Curiosity of the Demon King Pt. 12

Over several millennia, the demon kings of the day, now considered failures to the race and prophecy, had left behind their presence in the hundreds of fortresses and castles dotting the vast landscape. The source of magical and physical experimentation that had bolstered the military efforts of the day, left behind upon the death of him to whom their loyalty was bound at the hands of humanity's champion, emanated unto the surrounding area and the nation as a whole as if a plague, the last curse of the failed demon kings, their final failures. From these so-called dungeons came forth monsters of all kinds, and within lay the gathered fortunes and artifacts of the strongest beings in existence, whether ancient or contemporary.

The name of this castle's former owner was lost to time as were many, given the concerted efforts of their betrayed peoples to erase their names from everything from documentation, to their bloodline, to the very namesakes of important objects as a death beyond death. The job of historian, disrespected, was made for masochists, but Kaffe's one-time master had drawn attention to the importance of documentation in the way of the old mages who wisely discarded demonic pique where it served no purpose. The man himself could only be remembered bitterly, but his lessons were branded in pain on her mind, and he'd been a proper master at least in that way.

What did it matter that the Grut, lord of the grey marsh had named the Manic Skiff after himself? It had taken more than a year to find the hermetic signatures woven within its propulsion circuits to learn just where it had originated, and those days were wasted on a vehicle which couldn't be returned to service after all. Worse and worse were the chests found within dungeons fully detached from their origins by years or ages and never investigated!

But here, this was where the last chest had originated. Kaffe soared on leathery wings, following the tiny movements of a pendulum, visible only due to a new technique developed within her own laboratory. She'd have been proud of the micromagics if she hadn't essentially wrenched the runes out of a power regulation circuit in an otherwise unremarkable magic sword. She'd come to a ravine deep in feral territory, hidden by the very angle of the surrounding landscape, and set down on its rim to check the pendulum.

It was swinging wildly as soon as she'd let the string tense. Energies resonating from the sample had absolutely originated under her very feet. She stowed the device in one of her hanging bags and left them there at the edge as she descended, flaring her wings and loosing a flake of magic light into the hole before stepping off the edge. Even if it was a plundered, empty place, plunderers rarely knew how to take the most actually valuable things; she could only hope that scrolls and codices weren't used for their campfires.

Kaffe floated down within an expansive space, walls and ceiling glistening as though she were within a geode, a fantastical structure formed at the advent of all things. Before demonkind or any other living creature, Heaven had been in the process of refining this crystalline space deep within the world, swaddled in liquid rock. It was comparatively recent that the structure only now coming into view had been constructed; Kaffe's flake of light fell hundreds of feet before landing upon a landscape cut from the whole cloth of the surface, illuminating not only a fortress the like of which she'd only heard of in the fearful mutterings of madmen, but grazing lands and the placid waters of an artificial lake.

It shouldn't have been green. This space couldn't have gotten more than a couple hours of light on a given day, but the grasses were as lush and healthy as she'd seen in the human lands, complete with wild trees, dots of vivid color revealed to be a cornucopia of fruits. Kaffe circled downward, tilting her wings to keep herself level as possible without flapping, and spread magical light all around to illuminate the entirety of the space, not only to take in its majesty, but to search for risks. She'd seen the kinds of horrors which stalked beautiful spaces for herself.

But by the time her bare feet touched the cool grass, she'd seen nothing that concerned her. She cast one final light to hover over her shoulder, the beginnings of another spell held offhandedly in reserve as she stepped through the strangely manicured grasses to the bridge across the fortress' moat, left open after the death of the occupant had reduced its defenses to meaninglessness.

The walls inside were actually plastered and painted, or had been at one time. Age had stolen the color and rot had eaten the plaster beneath, dotting it with black holes rimmed by fungus. Given the fact that most demon-kin didn't bother with those niceties atop bare stone and wood, whoever had occupied this castle was a cut above average. How it survived the millennia in a state even this preserved was perplexing.

It wasn't a utilitarian space, too large, too tall, and with too much worn marble that Kaffe soon began coming across. This felt so much less like a demonic structure and so much more like those that she had been involved in plundering with her master during the war, off in the human lands, meant for their gods. Their abundance had been apparent at every turn with paintings and sculpture, great colorful banners accentuating the high ceilings of their halls, whereas the current high lord of demons slept in a room scarcely wider than thrice his arm span like a pauper.

