<html> <body> --------- Metamor Keep: Divine Travails of Rats by Charles Matthias and Ryx Pars IV: Infernus (r) Saturday, May 12, 708 CR Deeper and deeper into the warred of architecture designed for royalty Charles descended, darting past doors that offered brief views into the desires that came in so many varieties and forms that the rat was left bewildered. He had imaged that desire was a simple thing – one love for his partner's desire – but staggering past rooms full of art gazed upon by the blind, symphonies attended by the deaf, and feast where those who sought to feast were themselves the main course Charles found that his understanding was flawed. Even something as simple as cheese left him staggering trying to escape its alluring scent and the hint of its delicious bouquet. Were those damned souls left tortured in this hellish afterlife those who gave their eternal fate over to whichever dark god held sway in this place those who sought to satisfy a desire so profound – for feasts, for music? For art? For possessions that now buried them under an immovable weight? What had they desired so much? What did he? In the realm of Klepnos all the scents, sounds, and sights had overwhelmed him with their potency. But here there was a sick center to each, as if the delectable enticements were merely a chocolate shell about a rotten egg. Here there was no feast as in the Duke's hall where the revelers were making merry and enjoying each other's company. Nor were the cries he heard the practiced exhalation of a whore house where those selling their body at least had some coin to cover the death of their dignity. This was even worse than the carnal weeping lining unseemly docks at night as those who had nothing left to hope for but a scrap of bread or moldy potato offered their diseased carcasses to the lust of sailors who never glimpsed anything but flesh. The moans and groans were dead voices unable to resist, and incapable of hoping for any return on the use of their flesh to sate lust. The scent of consummation, so filled with love in his own home, was nothing here but lust hardened by hate. To desire this deep was to enslave. A hand lifted to the torn fabric at the nape of his neck and the cowl hanging down his back. Hours before a spiked black-iron collar had been enclosed around his neck, and he felt all the fire of rage course through him. Power over the very stones had been at his command. And yet the price had been enslavement beneath the heel of Revonos. Would he now risk another slavery for the mere satisfaction of the scrumptious scent of cheese? Charles, unable to bear witness to any of desire's manifestations, kept moving along the myriad yellow pathways as he waited for the Åelf's rescue. To his horror after navigating a broad set of stairs that appeared to be fashioned from smoky marble, the short walls on either side came to an end. Before him stretched a vast hall between a row of decorative pillars which towered into the shadows of the groined ceiling high above. In the center of the huge space was a broad fountain of wine so heady that the mere scent of it made him dizzy. Arrayed about the fountain were monstrous shapes and things that seemed to have once been human unable to escape their grasp. The path descended the stairs, splitting at the fountain, and continued into the distance toward the far end of the Hall. But to reach it he would have to pass unmolested through the gaggle of demons which he knew was impossible. All but one of the creatures arranged about the fountain were voluptuous and sensuous with nubile curves on every inch of their flesh. They bore no clothing and so there was nothing that the rat couldn't see. He tried to make the sign of the Yew, but his arm had become a thing of lead that he could not lift. They lounged around the fountain, some laying half in, others just on the edge, their long hair drenched and purple, concealing wicked horns that spiraled from their temples. Their skin was lusciously tanned with a veneer of scarlet. Manicured hands with fingernails stretched into sharp razors ran down their bodies, emphasizing and forcefully exposing their breasts, hips, thighs, and everything else that there was to see. The other monstrous figure was mostly man-shape. Chiseled muscles that gleamed as if oiled rippled across his chest. The flesh was burnished as if on fire with nary a hair to mar the perfect gleam of its sheen. Long wavy locks descended from the crown of his head, flowing across a quartet of horns that lifted upward and outward like the setting for a ring. His feet ended in cloven hooves of obsidian black, and these were beset upon by the ruby lips of a quartet of the succubae. The incubus reclined with supreme contempt as it gnawed upon quivering flesh, juices spilling across its perfect chest only to be washed away by the spattering fountain. The monsters were not alone as they reclined on the fountain. Things that had once been human but were now missing parts of themselves were also kept close. The rat's beady eyes flicked from one to another as he trembled in his dark corner. For what parts they possessed they appeared human though they were as naked as the monsters. Some were missing only a hand or an ear, though no scar remained to show it, only empty flesh as there was nothing but more skin underneath. A few had no limbs at all, only stubs that left them prone on the ground, with only their torsos intact for the pleasure and consumption of their masters. Yet they still moaned, unable to move, unable to feel anything at all except the