Content warnings for this extremely NSFW piece: anxiety, dead-naming, mild corruption, misgendering, mind-altering effects, overstimulation, severe dysphoria, some erotic body-horror (vaginal creepers/tendrils).
All characters are over the age of 18. Specifically, Liesel is 23 and Mechtlieb is… a few hundred years minimum? Haven’t decided about her yet.
Edits, 6/2/2021: I decided to rewrite the early material of Liesel’s life. I meant Hexenkessel to be an indulgent, escapist fantasy realm where the worst things that happen are the results of good people misunderstanding each other–or trespassing on the domains of supernatural horrors, but that’s different, that’s you stomping through their homes uninvited, you mortal lummox. I have Canno and the Fringe to deal with heavy themes and active bigotry.
Not here. I won’t have any of that here.
Oh, and I also added a fair chunk to the sex scenes because, come now, I had to.
We begin below the asterisks.
***
You will know me as Liesel Arzat. The second is the name of my forebears. The first is the name of myself. If you believe you know me by other names, you believe falsely. I declare without shame that I am neither a channel of the gods nor a mage of the academies.
I am a witch of the old ways reclaimed.
It is my great pleasure to bridge the realms of matter and the realms of spirit. The fearful, outsiders ignorant of our world, will tell you I consort with demons. That I am a servant bound and chained by unpredictable powers. I will tell you the truth. I will tell you of the day I finally became free.
I do not refer to the colorful disaster which fell upon Bad Niedring. I did not cause it. I confess that I might have forestalled it. I did not, for the road called to me just before. I have only the rumors to hint what happened later.
Perhaps it is best that I set out after the song of the night. I was already so tired of being overshadowed.
Eibert was the only one of my few friends who saw me leaving the festival, or if others saw, only he approached me. His face was caverns and torchlight on sun-wrinkled skin.
“Arno?” he asked. His mustache rode the waves of his words. “What is it, where do you wander?”
“Just… you know…” I said. Blocky bones, rough whiskers, oh how I crawled beneath the flesh I was given. In my belly and aching chest rose the truth of me. Surely if I only said it, I thought, Eibert would embrace it. If there was one shred of meanness or spite in his whole being, he buried it so well I never saw it.
But I was afraid, and so the words became silence and grating back down my throat.
“On,” I said at last. “Only on.” Eibert palmed my shoulder as I left. He parted his lips a few times. Then, saying no more, he turned back to the massed backs of the other revelers.
My course never carried me to the little house I had called home. I thought to leave it. If another could have a life from its bits and pieces, let them.
Screams of excitement and fright, warped and whooping laughter, they carried ember spirals from the dim multicolor darkness behind. Smells of roasting meat, spilled beer, and far too many fireworks detonated at once. Bad Niedring’s towers soared haughty and tall. Teeth of a fallen giant. A throat too deep for fire’s flight. I could never help but love it, that labyrinth of specters and flitting eyes. Every other house was haunted.
And yet… it never became home to me.
Ahead the cold, the dimness, and the wilds. The reek of ash and sting of soot in my eyes became the frigid knife of early autumn. Ill-fitting linens and a few iron bands. I fled with what I happened to wear for the revel. As a ghost I attended, hoping that the nearness of warmth and joy might teach me to feel them again. Yet the ghosts laughing in the shadows cast at the dance still seemed livelier than I.
I was relieved to escape the fears of my former town. I was afraid, for I did not know what comes next.
Even if we must define ourselves against sadness, still, it gives us a way to define ourselves. Who am I now? With such thoughts I braced myself. I dreaded fang and claw. Howls, hisses, a cyclone of incomprehensible music and then nothing. The whispered terrors that haunt the woods in the deeps of Hexenkessel.
Bad Niedring was the only place I had ever known. Of course I thought everything past it was deep and unknowable.
Yet the wilds did not reject me. The past did not reclaim me. I walked until dawn, a pale wraith in coarse clothes on an uncertain path. Sunlight surprises me at the turn of fortune. A gangly silhouette framed against light filling an ancient tunnel’s oval: that is me.
