by Tay LaRoi
“Oh, Anja,” Aleit breathed, sliding down slightly. Her knees sank into the water as she braced herself over Anja. “This is why an aquatic soul like you cannot be caged. Your desire will flood the world.” She slipped farther down, her fingertips brushing against Anja’s flushed chest and hard nipples. Anja gasped at the touch, at the fire that flickered across her skin. “I’m so glad to be the one setting you free.”
Aleit crept farther down Anja’s body. From the waist below, she was underwater again, but her face now hovered above Anja’s exposed vulva. She smiled down at it. “You are so wet, my dear.” She reached down and, with two slick fingers, slipped inside the outer folds.
Anja writhed beneath her. Aleit’s touch could burn her alive.
Aleit slid Anja’s labia apart and then bent forward, breathing warm, moist air onto her. Anja willed herself to stay still, to absorb this moment. She drank it all in, letting her body fill itself with desire, etching each and every sensation into her memory. She mustn’t ever forget this, the most perfect and wonderful day of her life.
“You are one of us now,” Aleit whispered, her tongue flicking against Anja’s labia. “So don’t hold back.” She licked harder now—Anja moaned beneath her, praying for another. “Let me hear you scream.”
Aleit dove inside, and Anja cried out for her. Aleit sucked in, tugging and pushing against her like a churning sea, and Anja screamed for all of it, not knowing whether she was begging or demanding. She thrust her breasts out and arched her back, pushing herself in, willing herself to be closer to those lips and teeth and tongue, even as they slid along each fold and dipped into every crevice. Anja reached out with both hands, threading one through Aleit’s thick tresses and grabbing her hand with the other.
“Please,” Anja implored. She didn’t know what she was asking for, but that was no matter; Aleit gave it all to her, and more. Within moments, she felt her muscles clench and her orgasm swell within her, buried deep in her stomach but radiating out, and everything she could see or hear or feel was blinded by white, by the bliss of a sensation so intense it resembled nothingness.
And in that perfect, magical moment, twenty years of neglect, cruelty, and suffering were washed away. Anja opened her eyes again and saw only the sunlight peering down through the treetops. She heard only the gentle course of the stream flowing over her feet and felt only the skin and scales of the river woman on top of her. Her past ceased to exist—she had only an eternity ahead of her.
After a few moments of silent closeness, Aleit reached up again and took Anja’s hand.
“Okay, Liebling,” she began, leaning backward into the water. “It’s time.”
Anja dove forward, splashing face-first into the river. The two of them rolled together under the waves for a moment, absorbing a few more seconds of skin contact. Then, Anja opened her eyes and gasped.
Aleit had transformed once they were fully submerged; her waist now transitioned into a slim aquiline tail, with fins running down each side. Her entire lower half now shimmered with thousands of scales, each reflecting a slightly different hue. But the top half of her remained unchanged. She smiled, and her face was just as enchanting as ever.
Hold my hand, Aleit said without moving her mouth. Her melodious voice sang directly into Anja’s mind, just as it had in the forest. As long as you touch me, you can breathe with me. She flared the slim gills on her neck, motioning for Anja to breathe in.
The human girl did as she was told, and the water passed through her without harm.
Now, come with me, Aleit continued, lacing their webbed fingers together. We will swim to the City together. There, my dear, you will become the free, aquatic soul you were always meant to be.
Anja nodded and followed her, all the way to the bottom of the river.
About Samantha Kate
Samantha Kate works as a paralibrarian (that’s library support staff) for her day job. In her free time, she tries to pursue more creative projects than is humanly possible.
Website: http://samanthakatestories.wordpress.com/
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If You Want to Walk
Nicole Field
One
Chess walked down streets far darker than she was used to. Outside, it looked like twilight, almost, except that where she was from, twilight had a finite end. This evening, she had been stuck in this half-lit world of the Fae as long as she’d been walking, and she’d been walking awhile.
This was the second time in two days she’d found and then walked these streets. They looked a little more familiar for that, but the lack of light was still disconcerting. It left her with an impression of eyes peeking out of dark corners, of sharp-clawed things creeping behind her. She didn’t know how. Some deep recess of her soul told her they would jump out to attack her if she ever gave in and turned to look around.
It was only her own force of will that had kept them from jumping out at her already.
On this excursion, only one thing was different from the last: the fact she instinctively knew she was being followed. Chess tried not to focus on that. If she did, she’d lose the last of her ability to navigate this landscape.
Coming to the end of the street, she wondered if there was actually more than one street in this place, or whether it was all just an illusion. Once she got to the end of it, did it just start up again?
Except, her feet would not take her another step forward. Chess tried, but the trying only did more to distress her. It was like in those dreams where she tried to take a step forward, but couldn’t, so she lifted her arms to fly instead. Chess wondered whether everyone had those dreams, or whether having those dreams had been a precursor to her coming here.
Her arms didn’t allow her to fly away now. As alien as this world was, it still remained too real to allow for that kind of fissure. A muted whimper passed her lips and, once again, she found herself regretting her decision to navigate this landscape on her own.
