World of Forbidden Desire Ch. 02

This is a high fantasy novel following the adventures of an Amazon warrior who got stuck with a guy who was summoned from our world. This will be an ongoing story with multiple chapters. I'm not sure if there will be an end. I wanted to create a world that I could just create endless sex adventures whenever one came to mind.

All characters are at least eighteen-years-old. Any resemblance to people places things, or other characters is purely coincidental. Everything is born from my imagination.

*****

Oraya's breasts are the first thing Bobby sees when he opens his eyes. Two enormous, sweat-glazed bronze orbs that dominate his entire visual field, the aureoles a battered riot of bruised plum and old scars, the nipples still straining with the aftershocks of violence and sex. He tries to look away, but his neck won't obey, and the rest of her is sprawled over him, a living slab of muscle, heat, and unyielding weight, pinning him like a butterfly under glass. For a moment, he is convinced he's dead and this is hell, and perhaps it is.

He's supposed to be dreaming. He's supposed to wake up on his crusty mattress, in a room wallpapered with anime girls and the sour funk of Doritos. Instead, there is only the woman's body, crushing and enveloping, her presence so absolute it warps the space around her. She stirs, and the movement brings her crotch, hot and slick and impossibly tight, into fresh contact with his spent cock, which twitches, then begins, with mortifying eagerness, to harden again.

She feels it. Of course she does. The woman, she is Oraya, though Bobby doesn't know her yet, braces herself on her forearms, every flex of her arms and chest making her enormous, battle-scarred tits sway and press together in a display so shameless he can't help but gasp. She's bloodied, scraped, hair tangled and wild, but her eyes are steady, gold and feline, and when she looks at him, the room shrinks to her gaze alone.

"... You're alive," she says, as if this is somehow an insult.

Bobby nods. It isn't clear he's capable of anything else. He tries to cover himself, but there's nothing to cover with. His boxers lie shredded a few feet away like the shed skin of a lesser creature. He's still half-cocked, now smeared with a mixture of her fluids and his, and his face burns with the shame of knowing she's seen the whole show. Worse, felt it.

Oraya rolls off him, her bulk shifting with the grace of a mountain cat, legs splayed, arms stretched overhead. She sits up, and her breasts flop heavily, slapping against her chest with a sound that Bobby will never, ever stop hearing. She surveys the damage. The gore-streaked altar, the puddle of blood and come, the lingering crackle of spent magic in the air, and finally, with a kind of grim humor, herself.

"Get up," she says, and it's an order, not a suggestion. "We're not safe here."

Bobby scrambles to obey. His legs are jelly. His hands scrabble at the glass-and-metal phone on the floor, but it's dead, the screen a spiderweb of cracks and static. He clutches it anyway, his last tether to a universe that had rules and logic and at least a fighting chance of survival.

He watches, dumbfounded, as Oraya picks up the scraps of her leather armor and begins to refasten them, binding her enormous breasts behind a battering-ram of straps and buckles. There is something both obscene and beautiful in the process, the way her hands move with expert haste, the way her nipples disappear behind polished black, the way her muscled arms ripple as she cinches and knots each piece. She finds a blood-soaked red cloak, snaps it over one shoulder, and grabs a sword the length of a snowboard from the floor.

Bobby is still naked. He tries to fashion a loincloth from the remains of his t-shirt, but the fabric is too thin, and he gives up, covering his crotch with his hands as he stares at her, trembling.

She notices. "Clothes," she mutters, and stalks to a wooden chest near the altar. She yanks open the lid, hauls out a bundle of black linen, and tosses it at Bobby's feet. He catches it on reflex, almost drops it, then fumbles to wrap himself in the makeshift tunic and pants. The scent is wrong, dank and herbal and sharply foreign, but at least it covers his dick.

Oraya finishes arming herself and turns to him, appraising, unimpressed. "You need boots," she says. "And a weapon, if you want to last more than five minutes in this place."

She sighs, as if the weight of responsibility is something she's been dreading since birth. "Sit."

He sits. The floor is sticky, and he tries not to think about what with.

She kneels across from him, her face only a handspan away, her gold eyes boring into his with a force that could strip paint. "Listen to me. You're in the world of Aramore, in a region called Malakhar now. There is no going home, not that I know of. You were summoned as part of a binding curse, a spell cast by the Veilbinder, a dark magus, who is now our most implacable enemy. Your life is binded with me, for as long as you can keep breathing."

Bobby's mouth opens, closes. He tries to speak, but the English gets stuck halfway up his throat, jammed by terror and confusion. "I don't--I mean, I--what happened? Why--"

She cuts him off with a brutal hand on his shoulder. Her grip is iron, but not cruel. "You won't fully understand everything this instant, but in time you will. For now, understand that we're joined. I don't know the shape of the curse, nor the true nature. I only know it binds my soul to yours, somehow. When the curse burns, it seems, you're the only one who can quell it. That seems to be how Nereza designed it, the spiteful kretch."

