Evelyn Five-Eyes

Bastion referenced bedding down a female efheby once, and ever since people have been wondering what that was like. Here's the promised tale. Content warning: kinky, weird, explicit, upsetting, noncon towards the end, not wholesome, NSFW.

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“Delicieu is in you like a disease,” said Rahm Ripa, taking long, incensed strides down Ethelmik’s dusty main street. His long-time friend and colleague Bastion Winalils was quickly growing out of breath in his struggle to keep apace.

“I’m not going to pretend I know what that means!” the other replied, pointedly refusing to pant. Rahm made a noise of disgust.

“Delicieu may be gone but I see him still in the trajectory of your work. This fixation on pain, Bastion - to what end? To conquer it? Childish!”

Bastion chuckled. “Is that what you think I’m after? What he was after? Ach, Rahm, that was never what Master Delicieu wanted at all. He would no sooner have alleviated all the world’s pain than- than you would have strangled your own children in their cradles. Haha, aye. Aye, he loved suffering the way a father loves his sons. He sired pain. Sired it! Scream after scream...”

Oh, Bastion hated the town of Ethelmik. The thunder of the magnificent waterfalls thrummed beneath his feet and seemed to blur the lines of every business and building, as though all of it was almost imperceptibly vibrating. Rahm said one grew accustomed to the sensation after a while. He claimed to feel it only if he thought about it, like his breath or his pulse. Otherwise it receded into the background.

But there were too many things already in the background of Bastion’s thoughts. Too many ghosts hovered there. And so he hated the beating fists of the waterfall, and hated his own laboured breaths as Rahm strode on, always just a few steps ahead.

“You’ve told me enough about that stupid bastard,” said the older Black Tongue bitterly. Was there a hint of protectiveness there? “I feel like I know Delicieu well enough. I feel like I would try to kill him if ever he showed his face again!”

“He never will,” said Bastion simply.

Rahm harrumphed, working himself into a good rant. “You were only a boy when you came to the Black Tongues. They shouldn’t have put a boy with that sadist. But the Black Tongues all are morons - all of them! Down to a man! What did they know of boys? The old crows. Ald to Ald was enough for those pattern-seekers; Jet to Jet!”

“It doesn’t matter,” Bastion dismissed.

“It does! Because Delicieu’s in you still like a disease! You should be following your OWN pursuits. You should be studying the Weeping Plague as you always wished! But I believe it may not matter where you go nor what you do; Delicieu is a latent virus. He surfaces in you when you are weakest. And now this damned obsession is steering you straight towards calamity.”

“By Ilganyag’s three pairs, Raptor, you are being far more dramatic over this request than I had anticipated. There is nothing calamitous in visiting a senet beast. If you would just pause and let me finish, you would learn I am taking every precaution-”

“And what does Lady Ilganayag say about this!”

Bastion barked a surprised laugh. “She is not my mother! Any more than she is your wife. How in the hell do you imagine the Lady’s opinion factors into my day-to-day activities?”

Rahm could look very aloof and superior at times. Those expressions crossed his face now. Bastion wanted to turn dramatically from him, vexed, and offset away in a grand display of black feathers. Of course he didn’t. He’d come here today for Rahm’s help.

It was just… well, why did Rahm have to treat him more like a child than a compeer? Than an equal? He was only ten years his senior! “The Lady and I don’t speak of Master Delicieu,” Bastion lied, flouncing his black mane, “But she loved - loves him. She loves us all.”

Unsatisfied, Rahm demanded: “What is your goal in continuing his work? In seeking out an efheby?”

“I’m not continuing it.” Bastion sighed. “I’m… Well, if you wish mechanics out of me, Raptor, I am less interested in pain than in how it factors into the disassembling of the soul at death. Pain is potent, Rahm. Master Delicieu made sure I saw that. Felt it. Humans, we shrink from it with all that we are. And I believe it is that instinct to escape pain that scatters the dying soul. Preserving that soul - preserving life itself, Rahm - THAT is my goal. Pain and pleasure are all tangential to this pursuit. I am not the sadist you imagine! Not some... some sweating aesthete looking to bottle a blow job and go to bed with it. I am NOT Master Delicieu. You know this, don’t you?”

Bastion needfully touched Rahm’s arm. The other man stopped short a block down from his homey old house, all hoary with ivy. He turned. Bastion sounded his eyes for some whisper of approval - no, not approval, because he was a colleague and Bastion was not a child! No, he wanted only some sign that here, in dusty, loud, and thrumming Ethelmik, there was a Kasslynian who maybe knew his heart.

Rahm was a handsome gentleman. Bastion had always thought so. Pretty eyes and a lot of style. But he was too preoccupied with his own work and woes to be of much comfort to a wandering Black Tongue brother.

“I don’t think you should seek the efheby out,” Rahm said at last, “They’re the Enemy of Man. You wanted my counsel today? There it is. I don’t think the efheby has any answers for you. Delicieu’s work is not your own. Leave it.”

“I will,” Bastion promised, sincerely meeting Rahm’s pretty eyes, “If I engage this efheby and she has no insight for me, I will be done with this line of research. But Rahm, everyone I’ve spoken with has told me not to visit her alone. Please, my brother. My friend. I need you to come with me.”

Rahm dropped his gaze to his pointy-toed shoes and the invisible calves sticking out of them. He’d been marked by his own obsession - lost much in the pursuit of it - and Bastion knew there were few other men in his acquaintance who could understand his monomania. It certainly was not understood by the shrewd female face watching them both from the front window of the home ahead.