Within, the altar of glittering black stone beneath carven facets and dust-hung effigies. Vines, blossoms: the in-rushing heat on a late-morning wind raises tingling fertility to my nose. The engravings depict blushing scenes. I would recite them in greater detail, only… only, I fear I have long forgotten them. Memory bows to the song of the spirit, and my spirit’s focus soon shifted elsewhere. I was a witch, though novice, presented with an altar. Lacking herbs, talismans, or tokens, I chose the only ritual object I still possessed.
I shed the linens.
I shivered at chills, at the prickle of the vines upon the altar against the tender flesh of my back, at the shame of exposing the prison I called flesh. I was often told that my golden hair and green eyes are lovely. I would prefer to pass over the rest.
Terror billowed like an oil-bloom from the abyss under my heart. It swallowed me. What words I said, what homage I paid… I flailed to find the surface. To meet silence from spirits in the cellar of a dingy townhouse is one thing. If they rejected me here, this sacred sanctum–I discovered that I had shut my eyes only when they began to ache, and when I felt that ache, I felt that I wept.
I feel my flesh, and my war with it. I am a thousand razor tendrils clawing for salvation beneath sinew, bone, and skin.
When she answered, it was over.
“An early morning,” said the voice of silk, of a heartbeat, of the heat that cuts deeper than the blizzard it drives back. “But never too early to greet a maiden so fair. Please, child, open your eyes.”
Touch came before sight. A pulse against my skin, radiance-waves and tingles. Was I pressed down, was I pulled upwards? An ache bloomed between my legs, rushing blood and a tickle like a hook. It was lust, and I could no longer hide in poetry.
It occurred to me, then, to fear. I held the power to call and bind all the little spirits I could sense. Now I knew I held the power to be heard by spirits I could not bind. I knew that I held no powers but these. A self-glutting litany: even if some spirits were wicked, surely my yearning would beckon a kindly one when the time came. What if I had thought wrong?
I opened my eyes.
She did not hover. She stood on two vine-wound hooves, upon legs sprouting innumerable small leaves dappled with every shade of green and gold–shimmering like scales, soft and plush as fur. She was verdant, lush in bosom, hip, and thigh.
And beautiful.
Glossy hair of forest greens, autumn reds and golds. Four crystal horns: two spiraled, two ran straight. Twin tails of thick iridescent vines–worth describing. Yet these were most beautiful because she chose them.
“What would you ask of me,” she said, “woman to woman?”
“I would…” I would find it very hard to speak, for she was heady as incense. Heady tingles as of pollen filled my head rather than my nose. “Spirit… I would like to know your name.”
She laughed, and grinned with white fangs, and glowing wolf’s eyes. “Demon,” she corrected.
The demon propped a perfect hand, jade skin and black claws, beneath her delicate jaw and blossom lips. She shifted her hips. Wisdom insisted on meeting her eyes. My eyes insisted on drifting down, down over the heavy breasts, down to the dewy invitation of her– I looked away.
“Oh, please do look,” she laughed. “I am not a succubus because I dislike being found desirable. That would be quite backwards.” A few seconds, several breaths, a dozen heartbeats. I needed clarity, to weigh risk– “My name is Mechtlieb,” she said. “And yours, dear witch?”
I babbled. She was too beautiful, and the glow in her eyes was too bright. Her scent was herbs and honey. The more I breathed it, the greater the warmth within me. I twitched with the ache below. I told her all. That I am Liesel. Why I became a witch.
Why I was alone.
As I spoke her power’s pulse lessened against me. Her lovely brow furrowed. I poured out a litany of woes and pitiable things. Everyone in Bad Niedring was kind to me. I never wanted for food, nor did I ever have to work too hard to make time for myself and my passions. Eibert and so many others invited me into their lives and homes with all possible fervor. And yet it never… never quite…
“Oh, Liesel,” Mechtlieb said, taking my hand, “you need not have made an offering of yourself to call for succor.” She drifted closer and took my hand in hers. “And you are not weak, or selfish, or a coward, or any of these other awful and unfair things you have been left to name yourself.”
She leaned closer until the pine-scent and incense on her breath utterly cocooned me in their dream-haze. “Happiness is no war you must fight. You owe it to no one to wade through trial before meeting joy. You need a place to call your own because the souls who dwell there are souls like you. It’s no evil to go seeking it.”
The succubus sighed and withdrew. “I apologize, dear girl. It seems I’ve come on false pretenses. I meant to lie with you, but–”
I panicked.