It being his choice scarcely made it more acceptable.

Up near the ceiling, Kaffe saw as she walked the twinkling of the metal rings which would have held that same sort of banner. Incredible luxury, using metal which wouldn't patina or rust to nothing within however many millennia it lay undisturbed; she planned to take as many as she could carry back home, with or without what she'd come to find. Perhaps a bit of jewelry would settle her lord's temper... or inflame it, considering his... her current predicament.

The stone was cold beneath her bare feet, marble in such great slabs that the radius of her light could not find a seam. One would think that a place such as this would never fall out of memory, that it would remain the oft-spoken jewel of the race no matter how many rational men must be expended to reclaim it from the monsters.

Kaffe kept her head on a swivel, squinting into the darkness while directing the points of her ears to pinpoint any small noise.

It was too quiet. If the monsters once here had starved she would have expected remains, or had it really been long enough that scavengers had taken every scrap of flesh and bone, long enough that their own leavings had been rendered dirt? No, in fact it looked like there had been servants sweeping the floors, dusting the giant marble pillars and the ceiling, cutting the grass outside in the darkness of the surrounding estate, but they were nowhere to be seen.

There were spells which could affect that, but even the best enchantments had some trace of their existence. Kaffe's refined spiritual senses picked up not a whiff. Magics so delicate as that had been denied to demonkind for eons.

By the time she'd crossed the entry hall to the marble steps, Kaffe had dismissed the offensive spell held in her hand for a stronger variant. Were there an ancient monster waiting for her behind some door or another, she much preferred to reduce it to atoms then and there even if she could have learned something from its corpse.

The rooms in the East wing were at least closer to a reasonable scale, though the fittings and fixtures were all of incredible quality, proven just by their continued existence. Kaffe went to searching, knowing full well that the most apparently valuable treasures were always deeper inside, but true treasures were often crammed into worm-eaten corners. The doors had all long since rotted away, leaving their hinges to flap uselessly, and any room that had once held a wooden storage chest now held its shadow in the form of a standing metal skeleton. Gold pieces here and there, flat disks with no minting, unhelpful yet picked up all the same, but Kaffe couldn't have hoped for a diary or a grimoire to have survived in the common form.

Old master historian Del had bemoaned how common an item paper was in the common age, compared to his childhood. There was once a time that anything written down could be assumed to be important, no matter how silly an ancient mage's code made it seem. Some of the most valuable contributions to magic had been found in cookbooks! If this castle were so old as it seemed, Kaffe could only imagine the wealth of knowledge lost forever to rot.

Kaffe rummaged through a pile through the open skeleton of a locked chest. One piece of rubbish there looked like a slate, with a character scraped into its surface... So this place was that old.

She grinned.

Then, something might remain...

By the time Kaffe had gone on to the other wing, she'd come up with precisely nothing of use. Damn, if this hadn't had to be a secret mission, she would have liked to bring an entire team of mages to perform the telemetry she really needed to suss out this place's secrets. She'd have settled even for a group of adventurers of the like humanity tended toward, just any other pair of eyes would more than double the effectiveness of her search. But Avlakoi was waiting for her, even if he didn't know it yet, so she pressed on; he'd been left in an unenviable situation, all she could do was search for the solution when all of her available tools had failed in spectacular fashion.

He likely didn't remember their first meeting, she thought. At the time, Kaffe had only been the apprentice to Righm, the court mage of the previous demon king, dispatched to the front lines of one meaningless war in a battle mage's concealing robes. And Avlakoi, he'd been the heroic vision of demonkind, representing their greatest warriors with the blood of countless humans still drying on his scales. Where he went, the air was choked with smoke, and one could tell his path by the gouges his grand talons left in the dirt.

Back then, they'd walked for a time together on the march from one sacking to another with the rest of the army. He'd broken from the slow progression and rushed to a nearby tree, came back with a massive handful of fruit, and he said, "Take one, the fruits in this land are naturally sweet, you can just pick them and eat without a worry about poison. I think I've heard this called an apple."

She'd raised her veil only enough to bring the bright red fruit to her lips. The juice ran down her chin, she hadn't been prepared for how moist and tender the flesh was, how thin the rind. It was gone before she knew it, and Avlakoi offered another immediately, had watched with the slant in his reptilian eyes, either joy or wrath. Now that she was more familiar with her master, she liked to think he'd have smiled as encouragement, if he could.