And then, one of them stepped out from their hiding place and strode over to her. Whatever held her in place did not hold them. For a moment, Chess could only stare in shock as they came within striking distance. Reaching out, they grabbed her by the upper arms so she had no choice but to look into their eyes. Their slanted, iridescent eyes that seemed made up of every colour found in an oil stain on earth.
Chess’s only other option was to look at their impossibly well-shaped chest, the only indication Chess had that this figure was a woman.
She’d never met anyone in her own world who was quite so androgynous in the face as Dancer. During their first meeting, they’d advised Chess they didn’t subscribe to humanity’s narrow view on gender. “We are both, and neither,” they’d told her simply, standing half a foot taller and staring down their blunt nose.
“You are all right,” they said to her now. “You are doing so much better than many would have expected.” Their voice was dual toned, but Chess had almost become used to that by now.
She didn’t feel she was doing better than expected. To tell the truth, she felt only weakness seeping into her. It was a side effect of the faerie’s touch on her skin, the silent promise that she didn’t need to worry now, that others would take care of her.
“Hey.” Those fingers came to rest under her chin. A caress Chess leaned into, despite all that had happened. “You don’t have to walk alone here.”
That she already knew, and it was what Chess was afraid of.
Her head felt big, too big. Sounds blew up like heavy bubbles in a hollow drum inside her head. Not a headache. It was more like air pressure.
Chess opened her eyes, and once again, she tried to make sense of the things around her. Sometimes, all of this felt like a dream from which she couldn’t wake up. Back home, she’d often wished for an escape from her life, a way of passing on that didn’t cause any pain to either her or to the loved ones she left behind. Life, just livin
g, didn’t seem to be so hard for her friends. She didn’t know what it was that made her want to leave everything behind.
She wanted to take that back now. This journey had revealed to her a fragility of self she’d never been aware of.
And then there was Dancer.
Sometimes, in Chess’s better moments, she was able to pull it together. On those occasions, they were the first being she saw. They, with their multicoloured eyes and gentle lopsided smile. They, with their loose top pulled down on one shoulder more than the other, as they held out a mug of tea. They knew her love for tea. They knew her so well that sometimes it felt like simply being around them was like home.
She wasn’t, though, a fact she fought to retain. It was the reason she left their home as often as she could, to run up and down twilight streets as though, at the end of one of them, there would finally be a doorway back to her own world.
She felt like she was always fighting. Fighting herself, fighting to get away, fighting to go back home.
And right around then was always the time Chess remembered this wasn’t home, could never be home. She hated herself a little bit more each time this place made her forget that. Those moments led to nights of crying in Dancer’s arms, of screaming and trying to get free. Sometimes, she thought that just the shock of bright-red blood, the texture of skin that gave way under her fingernails, would snap her out of this…this dream. For dream was what it was meant to be.
Why couldn’t she ever wake up?
Her cries of “I want to go home, I want to go home!” were only met with Dancer’s whispered, “I don’t know how. I just don’t know how,” as they held on to her tightly, rocking them both gently. It was the reason Chess couldn’t hate Dancer. They hadn’t done this to her; they’d only been there for her when she found herself in a world she didn’t understand and couldn’t leave. From her every word, Dancer flinched as though her fingernails had finally made their impact felt.
She slept a lot more here in the world of Fae than she had before. Chess dreamed about the life she had on earth, the one she hadn’t appreciated when she was there.
Above. That’s what they called it here. Above and—where she was—Below. She couldn’t go back and stop her younger self from wishing to be somewhere else. She remembered how it had always seemed as though someone else was having more fun, having something more than the world she’d been given.
Now, here she was.
“I dreamed I woke up.”
Dancer looked at her, and Chess could tell they were trying to read from her face whether this was one of her lucid moments. Around bloodshot eyes, Dancer still managed a smile for her. It reached their eyes. No fake smiles from them. There never were.
As Chess met them glance for glance, it came to her that they looked as though they’d gone without sleep for about as long as she’d been in this ‘dream’. Did faeries need to sleep?
Sometimes she didn’t want anyone to touch her at all. This was one of those times. Chess hunched her shoulders as she sat on their couch that dipped ever so slightly in the middle. That imperfection made her think of home, of the couch in her living room, which had two previous owners before it came to her. She wrapped her arms around her legs and lay her head on her knees.
Bright streaks of her own purple hair fell against her eyelashes, but she didn’t shift again to move it. It was always something she’d wanted to do—bleach her hair and then dye it something bright and shocking—but she’d never been sure what it would do to her hair afterwards, or whether she’d maintain the upkeep in the real world.
The day she’d figured out she could spontaneously change parts of her appearance in the world of the Fae had been both a great and devastating day for her personal reality.
One of Dancer’s spare tops swamped her today, covering her hands and going down as far as her upper thighs. It smelled like them. She wasn’t sure what that smell was. She’d never smelled it before she met them, and now she couldn’t get enough of it. It was the same with too many of the foreign smells Below.