Bobby's head goes light, and he sways. "Are you saying--"

She stands, tall like the stories of amazon warriors, looming over him, and even in full armor she is an absolute pornographic vision of hentai, all muscle and cleavage and untamed curtains of hair down over one shoulder. "Yes," she says. "Exactly that."

He feels his cock stir again, even in such a circumstance. This has to be a dream.

Oraya yanks him to his feet with a single, effortless motion. "But if we are cursed to copulate, then we'll need to seek help to cease it. There's someone who can help us. She's a sage, a chronicler. She'll know what to do."

The blood is still rushing in Bobby's ears, his heart a jackhammer of dread and wild, animal excitement. He stumbles after Oraya, through corridors black as pitch, down stairwells where the air is heavy with incense and the walls are lined with bones. She is ahead of him, every stride a lesson in physical dominance, her ass, round and perfect, barely contained by leather, bouncing with each step.

He memorizes it against his will. It's all he has left of the world he knew, a world where women like Oraya only existed behind paywalls and in impossible daydreams.

They burst out into the night, the shriek of wind and starless sky above, and Oraya leads him at a dead run across the temple's shattered courtyard, past the corpses of monks, the group cleaning up everything and shouting their gratitude, and the smoking wreckage of spells gone wrong. Bobby barely keeps up, his lungs raw, his feet slapping against the uneven stone. He wants to cry, but the tears won't come.

The city beyond is a stark dichotomy of towers and bridges, some built of black stone and lit with fire, others luminous and crystalline, glowing gently in the night. A thousand different species of horror and grace move through the streets--people with horns, animal faces, fangs and claws, elven figures with serene eyes and flowing hair, sages and scholars with etherial eyes, and seemingly every single one of them surveys Bobby as though they know he's not from their world.

Oraya never lets him lag. She drags him onward, up winding stairs, across suspended walkways, through back alleys where the only light is phosphorescent moss and the flicker of distant screams. She moves with purpose, tireless, never once looking back.

At last, they duck into a narrow tavern, a den so thick with smoke and candlelight that Bobby can't see his own hands. Oraya slaps a coin onto the bar, then shoves him into a booth at the back, where the table is sticky and the benches are covered in ancient grease.

She sits across from him, and for a moment, neither speaks. The air between them is thick with everything that just happened, and everything that will.

Finally, she says, "Rest for now, catch your bearings. Tell me about your world." It is not a request.

Bobby tries to remember where he came from, but all he can think about is the woman across from him, her mouth bruised but strangely beautiful, her hands still trembling with the aftermath of violence and magic and need.

He begins to talk. She listens.

Bobby speaks. At first, the words stick, a viscous paste of shock and embarrassment and something like awe, but he forces them out. He tells her his name, Bobby Bennett, and where he's from. Seattle, Washington, America, which means nothing to her, so he tries Earth, and then "the not-magic world." He is eighteen, a high school senior who's supposed to graduate in a couple months and go off to a university, and even as he says it, the number rings hollow, childish, laughable next to her. He tells her about his mother, a nurse, anxious and overworked. About the father who left young, about the internet, reality TV, and how everything in his world is lit by a half-assed fluorescent sun. He tries to explain "cell phones," "anime," "gaming," but the words only make his new reality more absurd, and soon he is rambling, voice rising until he's half-hysterical and half-mocking himself.

He can't look at her while he does this. It feels like the world's cruelest joke, being forced to live out his most lurid adolescent fantasies with a woman who could crush his windpipe with her little finger, a woman who moves like she's already memorized every possible way to kill him, and kill him again. Bobby's humiliated, not just by the memory of her body, or the memory of what she made him do, but by how much he wants to see her smile. He has never wanted anything as badly as he wants that smile. He just wants to feel that she's on his side, that he's not alone in this strange world.

He can't stop looking at her breasts. They are a physical constant, like gravity, and every time she shifts or gestures, her armor strains and gaps, threatening to birth a new law of nature. She notices, of course, but doesn't care, even seems nonchalant about it as she preen slightly, shoulders rolling back so that the straps and plates frame her chest like a living trophy. It's normal to her, maybe normal in this world, something that's always been done, therefore no one is phased by it.

Oraya listens. She drinks the words the way she'd once drunk the blood of her slain enemies, unflinching, and with a kind of brutal curiosity. She thinks about what it means to admit weakness, to speak weakness aloud, and wonders if she's ever met a man who could do such a thing. In her world, men postured, puffed up with bravado like fighting cocks, all strut and spurs and no real meat beneath the feather. Even her own mentor, a champion of the Ember Vow, had never once said "I am afraid." She decides, for the first time, that Bobby Bennett of Nowhere is, in some small and peculiar way, the bravest boy she's ever met.