ministrations of the succubae deadening everything that they were. Charles' eyes swept to the pavilions nearby in search of some escape, and there he saw even more of the denuded humans. Some were molested by the demons and could only cry their misery of lust. Others were molesting each other. One pair had been reduced not just to their torsos, but just to the skin of their chest, belly, face, and genitals, so that they looked like nothing more than a pair of desiccated leaves buffeted together by the wind. One of the succubus had taken the skin of a human and stretched it out across her own body – despite being quite a bit more voluptuous than the unfortunate soul she had garbed herself with – so that the man's face was distorted by her breasts, the rest of him stitched across so that only his hands, feet, and loins extended beyond the frame of the succubus' body. Mad black eyes roved from that disgusting countenance, even as the succubus laughed and poured a ewer of wine down across her face and chest, bouncing it behind the taut, suffering skin. Charles met those eyes and quivered in a panic and the certainty that he knew that face. The form was ruined, the shape devoured until all that was left was the skin, but there was something there that could not be mistaken. Charles could see the puffy cheeks, the corpulent frame, the dark hair, the meaty fingers, and the avaricious glint that sought to absorb all into itself and yet could never be satisfied. Those black eyes spat hate with every lustful thought, and pined for any measure of vengeance it could obtain. Charles knew those eyes. Charles had almost been a slave to them but for the intervention of a white rabbit. The name came, one that filled him with loathing. Altera Loriod. Once a man of low nobility and connoisseur of the darkest of carnal lists, now become nothing more than the carnal accessory of a succubus. As if sensing that the garment stretched taut across her chest had been distracted by something beyond the tortures she had for it the succubus raised her gaze toward the stair upon which Charles had halted. A smile drew the corners of her succulent lips and a forked tongue slipped from between them to caress the glistening mouth with a seductive lick. Loriod's mad gaze never wavered, fixed on Charles with a rabid hunger that seemed to infuse the demoness that wore him with a degree of yearning as well. Slipping from her recumbent pose at the edge of the fountain she languidly strolled across the hall, her smile becoming more broad, revealing the tips of sharp teeth behind. Every move, each step, each twitch and jiggle of the succubus' salacious form, made the taut flesh of the late Altera Lodiod moan with unfulfilled lust. Charles trembled for only a moment before retreating backwards up the stair hastily only to stumble against something that was not marble. A long, serpentine tail that was of no rat ever born and most certainly not his own, fouled his footing and sent him reeling backward to smack his head upon the marble terrazzo. Blinking, the rat pushed himself up only to gape at the long sinuous shape before him, wreathed in a glow of shimmering red. The long, serpentine body spilled down the stair in relaxed curves, the tail which Charles had fallen over tapering from a long body that led upwards to a svelte feminine shape. And that shape was of a white rat so unspeakable beautiful that Charles felt his heart and body trembling in awe of her. Even having lost her legs to the abalone white scales of the serpent emerging from beneath her royal gown she was the perfections angels would yearn to achieve and mortals could not so much imagine. Hungry blue eyes gazed down at Charles and a smile lifted her whiskers, perfectly scalloped pink ears twitched toward him while she held something cradled in one arm. The other reached down to offer him a hand getting his paws back beneath him. “Hello,” the word, so simple, yet offering something beneath it smooth askance that went beyond desire, beyond hunger, to a promise of things that would leave Charles' very immortal soul struck dumb with pleasure. The people at the table, the deaf attendees of an orchestra, and the woman pinned in the corner of a corridor were mere motes – barely even sparks – in the face of what that single word offered him. This creature; half milk white serpent and half opaline furred white rat, was the embodiment of yearning. All lust and all desire were consummated in her form; scale and whisker and azure blue gaze. Charles wept and cowered but could not raise his arm to take that offered hand. Her eyes glimmered but there was no warmth within them, “I like you.” Never had words lied so sensuously and Charles' ears burned to hear more. “He is mine!” A voice, strained to the baritone croaking of a strangled frog, rumbled from somewhere forgotten behind Charles' back. Not the succubus' voice, for he knew that one would be a pale shadow of the rat Queen's voice before him, but another voice. The low, cultured, but wheedling voice of a spoiled aristocrat stretched impossibly over the breasts of a hell creature. Charles could see them now, from the corner of his eye, as the succubus with her damned attire had waddled up the stair to stand to one side of the angelic serpentine rat. Loriod's dark eyes filled with hate as if they could launch themselves from the shell of flesh to bore into the rat's chest and perforate his hammering heart. “He agreed to be mine! I want him!” The beatific queenly rat, a presence as powerful as any of the daedra Charles had thus far