by Lucas, Naomi
Astegur pulled her nipple into his mouth, and she lost the thought.
He began licking and biting her breasts. She gasped through painful spikes of pleasure as his teeth nipped her skin, and she was suddenly thankful for the darkness.
Her hands loosened, and she tried to look at his face, but he continued to nuzzle her chest like a barghest pup all the while poking her core with his member.
“Astegur?” she began to question when a vibratory low roar came over him.
“Good female,” he mumbled, the low roar building. “Sweet flesh and all mine, here, all alone, waiting for a prick to fill her. I will take care of you.” He drew back and pushed her knees into her chest.
She lost hold of his horns. “You will take care of me?”
In answer, he spread her sex wide open with his fingers and shunted his hips into her. One brutal thrust broke her.
A scream exploded from her throat as Astegur’s full roar assailed her ears. A shock of pain shot from her sex all the way down to her toes. Calavia tensed as she held in a second scream. Sweat beaded her flesh and several more droplets landed on her from above. Lights burst behind her eyes, and for a moment, everything went dark.
Then his cock was gone and replaced with a slick, wet appendage. Uncertainty filled her. She struggled to get away, finding the loss of innocence more than she could bear, but he held her fast to the floor.
“Delicious female,” he cooed again, the sound coming from between her thighs, confusing her further as he kept her trapped.
She gasped. “It’s too much.”
“If only your blood was pure,” he groaned, lapping her sex.
You have no idea.
“Female, the loss of innocence is always painful. Do not fight me. This night will end with my cock buried deep, and your cheeks stained with tears.” His tongue jabbed into her.
Calavia cried out again, shaking uncontrollably. Pleasure laced the discomfort. A miasma of need constricted her sex. It sought him. It sought more of what he did to her. But she was afraid of pain and she was coming to know that everything about the minotaur was edged with it.
His tongue wasn’t as thick as his fingers or member, but it was frantic, dancing chaotically deep within her, licking and jabbing and rolling, building her arousal back up.
The pain from before, the fear of penetration, fell from her mind as his animalistic tongue danced.
It flattened where he’d stretched her flesh and pierced her innocence, and devoured and soothed her from the inside. She stopped fighting to get out from under him and was now was pushing herself back upon him, needing more, finding that knotted ache of emptiness had returned.
Whether her cunt was drenched in his saliva, or her own slick, she had no idea, but her skin slipped against his, fighting for an end to the sensation.
His mouth left her with a slurp, and she whimpered again, wanting it to return. But it was replaced with the tip of his bull’s cock, and her fear returned. She tensed and her spine locked into place. Her toes curled.
Calavia braced, gripping his shoulders.
“Cry for me, female.”
The tip of his prick pushed inside her.
She cried, screamed, and so much more, taking in his thick length one shallow thrust at a time. He rolled his hips, stretching her, working her sex, forcing her to take everything, ruining her core and claiming her virginity at the same time.
Her nails dug into his tough skin harder with each second that passed.
He pushed her legs hard into her chest as he leaned into her from above, giving her no leisure. His cock a battering ram, worked in and out of her until the only thing she could focus on was the tangles deep within. I can take it. If Aldora, a human much like herself could handle it, she could too.
But Astegur was relentless, stroking her flesh with slow pumps, working her open. Her legs bounced against his with every thrust.
Calavia didn’t know how long she held still, waiting for her body to catch up, but she felt so used and out of control in her life that she could do little else. She couldn’t even open her mouth to speak, to give him direction, and when she felt words return, Astegur’s fingers curled around her neck and squeezed, eliciting nothing more but choking sounds from her mouth.
He trapped her beneath him, pressing the entirety of his heavy prick into her. His tongue came down to lick her cheek. She arched up, giving into the stretch. As she did so, the pain of penetration began to fade. Calavia gasped again. She forced herself to relax.
Astegur’s smoke filled her nostrils, his thrusts increased, and her cries morphed into moans. There was a strange, addicting sensation building within her, warring for more while at the same time, demanding less.
Her legs continued to bounce with each shunt. Her body was covered with sweat. Her hair was plastered to her skin. He continued to fuck her through it all, lathering her face with his tongue as he moved over her.
She strained as much as she could, seeking release, but was caught tight in his bruising embrace.
There was no escape.
“Astegur, I can’t,” she begged, the pleasure building. The pain from before was now nothing more than a distant memory.
He caught her eyes. His dark and rabid, wild with something she couldn’t place. It flooded her head with delicious, wanton cravings. Her legs tightened around him. His lips were pushed back into a snarl, his smoke trailed out from the sides of his mouth. This wasn’t a man that took her, but a beast. A sexually aroused, starved monster.
One that made her ache for sex when she never had before.
“Beg again.” His voice was dark and low, demanding.
She felt his blood pool under her nails. Her eyes widened, her mouth opened even wider. “Please,” she managed to get out.