She wonders what to do with this knowledge. Oraya is not a nurturer. She is the knife at the throat, not the hand that heals it. She has mentored girls, girls who wanted to be warriors, girls who would rather die than be mothers. She's taught them to run farther on broken legs and to fight through the agony of a gut wound. She has never had to comfort a child who wept for home. She has never had to wish, on some strange new level, that she could make the world gentler for someone. She almost laughs, thinking this must be another trick of Nereza's dark magic, this sudden wish for kindness.

But she knows that, for Bobby, the rules have to be different. Her world would swallow him in a night. He needs armor, and not just for his skin.

When he finally runs out of words, she sits back in the waxy darkness, arms folded, muscle straining against leather, and tells him her name.

"Oraya Emberheart," she says, and the name is a weapon, a dare, and a promise all in one. "Second emberwrought of the Ember Vow. Slayer of the frostwyrm, veteran of the Stygian Rebellions, consort to the Lady of Kolmorath, and the only person in this world who gives a evrex if you live or die." She smirks with the last remark.

He laughs, hoarse and shocked, and she lets her smile linger, just for him, and it's like sunlight through a break in the thunderheads.

"I won't lie to you," she continues, voice low and even. "This place is death for the weak. Nereza's curse has bound us, and I don't know what that means, not yet. But if you can keep up, if you can make yourself useful, I will keep you alive. And if you want answers, ask them, but don't expect me to answer them all."

Bobby tries to ask about magic, about Nereza, about the Veilbinder's plan, a hundred other questions, but Oraya slaps the table with a palm so loud the whole bar freezes. "Questions can wait. We've rested enough. We need to move. This curse of ours needs answered before your other questions."

Oraya tells him of a sage, Amara, who sometimes dwells in the library at the center of the shrine. "She's not old as the wisest of scholars and sages, but just as clever, just as powerful, maybe more so. If anyone can uncoil the curse, it's her. She'll know what Nereza's really after, too." Oraya rises, her full height a rebuke to the cramped booth and Bobby's own cowering posture. She wipes a smear of blood, hers? someone else's, from her chin and gestures him to follow.

***

They make their way through the battered nave of the shrine, past cindered tapestries and walls. Oraya's pace is unhurried, but every footfall is decisive, a living contrast to Bobby's shuffling, wide-eyed backward glances. The further they get from the altar, the more the world shifts from the surreal into the simply improbable. Monks limping, their wounds patched with resin, priestesses whispering frantic prayers over the dead, infernal creatures in shackles being frog-marched by acolytes wielding knotwork whips. No one spares them more than a glance, as if the sight of a woman in piecemeal war-gear and a half-dressed, bloodstained boy trailing behind is the least remarkable thing to happen that night.

Oraya pushes open the enormous double doors at the end of the transept, and suddenly the world is books. Endless shelves of them, stacked like ribs up the walls of the shrine's library, the air thick with the musky perfume of vellum and lamp oil. The chamber is lit only by pillars of blue flame, casting everything in a haze of moonlit monochrome. The tables are planked with ash-wood, scarred by centuries of scholars, and scattered with scrolls and ink-stained bones.

At the central table sits a woman, or something adjacent enough: long, glassy white hair in a braid down her spine to the small of her back with parted snow curtains draping the sides of her face to her chin, violet eyes that catch and refract the torchlight like a prism, and skin so luminous it seems to drink in the darkness and return it as opal. Her robe is a gradient of midnight and dove gray, cinched tight at the waist by a belt of sapphire beads, and the opening at her chest plunges deep enough to promise the reader at least several volumes' worth of cleavage. She is not, strictly speaking, beautiful in the conventional sense, her face is all angles and wit, the brow marked by a diamond of tattooed blue, her eyes, nose, and lips ordinary, but she is safe, comfortable, peaceful, magnetic, and nothing about her seems designed to repel.

She does not look up from her scroll until the two are at her table. Then, with the faintest curve of her lips, she sets the stylus aside and focuses on Oraya.

"Ah," she says, voice as cool as a cave's reflection, "the prodigal has returned. And with a souvenir, no less."

Oraya does not bow. She never bows. She plants a fist on the table, the force enough to rattle the inkpots and make the other scholar at the table, a pale, mummified man-bird in clerical robes, nearly leap out of his feathers.

"Amara," Oraya says, "you're needed."

The sage's eyes flick past Oraya to Bobby, who is trying with increasing futility to shrink behind her. Amara's gaze lingers on his face, then drops--without pretense--to his crotch, where the unfamiliar black pants have failed to fully disguise the evidence of his earlier violation. A single eyebrow arches, and she makes a soft, knowing noise.