“Please, don’t go,” I said, more desperate with each word. “I’ve tried for years to call someone, anyone like you, it’s not t-that you’re beautiful–I mean, it’s not that you’re not b-b-beautiful, it’s just… I…” Convinced I’d destroyed my hope, I gestured at my body.
“Yes, that’s what I propose to aid you in,” Mechtlieb said. “But you need not pay for it. It is your right to feel at home in your own body, and–”
“I want to!” I say, with sudden force.
The succubus tilted her head. “You’re certain?” Even now, her concern could have been false.
My dry tongue sat heavy. I had never before felt so naked. If she wished to string me forever as a puppet of lust, my consent seemed a scant barrier. Still, it was a barrier. “Yes,” I said.
Her pulsing heat returns tenfold. She straddles me, licking white fangs. “Perfect.”
The liquid turns of her hips draw my eyes, and without even touching her lower-lips to my sleeping girlcock, her warmth pours down on it. Little droplets, colored and thick as sap, slid loose and spatter on me, prickling the skin of my hips, my belly, my balls and tip. Every vein, every fiber, every inner twitch of my womanhood becomes sharp and clear. My breath catches. Panting, I blink to refocus eyes rolling back from a near climax.
“Now, little witch,” Mechtlieb says, the golden glow in her wolf’s eyes taking the same rhythmic pulse as her heart-gripping heat, “lie back and think of the form you desire. If you fight me for control in anyway, this may go ill. So just…”
“Submit.” A thousand gossamer strands of her breath tease every crevice in my ear. Creeping inwards as lightning, as molten ecstasy. It courses downwards, up along the throbbing flesh of my member, and the flushing head straining to meet her as she eases downward.
The first kiss of her channel against me sears hot as fire. It does not scald or char. To boil not with torment but with pleasure–that is to lie with a succubus. Mortal words cannot capture it. I become pliable, metal on the anvil of the black-stone altar. The first slow patter of our meeting flesh soon gives way to more, grasping, clapping, echoing.
Mechtlieb shapes me. By the strokes of her hands she spreads the inferno of bliss beneath my skin. By her lips burning against mine and the liquid play of her tongue, she fills my senses. Flesh shifts, bone reshapes. Harder, faster, harder, faster, she rides me, bouncing, moaning into my throat.
Verdant fingers, black claws, play upon my chest. With kneading squeezes, presses against nipples that cast sensuous spikes through all the nerves below, she raises up my breasts. I meant to hold it in, or at least warn her, but the swell of ecstasy bursts forth through my cock.
I cry out and clutch her hips. Shuddering, thrusting, thoughts driven away by the raw need to fill her with myself. My heart thunders and still I strain, my back arches, one moan after another in time to the delirious burn of cumming. She’s so warm around me, so quivering and inviting and lust-drunk. With a last descent, Mechtlieb takes my length inside her down to the smallest patch of glistening skin. She gives herself to a half-vacant smile, wide-eyed, pussy-folds tightening, releasing, tightening again to squeeze every last pulse of seed from my hen.
The succubus is not so easily satisfied as that. Glows golden and vernal course down Mechtlieb’s neck. They pool in her belly, and I see my cock’s brief outline against them before they fill it. Breathtaking pleasure-aches make me even harder than before. Now there is only instinct. I rush to experience the demon every way I can, to make up for long years of starvation and loneliness and pining for another woman’s touch. I catch her heavy breasts between my fingers, crane up to lick each tender nipple, bury my nose against her body and drink her scents of lushness and lust while I thrust faster, faster, faster!
“That’s right,” she gasps, voice breaking sometimes in peals of sexual delight. “You do know what you deserve, don’t you? This is what you want, this is what I want–oh, yes!” Tracing coils of her vines wrap my plunging length, teasing inside my foreskin. Every bodily sensation gives way to the overwhelming ecstasy of the succubus’ inner heat.
I hold as long as I can, hold so that I can keep her floating there above me with her voice feverish from pleasure. The surge and tensing in my cock breaks past all control. A second swell passes from me, carrying me up with it as I cum, cum, cum! I groan, convulse, spurt once more into her welcoming womb. Mechtlieb cries out in harmony with me and tilts my head up to meet hers in a steaming kiss. Still urgent, we push against each other, until the last echoes of the peak and the last of my seed flows into her, as the last of her own liquids flow down to cover me.
