Herbert's Guest (Reanimator) Pt. 01

HELLO, MY LOVELY READERS!

Before we dive in to the story, I just wanted to add a quick personal note:

Firstly, I want to thank you all for your patience while my life was put on hold due to health issues and a subsequent interstate move. I've now recovered enough to start creating more spicy content for you all.

While Herbert's Guest (Reanimator) may not be an EROTIC chapter of Astrid's adventures, I still wanted to share it with you.

I understand a lot of you are only on Literotica for the smut, and that's OK. I have plenty of raw WIPs to keep you deviants fed, so watch this space.

But if you enjoy reading this story as much as I have writing it, drop me a like or let me know in the comments if you want me to keep posting stuff like this here as well, and I'll make it happen.

Stay Spicy,

xoxo Clitical Hit

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THE BACHDERYN: HERBERT'S GUEST (REANIMATOR)

PART 1

A searing, bloom of light flash behind my eyelids dragged me out of the dark, followed an instant later by a viscous crack of thunder that rattled my teeth.

Consciousness struck like an executioner's axe. Memory rushed to fill the void with indecent haste:

The Dragonian Mage. I remembered the yellow scales of his snout, his rasping voice like stone on stone as he spoke his incantation, fingers curled like dry claws had unspooled that vulgar orb of orange and sulfurous fire. Kallix beside me, hands snapping into the somatic cross of a counter-ward, the aborted syllable of "Vuurbrannath!" dying in his throat as the Mage's miniature sun, greedy and blinding, chewed through the timber rafters of the watchtower in an avalanche of burning pine and masonry. I recalled the concussion wave had tossed me into the night from the second-storey window like discarded paper, the glittering crash of diamond-paned glass giving way, and that horrifyingly wet, wooden snap as my leg kissed the stone sill. Then the shock: the furnace blast quenched by a breathless skid across drift-snow, and twilight rushing in like spilled ink before the world extinguished entirely.

Now, there was only a damp stillness broken by the tantrum of a dead Storm Titan above me and an unbearable ache thrumming in my right lower limb.

As my other senses returned, I recognised the rich, alkaline reek of lye, vinegar, and a disquieting undertone of rendered fat that smelled far too much like cooking pork. I heard the scratch of writing, and movement somewhere nearby. The scuttle of something like a rat.

I peeled my eyes open. Crust and dried soot made the task a miserable triumph. Above me arched a ceiling of heavy, cobwebbed vaulting of black stone, greasy with centuries of soot.

Drawing a breath to instinctively call for Kallix, I instead found myself overcome with a fit of weak, racking coughs. My throat and lungs felt as though I'd been sucking on a phallus made of fire. My fingers clawed to catch the leather of his coat, or brush the iron cylinders of his sidearms.

Instead, I found only cold metal, and realised my wrists were bound beside me. Broad, stiff leather cuffs held my arms flat to a flat slab.

The silence of the room was vast, heavy, and dreadfully devoid of gunfire, and the certainty struck me cold and hollow: Kallix had been directly beneath the main rafter when the fire caught.

He was gone. Ground to a memory by ash and falling stone, leaving me entirely unchaperoned in what appeared to be a dungeon of the Vaerestan State.

They've taken me. I'm done for.

The realisation was unwelcome, but true: of course they'd found me.

Unconscious, shattered, and completely vulnerable, I'd been served up on a platter like offal tossed from a butcher's cart. And once their magistrates pieced together who I was, the inquisitors would declare it a celestial windfall. I knew from the reports Kallix had shared with me that they didn't outright hang bards, guisers and yarnies - those they called Subvertives; they broke them joint by joint in the dark until their minds cracked.

Panic unfurled its dark, all-encompassing wings across my chest as though determined to smother me like the foul, uninvited parasite it was.

I struggled, and a sharp bolt of white-hot agony shot from my right leg into my hip. It overcame me, forcing me to lay still. I ground my teeth together, but I couldn't stop the whimper of utter despair and pain that left my lips.