"Oraya, you never disappoint."

"Shut it."

Amara smiles, and the room seems to warm three degrees. "You stopped the Veilbinder at the altar. I had my doubts. The Circle did as well. They'll be eating crow for a decade."

"She got away. And she left me with... this." Oraya jerks her thumb at Bobby, as if he is a piece of defective merchandise.

Amara stands, stretching with a languid, liquid grace that makes the robe slip to expose one milk-white shoulder and the silken slope of a breast. She gestures, and the man-bird scholar scuttles away, gathering his scrolls as if they are his children.

Amara's attention returns to Bobby. Her pupils are huge, fathomless, the kind that see through time and lies. "He's not of this world," she says, matter-of-fact.

"No," Oraya says. "The magus wove him into the circle. Then bound me to him."

Amara glides around the table, approaching Bobby with the casual menace of a cat wondering what a new toy can do. She doesn't touch him, but circles once, head cocked, as if searching for a seam or flaw. "And what," she purrs, "does the curse demand?"

Oraya's jaw flexes, the muscle twitching. "It makes me--" She stops, then starts again, voice flat. "It makes me aroused. An arousal so intense my body burns as though I'm drowning in fire, and my body responds and acts of its own accord, copulating with him."

Amara's lips part in a rapt little O of surprise, and a dimple appears at the edge of her mouth. "Only when you desire to harm him, or always?"

"Whenever the spell is hungry," Oraya says. "And it's always hungry. For now, I can endure it. However, at that time, the hunger of the curse was far too intense, and it overwhelmed me like nothing ever has before, compelling my body to act without my will."

Bobby's ears burn. He wants to vanish, to evaporate and re-condense in the far corner of the universe, but he's meshed in the gaze of these two women and there is no place to hide.

Amara leans in, so close Bobby can smell her breath, faintly sweet, like candied violets, shockingly innocent for the rest of her presentation. "What about you?" she murmurs. "Does the curse make you want her as well? Or is it only compulsion on her side?" For the first time, a note of genuine curiosity enters the sage's voice. "Do you enjoy it?"

He tries to answer, but the words catch in his throat. Oraya's presence, so overwhelming in those first moments, is suddenly fragile at the edges, as if she dreads what he'll say.

"I... don't know," Bobby says, voice cracking. "It feels good, but I don't want to--" He gestures vaguely, imploring the universe to fill in the blank.

Amara regards him for a moment, then laughs, low and bright. "That's the trick of any good hex," she says. "It makes you want the thing that hurts you."

She turns back to Oraya, voice sharp again. "Describe the moment. The instant the binding completed."

Oraya answers with the precision of a soldier. "We were grappling. She was chanting, and I tried to break her concentration. She spat something into my mouth, taste of honey and rot, whispered words that echoed down my throat. Then the world turned inside out. When it righted, this boy was in the circle, and I--" She hesitates, the memory a fresh wound. "I couldn't control myself."

"Classic transliminal invocation," Amara muses. "She used your will against you, then swapped it for another's. The boy is an anchor, a conduit."

Oraya's lips flatten. "I want the curse gone. I want the Veilbinder's head. In that order."

Amara considers, then turns her attention to Bobby, as if his opinion matters more than Oraya's vengeance. "And you, Bobby, is it,? What do you want?"

He wonders if there's a right answer. He wonders if any answer matters. "I want to go home," he whispers. "And I don't want to hurt anybody."

The silence that follows is oddly respectful.

"You may be disappointed on both counts," Amara says, almost gently. "But we'll see what the old books say."

She sweeps toward a side door, gesturing for them to follow. Oraya falls into step behind her, Bobby trailing, unable to keep his eyes off the slow, undulating sway of the sage's hips as she moves. The corridors are narrow, lined with shelves of parchment and jars of preserved things, some of which Bobby would very much like to unsee.

They reach a small chamber, more den than study, with a couch and a broad table stacked high with codices. Amara shuts the door behind them and locks it with a twist of her hand--no key, only a flicker of blue fire at her fingertips.

"Sit," she orders, and both Oraya and Bobby comply, perching awkwardly on the edge of the couch.

Amara does not sit. Instead, she circles the table, pulling scrolls from the heap and muttering to herself. The room grows dense with the rustle of parchment and the tick-tick of her manicured nails against the wood. Finally, she straightens and faces them.

"I'll need to see the curse mark," she says. "There's always a mark."

Oraya stands instantly, hands already at the buckles of her armor. She strips with clinical efficiency. Off come the chest straps, the battered pauldrons, the leather bracers, the blood-caked skirt. At the last she peels away the band of cloth covering her breasts, baring them in all their obscene, battered glory, the nipples still hard, the raw patch on her belly weeping a line of pink. She has no shame. If anything, her nakedness is a challenge to the world.