encountered, seemed amused by this request and, with a nonchalant gesture of nothing more than her white, claw-tipped figures, signaled her acquiescence. The succubus on which stretched the flesh of Loriod like some bedchamber fancy licked her lips and leaned in closer. Charles pressed himself back, away from both rat-topped naga and succubus, against the baluster of the stair. Feeling the cold stone of the railing Charles tried to gather his feet beneath him as the leering, distorted face of Loriod stretched before him atop twin mountains of soft flesh. None of the other demons – succubae or lone incubus – seemed to express the slightest interest in their tet'a'tet. Charles could not trust in that indifference but he would have to take that risk. The only thing he lamented was the inevitable displeasure of the lovely rat whose scent still filled his nostrils and left his loins aching with need. But the memory of the woman in the hall banked that fire and cleared his mind enough to consider his actions. Did a naga even have the right anatomy? Such thoughts, dancing about within his min like flame-drunk moths, served only to repulse him and curb those needs further. Planting his hands upon the baluster Charles turned and leaped at the same moment. The fall on the other side was not great and managed to land upright, briefly crouching to absorb the impact before darting along the yellow pathway across the Hall. Before Charles had managed to clear the sprawl of the stair's lowest steps the naga's tail spilled over the curled knoll post and lashed across his front like a wall of opalescent white scales. He jumped again but not high enough. The blow upended him in mid-leap forcing him to adopt an awkward tumble that found him on his feet, and moving with little loss of speed, when he recovered. She moved with blinding speed, her upper body swaying only slightly with the rapid sinuous writhing of her long serpentine length, to cut across his path. Snatching the Sondeshike from his cloak he gave a single jerk to extend it and drove the top through the meat of the naga's python body. It stabbed through, and skirled angrily from the floor beneath, as if there were nothing there. Charles blinked in surprise, staggering a step when the resistance he expected was not there to react against, and then gasped when the white tail entwined him and pinned his arms at his sides. The naga's regal, royal rodentine muzzle rested against the back of his ears and a forked serpent's tongue flicked past her prominent front teeth to caress them. The coils squeezed around him and he gasped for breath, unable to move. Her voice, soft and perfectly cultured yet alluring and sultry in the same breath, filled his ears and mind with ideas that shamed him with only a pleased exhalation. The claw-tipped fingers of one hand, much like his own but white, caressed his chin and throat suggestively – both with what those fingers could do to please his flesh as well what they could do to rend it. “He wants you, handsome little rat.” The queen rat-serpent crooned delicately, her whiskers tickling his ears and cheek as her perfectly white muzzle and one brilliant blue eye filled the field of view on one side. “I enjoy...” the word was drawn out as if nothing satisfied her more, “helping people get what they want.” Charles gnashed his teeth and dug the tips of his finger claws into the pads of his palms. The pain was sharp compared to the aching crush of her coils; sharp enough to drive the seductive undertones of her unspoken promises into the darkest corners of his mind. “I am not alone.” A sibilant, churring chuckle and a warm caress of breath across the back of her ears sent a tingle racing through his chest, down his stomach, to drop into the furnace of his loins like a dollop of molten wax into a chandler's kiln. “It is as you say, little rat.” The coils undulated, massaging his body from every direction with surprising facility. It tugged at his tail, drew his legs out straight, pushed inward at his belly, and then rolled against him so that he could feel his hips moving back and forth, grinding him against the cool, smooth surface of the serpent's muscular body. The gentle fingers of one hand raked up the back of his neck, the tips of her claws rasping against the flesh beneath his fur and sending a tingle down his spine, upward across his scalp. Charles tightened his fists wincing at the feel of his clawtips pressing against the tough pads of his palms until they pierced his flesh to draw forth blood and pain. “You are not alone.” In the corner of his vision he could see her lips move; the glisten of teeth and tongue beyond while in his mind's eye he could see what those lips and tongue could do when they were not talking. Shame clutched at his heart, but instead of reaching for a prayer to Eli in that moment of lustful doubt he could only envision the face of his wife, the Lady Kimberly, who even in the sight of his memory was a trollish visage in comparison to the serpentine rat queen who now held him. But, trollishly grotesque or not, it was the face of his Love that pushed those dark, carnal thoughts back. It was Love that buffered the hard edged fire of raw lust. With no hesitation Charles grasped at those memories and held them fast; of Kimberly's smile as she reclined – unconsciously seductive – upon a picnic blanket in the shadow of Metamor's walls. Of the glimmer in her dark eyes when she held her first child. Her first child. His first child. THEIR first child. Nothing in the beauteous serpent's promises offered that. The could never