My exact opposite.
While he never berated or belittled me, I could clearly see his disappointment when I acted up. It shamed me even more to know that I misbehaved because I wanted attention. I was so fucking pathetic. The fact that Pharos had been trapped inside the wretched necromancer Cornelius for all of my life except for the last two years didn’t help either. We never really got a chanceto grow close although he had been reaching out from time to time.
My countless other siblings lived too far away, had personalities that were far too different from my own, or were cursed like Ranael.
So whatever this mission entailed, I burned with curiosity. It saddened me to admit that the prospect that it might earn me another hug from my mother lit a fire under me.
So fucking pathetic.
For a male who prided himself as being an apex predator, I sure acted like a clingy toddler desperate for his mommy’s love and approval. Obviously, I understood that it was in large part due to the vermin who had been my sperm donor. My mother genuinely meant it when she told me to let it go, and that she didn’t hold any of it against me. My head understood it, but my heart still struggled to comply. And my mother’s aloofness and dislike of physical displays of affection made it even harder. It was stupid of me to take it as a rejection as she behaved the same with all her other offspring.
As I crossed the portal, I used the chameleon-like camouflage of the Gharlakan so anyone nearby wouldn’t see me as I made my way to Duskwallow. As I began my descent into the graveyard close to the crematorium, my sonar vision picked up an insane amount of magic being expended. Whatever ritual was taking place within, it involved some serious dark magic. Something nasty was about to happen.
A thrill coursed through my spine at the prospect of the impending mayhem.
This obviously couldn’t be a coincidence. All day, I had worried that I might be going there too late or too early. However, my mother stated that I wanted to be gone from Duskwallow before sundown while also giving myself enough time to do what I needed. For this reason, I speculated thatshe wanted me to come in mid-afternoon, around 3:00 PM. I couldn’t be happier to have apparently guessed right.
Circling around the large building, I used my echolocation to detect a potential opening that wouldn’t require me to go in through one of the three doors. I spotted one at the base of the residential part of the building, just a couple of meters from where the crematorium wing began. Although the much smaller residential section had been built at the same time, the wood and brick exterior made it very visually distinct from the dark stones of the crematorium.
I landed quietly near the tiny hole and shifted into an ash spider. The vicious critter resembled a hunter spider. However, it spit webs coated in a substance that turned the web into powdery ash on contact. In turn, the powder would cause excruciatingly painful rashes and welts. If it penetrated the victim’s bloodstream or if inhaled, it acted like a virulent poison that killed in minutes.
I crawled through the opening at the base of the damaged exterior brick wall of the house. It led me inside the living area of the former gravediggers. Abandoned more than 300 years ago when the entire place became cursed, it had now been claimed by dust, some dark and viscous form of mold, and the stench of something that should be dead but refused to be. The furniture looked disturbingly pristine, as if it had somehow been frozen in time. You still couldn’t pay me enough to sit on or even touch any of it.
However, I was shocked to see the countless arcane symbols and runes covering the wall separating the residence from the crematorium. It literally felt like standing before the doorway into Hell. The house itself looked like its former occupants had simply walked out one day and never returned. But you could tell that various arcanists etched those markings over a longperiod of time. I didn’t doubt something even more disturbing would greet me on the other side.
Then the sound of a woman screaming seeped through the closed door.
My back stiffened. As I raced towards another tiny fracture in the wall where I could slip into the next room, I began to doubt my initial assessment. I first thought that the woman was in distress. But now, although she sounded like someone in pain, her screams had a lascivious edge to them that hinted at something completely different.
I entered the crematorium and found myself in the viewing room. The guest chairs or benches were gone. The altar-like stone slab upon which the deceased was exposed in their coffin prior to the cremation still remained. However, it had been completely desecrated.
Dark stains spoke of old blood likely resulting from ritualistic sacrifices. Various other markings and unidentified splatters on the tiled floor revealed the unspeakable atrocities that took place here. A large pentagram protruded from beneath the altar, which was encased in a giant magic circle. As with the wall in the gravedigger’s living room leading into the crematorium, the walls here were covered in occult symbols and runes.
But it was the couple on the altar that retained my attention.
A man in his mid-twenties was savagely ramming his cock repeatedly into a woman. She was kneeling before him, ass up, her face almost crushed on the hard surface of the altar. He was fisting her hair in what had to be a seriously painful hold. Her face was red, her skin bruised, and multiple claw and bite marks marred her flesh.
For a split second, my stomach roiled, and a wave of rage surged within me at the sight of a man handling a woman so brutally. This systematically triggered me and my fears about what my sire had done to my mother. And yet, I knew it had notbeen rape. Or rather not rape by coercion and violence, but by deception as a doppelganger.
You tried to do the same to Amara…
I did not! That wretched thought would occasionally slink back into my mind. Yes, I had offered to take on the appearance of her soulmate so that she would stay with me instead. But she hadknownexactly who was before her. I had shifted right before her eyes. I didn’t manipulate her thoughts under a different appearance. Whatever the circumstances, my partners would always know exactly who was touching them, and it would always be with their explicit consent.
And to my dismay, this woman was consenting to her partner’s unbridled roughness.
I moved to the corner of the room to get a better view of what was happening. By the illuminations on the magic circle, they were partaking in some form of sex ritual. It undoubtedly benefited the man. But what was he offering her in return? The runes on the pentagram glowed in tandem with the sigils on the man. However, although the female didn’t seem to have any sigils on her, the bruises and wounds she had sustained were healing at an accelerated pace.
She emitted a sharp scream as he raked his nails—unnaturally pointy and sharp for a human—on each side of her spine. She threw her head back in agony as blood poured out of the open wounds. He slammed her face down onto the altar and continued to pound into her. The blood stopped trickling less than a couple of seconds later while the woman moaned. She was rocking her ass back and forth, meeting his dick thrust for thrust.
The man slapped her ass with such force, it resonated as loudly as a leather strap on a hard surface. She emitted a strangled sound in between two moans, and barely intelligible pleas for him to wreck her pussy. The man leaned forward andbit her shoulder so hard, for a split second, as his teeth sank into her flesh, I thought he had bitten a chunk off.
Dumbfounded, I stared as the woman cried out in ecstasy, swept away by her orgasm. How the fuck would anyone find pleasure in this type of abuse? The man cried out as well, ramming himself home, holding her hips so tightly his nails broke her skin. Fat beads of blood trickled around the puncture wounds. He undoubtedly had released his seed as he was no longer thrusting into her but merely grinding his pelvis against her rear while still being balls deep inside her.
As I witnessed this whole mess, I began to wonder why the fuck my mother sent me here. What could I possibly have to do with this consensual sex ritual?
The man never gave his partner a chance to fully recover from her climax. He yanked her head back so abruptly and with such force that I feared for a moment that he would either break her neck or tear out a chunk of her hair. But the woman straightened onto her knees and turned around to face him, led by the rough way with which he controlled her movements.
Without a word, he rammed his cock into her mouth. She didn’t resist or complain as he fucked her face with the same cruelty he displayed previously. Every time she appeared to choke, he would slap her then continue to rock in and out of her mouth at a punishing pace. Robbed of words, I watched the woman slip one hand between her thighs to rub her clit even as her lover pounded her face.