Bobby tries not to look, but his eyes have a will of their own. Every inch of Oraya is a map of violence and survival, scars crisscrossing her collarbones, bite marks healed into her thighs, a gnarled brand at the point of her hip that looks suspiciously like a mouth.

Amara approaches, hands cool and delicate as she examines Oraya with the polite focus of a surgeon. She inspects every limb, every fold, every secret crease. She lingers at the navel, then at the cleft between Oraya's thighs, humming as she gently parts them. Oraya stands still, unflinching, even as Amara's fingers dip inside, probing for magic.

Bobby's cock, traitorous to the last, rises in open anticipation.

Amara gives up, steps back, and turns to Bobby, eyebrow raised. "Your turn."

Bobby hesitates, but the two women's eyes pin him, and at last he shucks off his tunic, then, after a moment's agony, drops his pants. His skin is pale, unmarked, soft with adolescence. His cock juts up, tenting the air, and he wishes it would shrivel, but it only pulses harder as Amara approaches.

She inspects him with the same thoroughness, running her hands along his arms, his ribs, the gentle swell of his ass, pausing only at the root of his cock. She cups his balls, rolling them in her palm, then leans in and sniffs, as if expecting to smell sulfur or brimstone.

Amara smiles. "You are a delightfully ordinary boy," she says, and Bobby, to his surprise, feels something like pride.

She steps back, tilting her head. "No visible mark," she muses. "Most curses and hexes bares a glyph or a sigil, an anchor, a seed for the purpose."

Oraya, still naked, crosses her arms under her vast, magnificent tits. "If the mark's not visible, where is it?"

The sage's smile broadens, a flash of real excitement. "Dormant until you act, of course."

Oraya's eyes narrow, "Explain."

Amara's eyes never leave Oraya's as she answers. "If it's a true binding, the mark will only appear when the curse is active. When you're... consumed by it."

Oraya makes a noise of disgust, but Bobby sees the way her thighs press together, just barely.

"So what do we do?" Oraya asks, but suspects the answer.

Amara shrugs, a ripple of robe and breast. "We activate the curse. We observe the mark."

Oraya's face hardens, and she looks at Bobby, as if daring him to gloat. To his credit, he only blushes deeper, and looks away.

Amara turns, and for the first time, her voice is serious. "You won't like it, Oraya. But it's the only way to study the magic."

Oraya thinks with a soldier's fatalism, and for a moment Bobby sees the fear flicker in her eyes, the terror that she might disgrace herself again, become nothing but an animal in the jaws of lust. But just as quickly, her resolve slams down like an axe blade.

She snorts. "You want a repeat performance here and now?"

Amara's smile is all teeth and pearls. "It's the fastest way, Emberwrought. Unless you'd prefer a more clinical approach? Potions? Invocation? I can summon a dozen acolytes to--"

"Enough," Oraya growls, shooting Bobby a look. "Do you understand what she's asking?"

Bobby's mouth goes dry. He nods sheepishly, and in his mind, he's screaming, terrified that this woman, this war-goddess, will fuck him to death, and yet, part of him is dizzy with anticipation. Two times in less than an hour? He would have traded his entire Pokémon collection for this scenario at thirteen.

Oraya squares her shoulders, the motion sending her breasts rippling, the heavy undercurve of each tit casting a dramatic shadow over her abs. She barks a command at Bobby, "Sit. There", and in three strides, she's across the room, hands on his shoulders, shoving him down into a battered wooden chair. She plants her feet wide, straddling him from above, her pussy already slick and obscenely visible, shaved bare and shadowed by the mass of muscle around her thighs.

Bobby's cock, already at half-mast from the earlier attention, throbs upright, the shaft bobbing in time to his pulse. He's barely even aware of Amara leaning against the table, taking notes, her violet eyes luminous with curiosity.

Oraya glances down, judging the angle, and rolls her eyes. "You're lucky I'm not made of glass," she mutters, then bends her knees, lining herself up with military efficiency.

"Wait," Amara says softly, a note of genuine concern threading her tone. "If you're not ready, if your core isn't wet, you'll destroy the boy's tool. Friction's a vrexen of a thing."

Oraya huffs through her nostrils, annoyed, and with no pretense at modesty, drives two fingers knuckle-deep into herself, working her slit with a brutal efficiency that makes Bobby's head swim. He watches, slack-jawed, as she withdraws, then plunges in again, the sound wet and loud enough to echo off the shelves.