After her older master's death, Kaffe had tried to cultivate the seeds that she'd saved in a folded linen since that day.

The soil in the homeland simply would not support an apple tree.

Presently, she came through a passage into a larger room. The wall sported a gigantic silver mirror, real silver, she knew how to tell, but not tarnished in the least after millennia. It was either taken well care of by the castle's unseen steward, or it was magical itself...

There were skeletons in front of the mirror... Magical.

Kaffe turned her eyes from the reflection and stepped inside. It was her first sign of life after all, and she trusted that her own mastery of the craft would keep her safer than these one-time plunderers.

"Idiot woman, what are you doing!?" called a familiar voice that could not have been.

Kaffe looked into the mirror, as if made to by an invisible force that held her chin and would have snapped her neck for an instant of disobedience. There she was as she had been years ago in the heavy cloak of an apprentice mage... the very same woolen garment she'd worn during her service to Righm.

So, that's the trap.  Kaffe couldn't speak her mind, trapped within the memory. She had heard of subtle defenses like this, the utilization of originally recreational magics intended to hold the subject within their most pleasant memories. But she instead saw the looming figure of Righm behind herself in the mirror, he placed a pitch-black hand on her shoulder and bent down from a stilted height to speak into her ear. Not a pleasant memory...

"Speak, useless woman. What have you found?" His voice was like the rasp of wind past icicles, mimicked by the mass of sharp teeth visible within the shadow of his own hood.

Her eyes in the mirror were wide with excitement, she didn't have to look to know that her lips were spread in a wide smile. She had once still been glad to be away from the duties of a succubus and admired the strength and knowledge of the dirty old man whose shadow she resided within.

"A chest, master," she said, further enveloped within her memory of the day. The mirror had been replaced with the bare walls of a different dungeon miles and years away. "I thought you would like to see the treasure within, as you were on site today."

"And?" There was impatience behind it that Kaffe recognized from the seconds before the creation of some rather stupid piles of ash.

Without another word, she magicked the lock off and flipped up the latch.

Not a chest, not treasure, not a chest! Stupid girl!

The mimic's tendrils shot out into the room, coiled themselves around Kaffe's body, catching her as she turned, and they sucked her back to the chest ass first. Her terrified squeals were drowned out by Righm's booming laughter; the black fur of his face was nearly split in two by his jagged smirk.

Her face reddened with shame, then more as she felt the subtle acidic mucus coating the mimic's tentacles eat away her clothing, tingling on her bare skin. Stupid!  She berated herself for embarrassing herself in front of the master so thoroughly. She'd been so pleased with herself for the plan of giving him first pick of treasure, too!

"I wonder," Righm said when he'd calmed his laughter, "if this is the sort which consumes prey, or the ovipositional sort. Shall we see, together?"

Kaffe waved her fingers to affect some magic and free herself, but she could already feel that her power was being sucked out and the only thing she accomplished were some pathetic sparks sputtered onto the floor. She was pulled deeper into the wide-bottomed chest and barely managed to get her legs beneath her as the clammy, slippery coils slithered up her thighs.

While she struggled, Righm reached down to her and she felt a spot of hope that her master would save her foolish self from a humiliating end, dashed when he merely wiped a tear from her cheek and laughed.

Punctuating her despair, a tentacle found its way to her cunt and pressed its slippery head inside. Agonizingly slow, it plunged into her depths without concern for her squealed rejection. She reached between her legs and grasped the wriggling tentacle, but it was too slick with mucus to gain any purchase, too squishy between her fingers, and soon enough the tentacles had wrapped around her arms, pulled them taut, dragging her back and down onto her knees within the chest.

"Master, please!" Kaffe pleaded to the dark shape of Righm above her.

Thereafter, his grin faded. "Any who would pretend to be worthy of my instruction would survive a trap such as this. Live, or die." He grabbed the chest's lid, a single tentacle intent on dragging him down disintegrated upon contact, and he closed Kaffe away into the darkness.

Within the cramped space, she could only feel the roiling mass of tentacles surrounding her, hear the squelching of their motion. Only the one tentacle had pierced her quivering pussy, she could feel its motion filling her insides, mucus spilling from her cunt to join the pool gathering beneath her, and there were dozens more vying for its position as if they weren't one creature, but a colony, all yearning for her holes.