offer that. Her whiskers and warm breath tickled his ears, but the seductive warmth washed against a glacial wall within the mind of the mortal held within her coils. “Merely call my name and I will rescue you from him.” Past the prominent rodentine teeth her forked tongue snaked out to brush across his muzzle and whiskers, leaving a glistening trail of saliva as it slid across the fur of his cheek and across the ruined flesh around his eye before slipping along one ear to disappear between those lips with so many promises. “He wants you, and he has been ever SO loyal.” “He is damned,” Charles rasped, ignoring the tantalizing of her fingers, tongue, and voice with images of Kimberly's joy. He could feel that joy suffusing his heart against the fire of his loins; a spark before a furnace but also a spark against the darkness. “The damned can ask for nothing!” “Ahh, my pretty rat, the damned ask for all.” Charles felt her hand working down his chest beneath his jerkin, combing at his short fur as if seeking the pulse of his heart. Her nose brushed his ear; a nuzzle of promises that he already knew were offered by another with more meaning. “And yet, here you have come. Because you are seeking something.” “I do not come alone!” Charles snarled again, yielding against the grasp of those coils he could not pry himself out of. His Sondeshike was pinned at his side as neatly as his arms. Even collapsing it would do nothing against those pearlescent scales as he now knew. Where was his protector Åelf, Charles wondered with a rising panic. The warmth within his heart was a steady strength, but against the wiles of the beast in whose embrace he was bound it was such a small thing. “Perhaps not.” He could hear the shrug in her voice. For his demands Loriod had fallen completely silent. After his vault over the stair railing Charles had lost sight of him, which was all for the better. “But you came seeking, and what did I say, my handsome little rat?” “Nothing I listened to,” Charles bluffed, fighting to keep Kimberly's beautiful smile – a real smile as opposed to the artifice drawn across the muzzle hovering near his own – in his mind's eye. “I do so enjoy helping people get what they want.” Soft, warm, seductive, and so very, very close at hand. A turn of his head and her nose, so perfect as if sculpted, would brush against his cheek in a rush of heat. “Call my name – you know it, oh, you do – and we can find what you seek.” The coils tightened briefly about him, and he felt his legs and tail pressed tight together, before the undulating motion resumed which buckled his hips. Out of the corner of his eye Charles glimpsed the succubus with Loriod's skin sewn into her flesh leisurely glide around the base of the stairs. Hungry eyes found him immediately and the rat grimaced. Qan-af-årael, where are you? The queen rat dangled her arms across his neck and he felt his ears pressed against her breasts. The soft warmth of her fur and the delicate touch of her arms felt relaxed and enticing. If they but belonged to Kimberly instead he could enjoy them! “But until you are ready to let me help you, and it would give me great pleasure, to do so, little rat, I will let this one have what he wants.” Charles swallowed as the succubus sensuously ran her hands across Loriod's flesh as she walked around the abalone coils that had ensnared Charles, until she and the vile, distorted face of Loriod were in front of him. And then the petty little noble's skin began to stretch, drawn outward across the succubus' body until the limp hands slipped over her manicured nails, his feet encased her own, and his head engulfed her neck and face. The succubus pulled by her queen's consent the skin of Loriod across herself as if he were nothing more than a costume to be donned. Loriod's flesh was distorted in every direction by the shape of the succubus within, yet she appeared to show no distress at the revolting consumption. The flesh of his head was drawn so taut that his corpulent features were stretched bone thin. His lips spread and his mouth distended as if he too were a serpent. Charles felt the rat queen's coils tighten about his chest so that he could neither breath nor bend. His body, straight as a rod, was angled toward that gaping maw in which he saw nothing but darkness. Charles choked for even a gasp of air as he tried to twist his head away even though in his writhing he was brought almost lip to lip with the rodentine opalescent naga. The corpulent mass of damned soul and succubus pressed closer, their combined breath a fetid warmth across Charles' whiskers. Loriod's lips had been drawn so thin that they were nothing more than a scarlet circle, but there was no creature hiding within. All Charles could see was darkness; a void that passed around his snout no matter how he fought to escape. The coils of the serpent were far too powerful to force and too tight to slip out of. His fevered brain screamed the name of his protector, but Loriod's lips wrapped themselves around his head. He felt the flesh tighten against his neck and then crawl across his shoulders as the coil undulated over his body, releasing more and more into the monstrous jaws of his tormentor. Yet he felt nothing inside that maw; there was neither tongue nor teeth to greet and grind him, nor stink of breath to gag him or succubus to tease his tortured soul. And into that emptiness his body was shoved and swallowed until for one brief moment he felt nothing at all. ---------- May He bless you and keep you in His grace and love, Charles Matthias </body> </html>