Bobby's gaze travels upward, swept along the lean, sculpted length of her torso, where every muscle stands out in sharp relief, a living anatomy diagram. He's fixated on the way her massive tits hang almost parallel to the floor, nipples still dark and pebbled, the undersides flecked with faint bruises from the last session. Her stomach is a washboard, the abdominals ridging beneath her skin like a suit of natural armor. Her arms, when she flexes, bulge with the kind of power that seems at once both terrifying and magnetic. He can't decide if he wants to be punched by her or held.

She confirms her own readiness with a glance at her wet, glistening fingers, then impales herself on his cock in one swift, unyielding thrust. Bobby gasps. There is no softness to her, no gentle easing. She rides him like she's breaking a wild animal, hips jackhammering down so fast and hard he loses all sense of rhythm or control.

He wants to grab her tits, wants to run his hands over her abs, wants to sink his face into that miraculous valley of flesh between her thighs, but he's frozen, hands clamped around her hips as she fucks the air out of his lungs.

There's no magic this time, no curse compelling the act. Oraya is doing it on her own, and she rides him with a grim, methodical determination, her jaw clenched, her eyes fixed on the wall behind his head as if daring it to challenge her. The slap of her ass against his thighs is thunderous, and with every piston stroke, her tits bounce up and down, even more mesmerizing in the candlelight.

Amara circles the table, arms folded, watching with the cool detachment of a scientist, as if Oraya is an detached specimen she can finally balance.

Bobby's mind scraps itself clean, blanked by pleasure and disbelief. Her pussy is so wet, so tight, that every downstroke sends fireworks tearing through his spine, and each time her ass slaps his thighs, the aftershock radiates up to his teeth. He wants to last, wants to hold out, but Oraya's rhythm is merciless, her thighs bracketing him in an inescapable vise, her gigantic tits swinging just above his face like the promise of paradise or the threat of erasure.

He is close. He is so, so close.

Amara's gaze flickers, hawklike, between the two of them. She notices, before either of the participants, that something is happening at the meeting of Oraya's hips and Bobby's pelvis. The first sign is a dot, a pinpoint of cobalt, so faint it could be an illusion, just above the hood of Oraya's clit. Its twin appears at the root of Bobby's cock, just above the base, brightening with each pulse of their desperate, animal thrusting.

The dots bloom. From each, lines unfurl, thin and dark at first, then branching and thickening, twining up from the seed at Oraya's pussy and the root at Bobby's cock, growing like veins or roots or a map of rivers. The lines spiral and split, tracing glyphs and sigils along the skin, wrapping Bobby's pelvis and Oraya's mons in a lattice of ancient script. The marks glow with a phosphorescent, sickly blue, then pulse, growing brighter as the bodies beneath them shudder and begin to lose all control.

Bobby comes first, of course. He is inexperienced, a virgin just hours ago, and even with a war-goddess atop him, his limits are lower than a rat's. He spurts with a helpless, whimpering cry, the orgasm rolling up through his legs like a seismic wave. Oraya feels the twitch and the sudden, hot flood inside her, and it's all the curse needs. With a roar, she slams down, burying him to the hilt, and every muscle in her body shudders with orgasm and pleasures she's never felt nor sought. Her hands crush the chair arms to splinters, her tits quake and slap against her chest, and her pussy clamps so hard Bobby almost passes out.

The marks surge with light, the lines now fully formed, a complete sigil wrapping their groins like a tattooed bikini. Amara scrambles for a scroll and a stylus, sketching the marks with feverish speed as the climax pours through the room. She is a scientist, a scholar, but even she flushes as the two bodies in front of her wring every last pulse from each other, as if the magic itself is milking them, demanding they empty every drop before it will let them go.

When it's over, Oraya slumps forward, her forehead pressed to Bobby's, sweat and hair and the scent of sex hanging thick in the air. Bobby's cock, still twitching inside, paints the inside of her thighs with a mixture of their fluids, and he's left gasping, heaving, blinking back tears of exhaustion and something dangerously close to joy. His face is a wet, red mess, but his mouth curls in a dead-eyed, hormone-fried smile: the universal look of every boy who has just fucked an impossible woman, and survived.

Oraya stands, naked and unashamed, sweat and Bobby's cum glistening on her thighs. She does not look at him. She turns instead to Amara, voice hoarse from the effort.

"Well? Is that enough for your notes?"

Amara blots the page, her hands steady, her face unreadable. She meets Oraya's gaze, and for once, there is neither levity nor cruelty in her tone.

She nods, eyes dark and ancient. "I know these scripts and markings from scholars and sages endless search for knowledge of the forbidden. The curves, the symmetry, the way the script eats itself. It's from the Codex Aeternum--"

Oraya interrupts, "That's a myth."

"It's not." Amara's fist clenches around the scroll, trembling. "The Codex existed. It was torn apart centuries ago, its pages scattered across the realms. No one has ever gathered them all. No one even knows how many there are. Nereza must have found a page, perhaps even a few."