It was only when she felt the silken motion of a tentacle wrapping around her neck that she remembered the creature's entry in her bestiary, and she held her lips as tight as she could while the tentacle filling her from below made it more and more difficult to keep from moaning. The slippery, pointed tip of another tentacle prodded against her lips, sour-smelling fluid pulsing from it against her skin, dripping down her chin; this sort of monster had no idea where the vagina actually was, it got by via searching out every available hole.

Every. Single. Hole.

A pair of the slippery tentacles wound around her thighs and squelched against one another as their tips squirmed between her cheeks and found her puckered asshole... Kaffe struggled against the feeling of the one that just kept pulsating inside her sopping wet cunt, trying her best to clench her other holes, but her mind was fogging by the second. An aphrodisiac... how convenient for the monster that its fluids would eventually convince a host to stay of her own volition... Her pussy was burning inside, slippery white mucus forced into nooks and folds unknown even to her own fingers. It was only an intelligent mind that allowed her to reject the pleasure.

More tentacles passed across her skin, sprouting thin sensory tendrils that tickled on their long, slow progression up her back. They prodded inside her ears, filling her with the sound of rushing water and popping slime as others invaded her nostrils and she had to concentrate not to choke on the mucus it pushed down her throat from there. But it tickled too...

Kaffe sneezed. Her body lost tension and immediately the two tentacles beneath thrust up into the depths of her ass; she gasped and had only gulped down half a breath before the one pressed against her lips plunged gracelessly into her throat.

Her eyes watered from the sudden invasion, her chest burned with the desire for air as she was bounced this way and that in the dark, confined space by the pulsating tentacles. The two in her asshole spread her out wider and wider as they pressed further within, bulging her belly with their mass as they twisted around one another, spilling mucus that coated her insides, stuffing her to capacity.

Another attempted to join the one in her cunt, fruitlessly jammed itself against her already-filled hole and ended up viciously rubbing up against her clit instead. Kaffe barely felt herself piss except for the splatter of warmth on her thighs. The way it pounded her pussy was different from anything she'd ever felt before, different even from the slime-filled squishy dildo hidden in her bags back at camp. It felt... It felt... It felt so freaking good~

She caught the thought in its inception and snapped back. The one in her throat tasted like acid, it had already ventured into her stomach and come back up her throat, almost enough. She gnashed her teeth on the slippery, rubbery flesh and used the last of the air in her breast to moan against it, blowing bubbles with her nose. Finally, it came out enough that she was able to draw a full breath before it began plowing her throat again. These creatures bred parasitically, and that only worked out in their favor if their host mothers lived through the process, if only barely...

Held in place atop countless waiting tentacles, Kaffe was rocked from all sides with thrusts of such depth and roughness that it should have been excruciating, but the effect of their mucus prevented her from feeling anything like pain. More tentacles rose from the roiling mass and slithered across her body, coiling and rubbing in idiot groping that nonetheless managed to find her hanging breasts and tease across her hardened nipples. They engulfed her like a kind of thick, sloppy liquid, tendrils caressed the sensitive tips of her ears, grasped and tugged her nipples, teased her erect clit ruthlessly. Orgasm welled up in a rush and she was swept away in pleasured convulsions.

It pounded at her mind, she was going to meet her end here as a mindless seedbed, condemned to an endlessly cyclical life of orgasm and birth, fed on aphrodisiac slime and nothing more. Even as she writhed with pleasure, warmth filling her body, tingling from fingertip to her toes, the tentacles ruthlessly plundered her cunt and her guts.

They were going faster if anything, keeping her on the peak of an orgasmic wave, sensation assaulting her mind. Her body loosened, accepting of their every advance. She'd thoughtlessly taken a few waving tentacles in her hands, stroked their slick, squishy sheaths, and her heart leapt with the realization that she was happy! The piquant disgust of her conscious mind was becoming fainter, pushed to the back as aphrodisiac flooded her body with chemical pleasure.

The few tentacles actively fucking her were growing warmer, firmer, filling with parasitic eggs. Kaffe could felt them leaking inside her, scraping at her walls and choking her as they expanded, micro-orgasms racking her body while the first among them still hadn't left. She gladly imagined them as... No, she tried her hardest not to think about them finally bursting, filling her guts and her pussy with their thick, sweet cream... About becoming pregnant with another squirming creature just like this one and watching proudly as it went out to take another woman like its father... Again, and again, and again...