More days passed, and Chess thought she heard Dancer speaking outside their apartment with someone who had the same high vocal register as Dancer, but without the dual tone to it. However, no one ever came in to see her.
“Why do you do that?” she asked them one day, as they closed the front door between them and their visitor.
“Do what?” Dancer asked. They were so patient with her, so loving despite all. Chess couldn’t believe she deserved it.
Sometimes, like now, it made her want to be more objectionable, to get a rise out of them. To shatter the illusion and see if Dancer ever became any less perfect.
“You never let them in. Are they so hideous? So horrible? Do they look like…?”
Before her mind could completely commit to all the possible, horror-inspiring ways their friends might look, Dancer stopped her, coming towards Chess and kneeling in front of her, though not touching. “I’ll let them in. If you don’t mind?”
Chess shook her head. “No. I don’t mind.”
Two
What Chess didn’t know, and what Dancer had taken great pains never to let her know, was that every morning they went out hunting. Searching. There had to be a way out of here. Dancer had never wanted a way out of the Below, but they wanted one now.
“The way out is particular to every person. Just like the way in,” one of their allies, Siera, told them.
“She won’t accept who she is here, or that she’s here at all. Difficult to leave a place you don’t fully believe in,” Lyle told them.
It was the same with everyone Dancer went to.
As their feet became bloodied and tired, they bandaged them and then went out again the next morning. Always in the morning just before dawn.
Dawn had always been when they wished for someone to arrive who would see them as they were and could truly love them. Dancer should have known to be careful what they wished for. They had, after all, lived in the Below, under the faerie hill, their whole life. And that life hadn’t been short. A century and a half was a long time to be lonely.
They’d never imagined their wishings would bring a human girl down to the Below. Or that it would lead to this. Dancer had never wanted her here like this, had never correctly thought of what it would be like for a human down in the Below. They never thought there would be something inside a human girl—an answering need?—that would make her follow them here.
Three
The door creaked open, and she heard Dancer’s voice along with another. A soft baritone, far deeper than Dancer’s voice. It was mellow, soothing.
It was inside.
Chess looked up through her purple bangs towards the newcomer. He was tall, taller than anyone else she had ever seen, with a lean, angular frame and very long dark hair, supernaturally straight and down to the backs of his knees. His skin was pale. He looked both ethereal and real. He had a sense of solidity, like earth and rock in this place of mist and half light. It drew Chess toward him before she even made a conscious decision.
He sat before her, turning his head to flick his hair to the side before he sat on it. His worn leather jacket creaked softly, and then he smiled. That smile changed his whole face, making it wicked and cheeky and a little bit wild.
Chess stared at him in shock. When she didn’t look away, the man tilted his head to the side and narrowed one eye contemplatively. “Are you expecting…wings to pop out of my back? Black film to cover my eyes? Fangs? Fur? Give me something to go on here. I can’t live up to your expectations if you don’t let me in.”
It was only then that she noticed Dancer had stayed in the room, leaning against one of the archways, behind this tall, tall man. The sight of them being there with her reassured Chess, yet didn’t take away from the strange solidity of this newcomer.
The smile on his face invited her to join in despite herself. Chess wondered if that power to encourage people against their will was an ability all faeries shared, or just
the ones she’d met.
Moments passed, but when Chess opened her mouth to speak, nothing came out. A nervous smile curved her lips, thinning them against words that wouldn’t come. Behind the newcomer, she noticed Dancer’s expression grow concerned. It hadn’t occurred to Chess to feel scared until that moment. The beginnings of terror took her by the throat even as Dancer pushed themselves from the wall. The push of words backing up in her throat only made everything worse.
“Chess?”
One word, and everything inside and outside her head started to slow down. Again, Chess found her attention arrested by the man in front of her, even though—at some point—Dancer had come to crouch beside her, looking up at her with concern. Their hand gently touched the skin of her knee, helping to ground her in the room again.
A panic attack. She’d had those before, but they seemed to affect her differently in the world of the Fae. Recognising the feeling of it sometimes helped her to cope with it before she became a slave to the attack. She could feel her throat closing up again, and she closed her eyes, trying to remember the breathing techniques she knew. Breathe in, hold, breathe out, hold.
“You can go insane here.” It was the soft baritone of Dancer’s friend.
Chess kept her eyes closed and continued with her breathing. She was listening, though. She couldn’t help it, and it threatened to destroy the fragile pattern of her breathing.
As though he knew it, he continued speaking. “Batshit fucking insane. We’ve all seen it. If you stay locked away and afraid, you will never leave, and you will go out of your mind.”
Chess’s breathing hitched. Although she’d often felt driven insane by out of control feelings and emotions back home, logically she understood that was part of the depression that assailed her.
The surprise of hearing it was actually a possibility in the Below was sobering and startling enough that Chess’s eyelids darted open and she focused on the tall man anew.