Oraya's expression sharpens, the glisten of sweat drying to a mask of resolve. "What does it do?"

Amara's lips flatten, and the playfulness is gone. "It's said to be the First Grimoire, the womb of all spellcraft, the book that records every act of magic, every secret, every sin. Whoever holds the Codex can rewrite the rules. Undo binding, end bloodlines, extinguish or ignite whole empires." She lets the words fall, heavy as stone. "Or impose and undo a curse like yours. At least, that is what some sages and scholars aware of the codex believes. Even so, you need the page to learn how to break the curse. And a means to read it without being destroyed. Even if Nereza found pages, after reading it, the pages would vanish, and reappear elsewhere in the world. She most assuredly holds knowledge on how the curse is undone. However, unless you wish to kindly ask the dark magus to break the curse she placed on you, you'll need to find the pages yourself, and hope that the one you find gives you the knowledge you seek."

Oraya's brow furrows as she digests the truth of it. She knows only the battlefield myth. The Codex Aeternum, a story passed by word of drunken mouth, a talisman for despoiled orphans and traitors who dreamed of remaking the world. Oraya's old commander had once scrawled a crude sigil on his cock and claimed to have sired a thousand bastards in one night, the joke echoing through every barracks on the continent. But this is different. This is not laughter and bravado, this is the stare of prophecy made flesh.

She glances down at the marks still glowing on her pelvis and at Bobby's, the sigils burning like the afterimage of a deathbed curse. "I don't know the Codex," she says, and her voice is not ashamed. "I know only that nothing good ever comes from forbidden power."

Amara gives a brittle little laugh, but her eyes are soft, almost proud. "That puts you ahead of half the world," she says. "Most have never heard the word, and those who have believe only the scraps of rumor and heresy. Even I know only fragments. The Codex is more than a book. It's the memory of creation itself, the unspooling of all possibility, and probably the only thing Nereza ever truly wanted."

At the mention of her name, a ripple of dread passes through the room, and Bobby shivers, cock finally receding to a shy, exhausted curl.

Oraya asks, "Where is it? Where do we find it?"

Amara hesitates with that ancient glee only the faithless can muster. "Everywhere. Or nowhere. The Codex is not a book, not in the linear sense, not anymore. Nereza's pursuit is the same as a thousand before her, some want it for power, others for vengeance, and most for reasons so deluded they beggar even my imagination. But no one finds it unless they know how to find it. Its pages drift through the world, sometimes blank, sometimes burning with forbidden script. Often, the page is mistaken for scrap and destroyed, but it always returns, whole and waiting."

Oraya narrows her eyes, arms folding under her tits in a way that turns her silhouette into a monument. "How do we find one?"

Amara's gaze flickers with a new spark, her hunger for the esoteric suddenly personal. "You don't. Not by accident. The Codex is filled with unknowns. Though, it's said a compass exists, a device crafted by the Nullbinders to seek fragments of the Codex Aeternum. But the artifact itself is the stuff of fever-dream and pilgrimage, lost for centuries."

Bobby is the first to break the silence. "So, it's like... a magical GPS?" He instantly regrets it, but Amara's smile is merciful.

"I assume that is what your world calls the compass," she allows, "though with more blood and madness. The Eclipsed Dial, sometimes called the Black Needle, or the Sinspire, points toward Codex pages, but at a price. Only a few have been made. Fewer survived the making."

Oraya's lips curl with wariness, but a vein of interest threads through her suspicion. "How is it made?"

Amara paces behind the table, her robe parting with every stride so that her thighs flicker in and out of the dark. The spectacle is as calculated as it is casual. "You'll need three things. An Aetherglass, harvested from the site of a planar collapse--rare, but not impossible to find if you have no fear of the 'unworld'. The needle must be forged from the bone of a Reality-Walker, which is exactly as horrible as it sounds, and the power source is the breath of a dead realm, bottled in a soul-vessel."

Bobby lets out a thin, incredulous gasp. "That's, like, a side quest from hell. I don't even know or can imagine anything you've just said."

Amara stops, weight shifting to one hip, lips pursed. Her voice turns instructional, as if she's teaching a particularly dense child to read. "Once you have the pieces, you must bind them together in a ritual called the Nullbinding Rite. It must be done during a lunar tri-eclipse, and in the presence of three sources of magic from three different species in this world. The rite will fail and kill you if any element is lacking." She shrugs, as if this is merely the price of doing business.

Oraya's jaw works, but her eyes are already calculating the travel time to the nearest ruins, the kill radius of a Reality-Walker, the odds of navigating a tri-eclipse in the next year. She wants to punch the plan out of the air, but it has a shape, a pattern, and patterns are how she makes sense of the world.