She eases down, breast to breast, and cups my face with her fingers. “Sweet, silly Liesel,” she chuckles, “next time, do not try so hard to keep your semen down. Though… the side-effects are rather fetching.”
“What do you mean?” I demand, euphoria burning away.
“Calm,” the succubus answers.
With a hand-flick she manifests a crystal mirror. In it I see the face I had always desired: heart-shaped with high, elegant cheeks and pretty round eyebrows. The early nubs of two black horns come as a shock, and yet…
…yet, I like them.
“Oh,” I say. “I will have to have those measured for the hats I wanted, one day, but…” She is so warm against me. Soothing. I mean to say, “thank you, Mechtlieb.”
Instead, I pass into slumber. Into my dreams, I carry the image of two wolf’s eyes creased by laughter–and fondness. I wake to find her still atop me.
She chuckles at my surprise. “I hope you didn’t believe I would abandon you, naked and now bereft of fitting clothes, in a nameless shrine.” The succubus eases herself off me with a sigh of regret. Then, with a flourish of her hands, she presents a gown of green silk.
“My first gift to you,” she says. “I hope we shall be steady friends in the future, Liesel. There is, if memory serves, an old huntsman’s cottage in a clearing some kilometers up in the highlands. Empty now. Should be easy enough.” She gestures. “Get dressed and I’ll guide you.”
Now feeling a ravenous appetite, I fight through exhaustion to stand. In this I note one other gift of Mechtlieb’s: a pointed, pinkish mutation to the head of my penis. I touch it, and cannot suppress a gasp at its sensitivity.
“Enjoy that,” she says, with wry mischief.
“How am I supposed to walk with this thing rubbing against my clothes at every step?” I ask, half in dismay and half in a new, joyful, perverse excitement.
The succubus waves a hand in dismissal. “You’re a witch. Witches are clever. You’ll discover a poultice or something to lessen its delights when you must travel…” She grins, licking white fangs. “Assuming you should still wish to.”
Feeling much the opposite of clever, I dress myself.
The green gown hugs the new curves of my flesh with a closeness that suggests Mechtlieb studied me in my sleep. I could not be wroth over if this even if I were not, in truth, a little pleased, for she leads me to the cottage as promised. We reach it by traversing a foreboding ravine with an abandoned castle looming on the cliffs high above. It’s quaint and latticed, beneath sturdy oaks, with ranked pines climbing the slopes behind it. Occupying its own sheltered hollow, tucked in at the feet of rising mountains.
After darker paint and the right occult flourishes, it’s perfect.
“And with that I must leave you for now,” Mechtlieb says, “for you are not the only witch who consorts with me.” She winks. “I’m afraid there are no sisters near to you. Out of the more distant… the best teacher, though not closest, lives in a castle north of the Scharnach Valley.”
This gives me pause. “A castle?”
“A castle appropriate to a witch,” the succubus laughs. “Countess Karin is given too trying too hard. But she is a good friend, and a powerful ally.” She taps her lips, turns to walk away, then turns back. “Oh, she’ll try to seduce you.”
I contemplate that. “Mecthlieb… I thank you. I wish to keep, erm…” I blush. “Consorting with you. But as for this other witch, Karin, and more sisters beside… I think I should learn who I am first, and gain some confidence in my art, even if it means making mistakes. Otherwise, I will lose myself in foolish worship for them, and forget how to be myself. Perhaps I may decide that I like the solitude of my little cabin, and chance meetings with passersby, better than the company of other witches.”
Mechtlieb’s mischief ebbs, her grin turning softer and more earnest. “That’s wise, dear little witch. So, then, it is to be Liesel and Mechtlieb, and Mechtlieb and Liesel only, for now?” Then her play comes surging back tenfold. “Just as well, liebe Liesel. You’re so very easy to toy with.”
Before I can form a retort, she disappears, and takes her muzzying aura with her. The strain upon my body, of hours spent at the pinnacle of lust, strikes me seconds later. My legs give out, leaving me to crawl into the cottage’s door.
“Damned demon,” I snarl.