A small mewl answered from the shadows near my hip

I whipped my head sideways, bracing for a small dungeon inhabitant: a cat, or a rodent; something of that ilk. But the creature perched upon the wooden stool beside my slab defied every natural law under the sun.

It stood upright like a misshapen imp - squat, round-bellied, and carpeted in thick, matted grey fur, balanced upon short, bowed hindquarters. A mangy plume of a fox tail flicked nervously at its rear. Its broad, whiskered face was unmistakably feline complete with pointed ears and a neat grey nose, but the gaze fixed upon me was a carnival of horrors: both seemingly too large for the small face, the left eye was a dull yellow-brown, slitted by a horizontal pupil that looked as though it belonged in a pasture, while the other was moist, pale blue, and far too familiar for my sensibilities.

Worst of all were the appendages resting against the cold rim of my table. They were not paws, but pale, soft, impossibly delicate hands, no larger than a human toddler, complete with dimples at the knuckles and sharp pink fingernails that lightly tapped the metal in frantic excitement.

As I recoiled against the restraints, the thing dropped abruptly onto all fours with a needy whine. I noticed a ridge of wickedly barbed porcupine quills bristling straight through the fur along its spine with a dry, metallic rattle.

Despite being an ambulatory nightmare, its expression held nothing but the pathetic, desperate hope of an orphaned pup begging for scraps. It reached out one of those human hands and gently patted my bruised knuckles.

The soft, fleshy touch sent a jolt of pure revulsion straight to the roots of my hair. I bucked against the slab, the leather cuffs biting savagely into my wrists, every scrap of composure deserting me in a frantic, undignified scramble of raw instinct. The room tilted, the vaulting overhead seemed to lean down like the ribs of a leviathan about to swallow me whole.

"Leave her alone, Herbert."

The voice echoed around the dripping gloom, having come from somewhere in the shroud of vaulted darkness, an astonishingly plummy, aristocratic cadence. Stately, frigid, and imperious enough to make a high duke snap to attention.

From behind a row of murky glass containers stepped a small, viridian-skinned woman. Her moss-green ears were vast, sweeping backward from her temples like the wings of a roosting swallow and seeming entirely too large for her slight frame.

A Groenling.

My friend Deigna on the Golden Coast was a Groenling, but where Deigna stood statuesque and lethal as an elf, this woman was barely taller than a roadside goblin. Yet she lacked every ounce of their squat coarseness; her collarbones were delicate as blown glass, her cheekbones high and severe.

Over an elegant, high-collared gown of sumptuous black mourning silk, tiered lace, and long sleeves topped by puffs, she wore a stiff canvas and leather apron crusted with a spectrum of brown blooms, pale grease, and dried smears of an unknown yellow substance. Her hair was an iron-grey bird's nest that appeared to have been inordinately hacked with shears.

The woman herself might once have cut a remarkably striking figure in court, but whatever beauty nature had granted her had been thoroughly derailed by severe domestic neglect.

"The poor creature's 'ardly taken the inventory of her own meat suit," the Groenling chided, "hovering 'round like a blowfly on a warm pie, you are."

My ears scrambled to track the baffling acoustic collision. In the space of half a breath, the timbre of her voice had plummeted from powdered salon royalty straight into the guttural rasp of a dockside gin-sponge.

Herbert gave a contrite wheeze, his quills flattening back into his pelt with a soft rustle as he tucked his little human hands against his chest like a loafing cat. He hung his feline head, gazing up at her like a pouting child.

The woman scratched the creature between its ears, never taking her gaze off me as she approached. Balanced on the bridge of her nose was a pair of thick, brass-rimmed spectacles, held together with a glob of pitch, magnifying two chartreuse eyes that darted with the manic precision of a clockwork escapement.

"Don't flatter yourself by fainting again, dear," she said, that clipped palace drawl snapping back with terrifying authority. "The marrow is quite settled, and I have far too much to attend to without dragging your carcass back out of the vapors."

Gods, I thought, they've left me alone with a madwoman.