of them simply needing as she did.

Both her hands were wrapped around the fisherman’s cock as he squeezed absentmindedly at her breasts like he was kneading them for milk. She bit her lip, squeezing and tugging his cock in return in a way that she hoped was as teasing to him as his grasp was to her. She could feel her sex burning even as the rest of her skin stayed water-cold in the morning light. Like some perfect nymph of the water on top of him, grabbing at him for what warmth she could pull from his body.

Without warning his body tensed and his cock jerked in her hand. Her ears perked as she tried to wrap her mouth around the head of his member before he sprayed himself with seed. She half-succeeded, catching the rest of his sudden orgasm in her mouth and cleaning what she had missed from him with her tongue as he continued to release.

He looked down at her, still dreary-eyed and drunk on the charm. His hips giving an occasional, sedated twitch as his cock flexed in her mouth. On second thought, definitely better not to charm the imaginary below-deck crew. Better to have hands on her, enthusiastic. She undid her charm.

The fisherman came back slowly, washed in his own pleasure as his orgasm subsided. By the time he was back in control of himself, she looked up at him, lips still wrapped around his cock. She swallowed the last of his load and leaned forward toward him, eyes staring deeply into his. Any trace of the previous fear was gone, some small figments of confusion all that remained aside from lust on his face. Without moving away, she slid herself down around his length, feeling him throb inside of her. Everything was heightened, his short ragged breath right against her skin, his hands grabbing her hips as much to sturdy himself as to pull her down onto him. She started to kiss him everywhere on the face she could, peppering him on the nose and cheeks. The short whiskers on his face tickled her lips. It kept him from looking down, kept the distractions out of sight. The taste of his sweat clung thick to him and picked up on her lips with each kiss.

She rolled her waist, his cock splitting her lips and stretching them wide. The head of his cock ground up against the inside of her pussy, pressing outward toward her clit like it was trying to return back to its owner. She started to pump her hips as she rocked them, throwing her body down toward him in an almost animal rut. He had the advantage, he didn’t have something stuck to his body teasing him. He hadn’t been getting pushed into the mood for this since late last night. Still, he seemed to be struggling with all his might to drag it out as long as he could, **** not to climax so soon inside of her. Not while she was in full control and she was having her fun.

But he gave way just the same as anyone would have to, his cock swelling and throbbing inside of her, his head laid back on the deck as she kissed down his neck. She could feel his seed popping up out of him and deep inside of her. She leaned her head back, taking a shuddering breath. With each orgasm, a little more of him cleared itself inside of her mind. Images of a small village encroached on more and more each year by men in armor. New words bright and dark alike. A young woman, one she was stealing from. Ahri offered her a silent apology.

With each new burst of him she took in, his eyes grew a little dimmer, a little less focused. He was going soft around the edges. The cool of the river had all but vanished from her body, the woman on top of him now a radiant cluster of heat and energy, making him colder and colder by comparison. He might have faded completely, not knowing it was even happening.

She froze and raised her haunches like an animal when a voice came floating up the river to them, another one shortly after. Both of them made the fisherman perk up, both he and she recognized as the voices of his friends. Both growing closer as the boat trundled downstream. He reached out to touch her, in a second she was gone.

In her hurry she didn’t notice the difficulty of transformation. Animal urge was powerful, the kind of thing which gnawed an ankle to escape a trap. It was only when she was deep back under the cover of woods, trying to summon back her clothes, that she realized how tired she was. Everything took twice the effort it should have.

What would become of the fisherman, she couldn’t say. She had never half-fed before, never let somebody walk away. The words and images she had taken from him were immovable, burned in and permanent. She still hungered, still would need to feed again sooner rather than later. It left her irritated, uniquely blueballed, but she wondered more about him. Would he recover? Think of it all as a crazy dream as he went back to his life? Would something always be missing? How much of what she had harvested from that bush would grow back on its own?

And the blotch on her chest had grown.