He thrust the full force of his hips straight into her. Calavia screamed, the sounds echoed from the walls as bliss took hold. He did it again, and she wrapped her limbs around him. Her own hips jerked as sudden pleasure shot through, giving her gooseflesh, and curling her toes. The bull’s cock widened even more inside her, but all she felt was a sudden, pleasureable burst of sensation.
The horrible emptiness from earlier vanished.
Sizzling, pent-up waves of bliss crashed through her, straining her muscles, and locking her joints into place. She continued to cry out with each pulsation and with Astegur’s relentless thrusts. The pleasure eclipsed the world for one glorious moment, shocking her.
Astegur made a demonic sound she barely registered. He lifted her hips into the air as he drew back and knelt higher between her legs. He rammed his cock into her from above, forcing another burst of pleasure from her constricting sex.
Hot liquid exploded out from him as her eyes snapped closed. His seed flooded her sex and spilled out over her thighs. The sounds they made grew wetter with each of his final, frenzied thrusts.
Calavia laid back, letting her legs fall to the side as she listened to the minotaur’s exerted breaths, suddenly feeling exhausted as the pleasure crashing through her ebbed.
If this was what mating could be like, she was happy she had waited for him to arrive before experiencing it. She had not expected the pleasure. It was worth the discomfort.
Astegur’s bull’s cock pulled out of her slowly, making her whimper and bring her knees to her chest as she turned to hug them to her. She ran her gaze over his lumbering, bestial form.
“Astegur,” she whispered.
A hand petted her hair back. “Rest.”
“I really am human,” she mumbled through the haze of sleep that pulled her under. She briefly wondered if their mating would change anything. But then she squeezed her eyelids closed and forced the notion away.
There was too much at risk. She pressed her hand to her mouth, her nose, and breathed in.
He grunted from behind her as his body curled around her back, shielding her from the world.
Tomorrow, she decided, feeling sleep come on. She would answer his question tomorrow.
Chapter Ten
The crackle of blisterbark woke her. Her eyes snapped open. There was no firepit in her altar room. Calavia blinked out the glare and found the source of the noise—her hearth in the old kitchens.
Astegur was nowhere in sight.
The flames popped up into the air and warmed her skin, and she peered down at herself. He must have brought me here when I slept.
She was still naked, but now on a bed of linens and old clothes she had once stored. Beneath that was a pallet that she’d kept hidden in an alcove of vines behind her altar. She searched the linens with her fingers before moving them to her flesh.
Her skin was no more marred than it usually was except around her hips and thighs. Bruises mottled her usually pale flesh, and as she moved her hand between her legs, she expected pain or blood loss from her innocence. But only a deep-seated ache met her fingers from the mating hours before.
Her eyes caught sight of a bowl beside her pallet, filled with crushed cove and water.
He attended me…
She lifted her fingers to her nose and smelt its earthy musk.
The cove was a gift from the labyrinth, an herb that grew abundantly wherever the mist was at its thickest. It could be ingested or applied to flesh to numb any hurt.
Calavia moved the bowl closer to her and scooped out the rest of the mixture, applying it liberally to her breasts and sex, and before long, the minor aches that were left faded away altogether. Whatever she had remaining after the reapplication, she drank. Though the concoction took away the majority of her aches, the pain she’d endured for summoning him still festered deep within—though it had lessened with each passing day.
She spread her legs and returned her fingers to her core, assuring herself she had not been changed in some way, and that Astegur hadn’t ripped her in two. A weak smile slipped over her lips at the absurdity, but she pressed her fingers inside to make sure, then closed her legs tight as the memory of his cock returned.
Hooves thudding across the stone sounded behind her. She pulled her fingers out of her sex and twisted around, finding him standing in the doorway.
His sharp horns glinted in the firelight. “You are awake,” he grunted. His eyes flicked from her hands to her face.
“The fire startled me.”
“Do you not sleep beside one at night?”
“Only on the nights that are the coldest, but even then, there is a limited source of the bark here in Prayer. The thralls have to travel outside of my protection to procure it. I do not like risking them for something so small as my comfort.”
Astegur moved toward her as she spoke, holding several long pieces of rotting wood in his hand. She dropped her hands into the linens and curled her fingers around the fabric.
“You will have an endless supply soon.” He sat down on the stone at the edge of the hearth, pulling a blade out from the belt of his leathers.
She glanced at the crux of his furry legs where his cock was hidden before she lifted her gaze to meet his. “Will I?”
“The centaurs will have supplies, and once the mist gorges on their blood, they will be ripe for looting. We will keep the hearth roaring each night.”
Calavia slowly nodded. She turned her face to the flames. She wanted to believe his words, but her heart still dropped to her gut. Things had changed more for her in the last fortnight than they had in the many, endless years of her life. She didn’t want to die, she didn’t want to see her home destroyed, nor the townsfolk slaughtered. Her mother most of all.
A nervous energy filled her veins and fought the calming effects of the cove in her system. She pushed her palm to her belly. I need to find my mother. It had been days since her mother wandered off, ever since Astegur arrived. I need her magic…
The scrape of wood and blade filled the room in a soothing rhythm, but it did not stop her worry. She glanced around and found Astegur working his knife along the end of the wood, shaping it into a point.