Though it is hardship, I manage to latch the creaking door and haul myself to a seat at the kitchen table. I find it to have been piled high with food–bread, meat, and savory sauces still hot and fresh. I can but sigh, roll my eyes, and say,
“… thank you, Mechtlieb.”
Dreams come more easily than I am used to. The first night in the cottage brings liminal visions: shifting blue, strange heat, tendrils of color, sight, and sound too narrow to name. The second brings swelter, a sudden waking, and a wet sliding sound.
A wolf-eye winks at me.
Its glow traces the crystal horns, two straight up, two spiraling down. It catches in the slickness along my risen cock. Before the night-blur leaves my eyes, I feel her in full–a reverse-pulse thumping down my length, and its name is need.
Its name is Mechtlieb.
The sliding comes from her plump lips, wrapped tight around me, and the sinuous lapping of her tongue teasing the sensitive nerve-strap along my dick’s underside. I prop myself up on one arm. I draw breath to ask her what she thinks she’s doing. Her tongue’s twin forks find just the right spot and tease. I cry out, fall back.
With a liquid pop and a grin flashing white fangs, Mechtlieb releases my cock–but barely. My tip twitches against her lips. I am flushed, sweating, afire already. “What do you think, dear witch?” she asks. “Have I overstepped?” Her every breath wraps my head like a silken twist.
Often the heated currents of the air brush along my demon-tainted tip. The pleasure of it throws me back against the covers, where I clench my fingers so fiercely they ache. In the golden light of the demon’s eyes, my pinkish mutation shows another gift of demon corruption: clear drew beading on it until it trickles down.
“Oh,” Mechtlieb chuckles, “so that’s where the lovely flavor comes from. We will see excellent use from that, now, won’t we?”
Rising again, fighting spasms from muscle behaving like lust-drunk jelly, I clasp her horns and yank her towards my hen with an urgent groan. She chuckles, husky breaths raising my sex-aches to the point I fear I’ll explode. I plunge upward. She twists aside, flicking her tongue out and dragging it down my length until I’ve pulled her tight against my girlcock’s base. Even in the dim yellow-orange of her wolf-eyes, Mechtlieb’s mouth drips a shine like molten crystal.
I feel the trickles as hot threads tying into my skin, heightening sense and arousal.
Again I try to wrap my cock with the beckoning warmth of her mouth, and again at the last instant she dodges, tongue teasing.
“You…” I force the words out, “are awful!”
“I am a succ–” Mechtlieb starts. She grows distracted in her preening, and at last I bury my cock between her perfect lips. I feel triumph… for a breath.
It occurs to me that shoving my womanhood exactly where Mechtlieb wanted it is not outwitting her. The succubus proves as much by a luxuriant slurp. The fawning tones of her voice, deep within her throat, fill my womanhood with string-song vibrations. Every nerve answers. Each long suck fills me with static waves. Flicks of her tongue and masterful shifts to drag her fangs along my cockhead reduce me to pure mind-breaking arousal. All the while the wolf-eyes hood themselves in the dark–lust or smugness?
Of course it’s both.
The bed catches me as I plummet again, pulling her with me, bucking my hips. I beg with wordless sighs. I quake with need for release. My fingers clutch at her horns, but any pretense of control has gone. It’s the demon who leads, every twist of her head and tense of her fingers against my balls leaving me further under her sway. My breath begins to catch, gasping louder, longer. I drop a hand, clench sheets–
And Mechtlieb, sensing her moment, demonstrates how little she’s truly exploited my shaft’s mutant peak, demonstrates by lifting back and wrapping her lips right around it, coiling her tongue against the unbearably sensitive pinkish flesh.
I burst.
With a peeling cry far higher than I knew I could give, I throw my head back and succumb. Gout after gout of sperm tears up the channel within my cock. The succubus moans in delight at each, holding her rhythm. Her hot-oven pulse is within me, and the climax is endless.
Each plunge by the demon meets a thrust of my abandon in countertime. I cannot find my breath, and I do not care, for all is ache and relief and ache again as I fuck, fuck, fuck her throat desperately. I offer so much seed that some squelches from Mechtlieb’s mouth, glistens on her chin and throat.
At last she relents, plucking her lips away. I am exhausted. Steamy, breathless mush with no will to move. And I wish she’d kept going.