It came all at once. Kaffe's throat was pumped with thick, warm fluid and she swallowed it down greedily, felt her stomach fill and stretch, the remainder being forced up to and past her lips; she licked the tentacle, sucked on it to take in everything she could. The two in her butt stretched her asshole to its limits as they both dumped their warm loads inside her guts, plumping her from the other side with wave after wave of deliciously thick egg-filled slime. The one that had been rubbing against her clit spurted and coated her belly from outside while the two in her hands came without purpose into the air, merely adding the the lumpy stickiness of the chest, and the sumptuous aroma. Finally, the tentacle that had been fucking her quivering cunt unleashed a torrent of hot, virile seed against her waiting womb. Kaffe arched her back with the pleasure of yet another orgasm, having long since stopped counting them, welcomed monstrous impregnation in the cloudy state of her mind, while it yet remained.

She'd only taken one breath when the next volley of tentacles extended from the main body and began the process anew. Kaffe's mind receded further, her defenses breached and left ruined to the side. She'd live knowing nothing but pleasure for the rest of her life, the pains and the tedium of the outside world forgotten by degrees as she reclined and allowed her new husband to service her needs. How long ago was her last dose of birth control? She wondered how long it would take her to finally become pregnant, would have smiled at the thought if one of her husband's tentacles weren't calling for her attention at her lips. Of course, she wasted no time drawing him into her throat.

It was some time later, she didn't care much about time in any case, that the lid of the chest was opened again and her husband lashed out at the intruder. Kaffe herself cursed the light and the fact that she was receiving less attention, she wanted to kill whoever was intruding on her honeymoon!

A huge, red-scaled hand thrust into the midst of her husband's tentacles and clasped around her waist. Tentacles tried to wrap around the intruder's arm and drag him in, paralyze him, but his scales were far too thick for the poison to penetrate. He was too strong for the tentacles, suited entirely to capturing women, and dragged Kaffe out of their grasp, threw her to the floor of the dungeon.

He raised his blade and Kaffe cried out for him to stop, but he wordlessly stabbed down through the chest, her one-time husband, and the stone beneath.

"Not treasure of the usual sort, but I'll take it," the vision of Avlakoi said. "You there, woman, can you stand or must I carry a soggy wench?"

Kaffe only managed to sit on her knees. She was leaking from every hole onto the stone floor, her mind was slowly coming back from the safe recesses carved out for it and filled with shame as it did. "Y-you killed him..."

"So you can talk already? Thank the ancestors for your luck. From the ashes of their camp fires, your group has been gone for weeks. On your feet, if we can't get an ounce of gold from this place, maybe your companions would pay a ransom."

This was all a vision of the past, Kaffe knew as much. That cursed mirror was showing her this, but did it account for the weeks of history that she'd purposely forgotten? She shakily came up to her feet and approached the deflating body of the creature that she'd come to love; there was still aphrodisiac running through her veins. She couldn't properly feel anger yet, all the intensity of her emotion was funneled toward pleasure.

She raised her hand. "Ha ha ahaha... Hehehe... Hahahahaha!!!" Crackling energy siphoned from her soul ran down her arm, cooking slime ash black as it traveled to the monad of the spell in her palm. "Fuck you!"

The chest was gone, blown to splinters and smoke. The stone was gone, settling as a pool of magma. The mirror was gone, but there was a lump of slag on the floor back in the present, and Kaffe patted her past self on the back for training to ensure that she would never again lose control of her body in such a manner.

-o-

It wasn't an entirely unhappy memory, she mused as she combed through the rest of the underground castle, with much more care taken. That had been the day she started traveling with Avlakoi and Peris; someone left behind in a trap wouldn't be offered a ransom. That night, she'd lain with them both, had nearly forced herself on them when the absence of her husband weighed on her mind. She'd longed for someone's touch, would have taken anyone. It was only luck that she would have happened upon two of the kindest demons she would ever meet.

Then, war, the war. Avlakoi's ascent to the throne. Her own placement as court mage after the death of her old master, at her own hands...

Well, he had to be dead by now. No matter how much you tried, you couldn't make that kind of torture last forever.

She stopped her reminiscence when she went down and found what she had been effectively looking for, a history carved deeply into stone. There, she sat and set her mind toward study.