Calavia licked her lips. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“I have not thanked you for your acquiescence. I know now, that what I have done to you is unforgivable. I forced you here for a choice I made. I did not need to help your brother, but I did, regardless of the inevitable outcome.”
“You may have saved his human’s life.”
“I may have made things worse.”
“War is inevitable. My tribe often warred when we roamed the deadlands. Out there, where the world is old and the labyrinth walls have been gone for countless years, exist creatures that rarely come to the barrier lands. Giants, leviathans, monsters as big as mountains. Nothing exists out there long unless they are made for it, as my people have been made for it.” Shavings of wood piled around his hooves. “Liches with armies of undead, goblin kingdoms with entire civilizations deep within the dirt, packs of barghests with countless numbers, poised to swallow cities whole. My kind has survived out there for hundreds of years, my brothers and I will survive in this new land for just as long.”
“Why did you come to the barrier lands now?”
“My father, the warlord of our tribe, was killed, and those that did not agree with his rule blamed my mother.”
“Your witch mother?” she asked.
He nodded. “When she disappeared, they would not admit their treachery. They took her. They would not give her body to her children to bury, and so we spurned them and left. My brothers and I decided we would follow in our sire’s brutality and return to the barrier lands and remake our tribe. With the strength of Steelslash, and the power of my mother, we would find human females to breed with like the God queen of old did with a human male. And in our quest in doing so, we will conquer a new land to call our own.”
Calavia watched Astegur put down the stake and start on the next one. She pulled the newly carved tip of the stake into her lap. “I am sorry to hear about your sire and mother.”
“War is inevitable,” he repeated. “We fought a clan of harpies for the mountain we sought, we spent a season establishing our foothold and rule of the mountain, and now we must fight centaurs to keep what we have claimed.”
“Why were you and your brother away from the mountain?” She never thought of leaving her own people behind.
“Vedikus was supposed to scout the barrier lands here and to the north, while I was sent to scout the southern lands and gather information.”
Worry swirled her gut. “Why?”
Astegur caught her eyes with his and she swore they darkened to black ash. “War is inevitable.”
“You planned on claiming the lands closer to the wall…” Some of those lands were her own.
“Yes.”
“Mine as well?”
“Yes.”
She slid her gaze from his to the fire. “Would you have killed me?”
“If you fought us? Yes.”
She closed her eyes tight, but saw her world drenched in blood and quickly reopened them. She knew when the minotaurs arrived, when they killed the harpies to the west, but instances like that happened often. The mountain had been shifting ownership her entire life. But never her land. No one wanted to live in a swamp, nor travel through one, and so she had assumed Prayer would remain as it always had.
Ignored.
She had picked a side in a war that had not even yet begun, without even realizing that it was on the horizon. “These lands…they are not wanted, not easily conquered, and there is only one sacrificial zone. There are not only centaurs to be dealt with, but tribes of hobgoblins and orcs. The centaurs that rule the Greymis coast have the largest army on this side of the continent—the current labyrinth walls—until you get to the forests far north. I have only seen two minotaurs.”
“I hoped the centaurs would not get involved. In a way, we are made of the same cloth, beasts with humanity, but Vedikus has made his move, and there is naught to be done but fight and ask for blessings from the moon and our God queen. The smaller tribes that fight for a hold
here are nothing, which is why we chose to settle here. In number you are right, there are fewer bulls when compared to the horses.”
She inhaled. “Can you win? You and your brothers?”
“We will try.”
Calavia caressed her fingers over the point of the giant stake and slipped out from beneath it. She had made her choice and there was nothing left to do but see it to the end. She had given protection of Prayer to a minotaur who planned for war years before it even turned up on her doorstep. It took some of her guilt away but haunted her all the same.
If I had done nothing, and Vedikus and Aldora had died, Astegur and his brothers would have sought vengeance, and I would have been in their path. She had helped them, and now she and Prayer were in the centaur’s path instead.
She grabbed several candlesticks of wax from a nearby table and sourced out her supply of dried vilevines from one of the shelves along the far wall. With the wax and the vines in her hands, she sat back down on the linens Astegur prepared.
She crushed the vines with her palms and set them on the floor beside her, leaving the seeds intact. She then rolled the wax candles in her hands until they were soft enough to press into the crushed vilevines and kneaded them together. Once she was satisfied, she pulled the stake into her lap and massaged the mixture onto it, breathing over it, willing it to harden and petrify and poison.
When she looked up, Astegur was still watching her. Not even the cove could stop her skin from prickling under his stare.
What would he do if he knew she hid the purity of her blood from him? What would he do if he found out? Her mother denying her protection was not a scenario Calavia thought would ever have happened.
A warmth bloomed over her chest and cheeks as his gaze pinned her. She suddenly imagined the two of them in an entirely different scenario, one much like a couple nights ago with his battleaxe poised over her head. Her blush deepened with that spark of fear.