“That’s why I like you, Liesel,” she says, pulling herself off the floor and onto the bed with me. “So full of feeling.”
“I’m not full of feeling…” I pant. “You would have that effect on ANYONE.”
“Don’t compliment me at your expense,” she says, pecking my cheek. “That was a wonderful first round.” I preen too much over “wonderful”. I’m quiet while she rolls upright. Poises.
“Eh?” I ask too late.
She takes me within her a heartbeat later. Two days was just long enough to forget her pussy’s heated clasp. I remember very quickly, and the ache from my first orgasm only heightens the joy of her depths. Mechtlieb lands her masterstroke.
“That’s it,” she sighs, “good girl.”
I have been called many things. Occasionally good. But this… If every hateful lie ever whispered of demons were true, in this moment I would still give her my soul. She needs but to ask. “You’re a good girl, and you deserve to be happy,” she sighs. “Let me make you happy!”
I could claim that I am dignified, insist that I am a grown woman and a witch, that I should be treated as a peer.
“Oh, please,” I groan, cupping her hips with my hands and driving desperately against her. “Please…” Mechtlieb accepts with zeal, and a bracing hand on my chest.
“Foolish me, overlooking these last time,” she groans, rotating her hips while leaning forward to lavish my nipples with licks. I start and cry out at gentle nips of the white fangs on my teats. I am delirious with raw ecstasy, swimming in herbal scents of succubus.
Her tongue’s forks reach depths no human tongue ever could, touching me in ways I never dreamed of being touched. I heed her words from our first tryst. I do not try to hold back the smoldering force in my loins, but pull her tight against me and soak her womb with my seed. Mechtlieb shares the climax with me, glistening from emerald drew-drops to match the sweat that makes me shine.
She does not halt.
“One more, sweet Liesel,” she sighs, her twin tails wrapping my arms, wrapping my hen, joining it as it plunges into her anew. Then, with an eager giggle, she falls side ways and sends me flying for a breath into the air behind her.
“Come ,” she croons, reaching back to guide my hands to her rear. “You can do better than lying idle. Take charge.”
“You just want someone else to do all the work,” I scoff, but there is no malice in it. I ease forward, shuddering all the way at every little hitch and catch of her moist walls against my girlcock.
I ground it against the entrance of her womb. Once more her supple vines begin to tease. Breathing deep and fast, intoxicated, I let my lust guide me. A slow withdrawal–then, puffing, a deep thrust that shakes Mechtlieb and the bed alike. She moans and squirms against me. Her tails and vines and depths all clasp tight and contract on my length.
It’s too much. I groan in desperation and hurtle into one hammering drive after another.
“Oh yes,” the succubus urges, “fuck me. Fuck me!”
Onward I rush, my ecstatic gasps pitching up and up, grasping at her haunches as though I will fall off the world should I let go. Mechtlieb’s power pulses ever swifter. We are a billows, a forge, the inferno in the deep. Every rush brings my need higher, every ebbing leaves more yearning behind, until–until—
My senses fracture. Too much desire, too much wonder for a mortal mind to hold. Her breaths and mine, my thundering heart, the staccato clap of our meeting flesh–only touch is constant. Wetness, warmth, gentle coils tensing around my member. I squirm against her.
All that I am cries out to be with her, to be within her–perhaps to be her.
“Mechtlieb,” I breathe, and convulse down over her. She bends beneath me, pressed tight by my weight, kissing and cooing into my mouth with the shared joy of climax. It pours up through me and out from her, on and on until I am more drunk with delight than I could ever be from wine.
At last and also too soon, it ends. We come to rest on the bed.
“I thought you consorted with other witches,” I say, stroking her hair of all-season leaves.
“Two lust only for men, two are in a monogamous marriage with each other, and number five is Karin, who…” Mechtlieb clears her throat. “That is a, erm… risky decision, shall we say.”
I am not displeased. “So, in the night you are mine?” I ask, with a smug little smile.
“In the night I am yours,” Mechtlieb agrees, “if you are mine also. A contract must benefit both parties, dear witch.” I am left with the choice between a full night’s sleep, and the demon whose head now rests on my shoulder.
“Then I suppose, in the night, I am yours,” I say. “Forever, and always.”
Ashenvein Gate: Stories & Dreams 