Bobby's mind flips through the nightmare Rolodex of his last hour. The fight, the fucking, the blood, the marks still glowing on his pelvis, and now the prospect of assembling a magical horcrux out of murder and moonlight. He can't decide whether to laugh or faint.

Oraya's gaze is hard and very bright. "How do you know all this?"

Amara's lips quirk, just a shade slyer than before. "Because, once, I set out to find the Codex myself. Many scholars and sages have. We all wish to know the forbidden, the forbedden realms, the forbidden magic. Our objective is much different than Nereza's. However, I failed." She lets the words settle. "But I learned much, and I still have the scars. You will need a guide, and you'll need the help of someone who knows how to read a page of the Codex if you do find one. It will kill the uninitiated. Or worse, it will change you."

She leans on the desk, cleavage rolling forward, and takes sudden, razor-sharp interest in Oraya's battered, glistening body. "But there's something else you need to know. The curse Nereza placed on you? It was a desperation move. She performed it at great cost to herself, and it will take a very long time for her to recover, if she ever fully does. I can tell from the markings, the scripts as they are drawn, it's sloppy, imperfect." Her eyes are steady, calculating. "She doesn't understand it as well as you think. The curse will persist, but it won't worsen, won't kill you. It's a symbiotic parasite, designed only to harass and distract. You have time. Years, possibly before she appears as her true self again."

Oraya absorbs this with a grunt, the tension in her shoulders slackening, just a fraction. "If that's true," she says, "then Nereza is already behind us, not ahead."

Amara nods, fingertips slow-dancing over the parchment. "For now. But she'll be hunting, too. She has her followers, her acolytes, her own sages, her own scholars. You've bought a head start."

The knowledge acts on Oraya like a tonic: she stretches, shakes out her muscles, then re-buckles her armor with a speed and focus that leaves Bobby staring, dumb and a little bit in love. The marks on her pelvis fade, leaving only the faintest echo of blue beneath the skin, as if the entire ordeal was nothing but play-acting by beings too strange to fully comprehend.

Bobby pulls his pants back on, but his hands tremble, and he can't help casting nervous glances at both women, caught between the urge to flee and the raw, gnawing need to stay close to the only people who might keep him alive.

Oraya turns to Amara, voice low and absolute. "Would you come with us? If you know the ritual, if you know what to look for, I want your eyes on every step."

Amara lets her gaze flick up and down Oraya's body, drinking in the scars, the battle lines, the impossible alchemy of strength and beauty. Her tongue touches the corner of her mouth, almost unconsciously. "You want the scholar's help?" she purrs, "Or the sage herself?"

Oraya's answer is a stare that could peel paint. "Both. If you're willing."

Amara smiles, but the smile is not a yielding: it is a challenge met. "I will require books, of course," she says, "and a guarantee that, should you die, no one will blame the librarian." She glances at Bobby, her eyes softening just a shade. "And the boy needs protection, more than he knows."

"Deal," Oraya says, and grabs a short blade from her affects and slices a line to cover her palm in blood. The gesture is so primal, so at odds with the scholar's grace, that Amara laughs, takes Oraya's blade and cuts her own palm, clasping them in a pact that smells of sweat, ink, and the sticky aftermath of sex.

Bobby, for a second, wants to faint. But somehow, the world as it is has become less terrifying for its absurdity. The two women, titans in their respective ways, seem like enough to keep the monsters at bay. For now.

Amara releases Oraya's hand, and turns to Bobby, her robe slipping off one shoulder in a calculated act of distraction. "You are the anchor of the curse," she says quietly. "But you are also a key. The Codex, when it appears, will make itself known first to you, possibly. You must be ready."

"Why me?" Bobby croaks.

Amara's gaze is a riddle. "Because you are not of our world, never immersed in the potency of our world's magic. You are untainted. The Codex Aeternum will show you itself because you are not supposed to be a threat to it or this world. If you were still in your world, you would do nothing with it." She lets the silence breathe. "You are more important than you think."

Oraya grunts, not quite dismissive. "We move at sunrise," she says. "We'll get the Aetherglass first. Then the bone, then the breath. Amara, prep what you need. Bobby--" She hesitates, then softens. "Get some sleep. If she tells you stories tonight, don't let her cast anything on you."

Amara's laugh is pure velvet. "No curses. Not tonight."

The three of them sit for a moment, letting the plan crystallize, letting the new world they've made settle into its own gravity. Oraya's wounds knit up, slow but sure. Bobby's heart slows, and he feels, for the first time, not like a victim of magic, but a part of it. Amara busies herself with scrolls, but her eyes keep darting to Oraya, hungry, and to Bobby, curious, as if they are the first page of a book she cannot put down.