Rahm noticed his wife behind the glass too. “She’s not going to like this at all,” he grumbled in defeat, “Where in the hell is this snake thing hiding?”

“Ulestry!” said Bastion, victoriously clapping his hands together and bouncing along now merrily at Rahm’s side, “A city called Purebrook. She keeps a den there along with a dozen lovers or cultists or sycophants or whatever they are. I’ve already written the appropriate letters, she is excited to meet us!”

“I’m not meeting with her. I think this is madness. I will wait for you outside. Efheby are the Enemies of Man.”

Bastion frowned, mounting the front steps. He could all but hear how Rahm was capitalizing that phrase. “Well, as you will. But this Purebrook place purportedly boasts a wee cafe that does an amazing roast pigeon dish-”

Before Bastion could reach for the knob, Rahm’s front door swung wide and smashed him in the forehead. He did not find Iori’s apology afterwards convincing.

“Evelyn Five-Eyes,” they called her. She was an efheby, a type of serpentine senet beast that looked like a red-skinned human torso mashed into the thick legless body of a red snake. Black First Carbon plates - once highly prized as armour by primitive Man - girded her round. The “five eyes” of her name were five gold and scarlet spots running her length from midriff to tail-tip.

Like all senet beasts, Evelyn was a relic from the First World, brought to life to fill the idle hours of the ancient and unknowable Makers in the days before Mankind and the Second World had been even a dream.

Or - posited the Gefendur religion - the senets had been created by the Twin Gods as prototypes for proofing concepts they would one day incorporate into humans. Some senets reincarnated, like the waterwomen whose undying hearts acted like seeds that would regrow their bodies if they ever were butchered. Other senets displayed human empathy, like the heart-reading Wand’ring Roots, or senescence, like the mountain ogres who had all been created in different stages of existence (though the idea of how they would change from stage to stage seems to have been tabled at the time).

For their part, the efheby boasted gender dimorphism, greed, and even a primitive, dangerous kind of love. Unlike the waterwomen they could be permanently killed, and seemed therefore the most human of all the surviving senet beasts. Priests theorized they’d been created last.

Bastion didn’t quite believe in the gods - not in the worshipful way the Gefendur faith demanded, anyway - but he’d always thought it a bit of cynical commentary from mommy and daddy Maker that the most human senet beasts should be the deadliest of them all.

For efheby all had the fatal fangs of great snakes, and a peculiar, terrifying venom. Once injected, this potent poison acted like a digestive enzyme, baffling and diluting the human mind. Made malleable and removable that mind mingled with the snake’s venom so, when the hungry snake sucked it out again, she could taste it, swish it about like wine in her horrid purple maw, even swallow it forever and leave her victim a braindead husk.

It was no wonder Rahm had reacted so poorly to the idea of Bastion seeking one out.

Some efheby thirsted for human minds the way glut junkies thirsted for a fix, or alcoholics needed their nightly bottles. Humans were wild new experiences, their memories disrupting the interminable eternity of the snakes’ long years with sensations they otherwise could not know, and ideas they might never have.

Efheby could not find the same delights in the minds of other senet beasts. Senet minds were indigestible, designed for the experience of a psychic bite, and efheby venom merely acted as a medium for the sharing of their memories. Because of this, the charismatic efheby had been prized among their peers as mediators whose fangs could settle any argument simply by letting both parties experience each other’s point of view.

It was possible, Bastion supposed, that the venom’s strange and potent effect on humans was some unintended accident; an overlooked side effect as the gods grew humans into the world and selected for the senet beast traits they’d found most appealing. Perhaps it was one great Celestial Oops.

But Bastion doubted it. If there were gods, he was certain they were wicked. They had made Man and Efheby into enemies because the stage play of existence was more entertaining if the underdogs were shitting themselves in terror and the villains had two-foot dicks.

Evelyn Five-Eyes, at least, was no villain. Neither did she have a two-foot dick. By all accounts she respected the brevity of human life, and bit her beaus only to sample them. She always regurgitated their addled wits back into their skulls once playtime was over.

Unless they asked for otherwise, of course. Some humans became infatuated with the bliss of an efheby’s embrace. They begged to stay with them forever. Or, thought Bastion darkly, this was a final exhausted surrender to the predations of a creature prone to possessive love, who had all the patience in the world.

“Well, that is horrifying,” said Rahm after his friend had finished explaining all he’d learned of the Great Lady Evelyn, “How do you know some of them have two-foot long dicks?”

“That fact is always very stressed in the accounts,” answered Bastion, leading the way down a damp tunnel beneath an Ulestrian public house. The Snake and Jay, it was called. The two Black Tongues had found the place empty save for a skinny, sallow-skinned woman behind the bar. Her head looked as though it had been punched through in several places by a marlinspike or an awl. But the holes had all been pink and shiny and healed, and she had smiled at the pair amiably enough as they’d walked through the dark hall of benches and tables. Bastion had been advised not to talk to her, and to proceed straight downstairs and through a basement doorway leading into the earth. Efheby felt safest underground, he’d been told. Because they were dangerous, men hunted them. There were very few left.

“They should be butchered to extinction,” whispered Rahm as the tunnel dipped and the air cooled. Bastion wanted to make fun of him for lowering his voice but instead dropped his own voice even lower.

“And they will be, by and by. All the more reason for great and learned men like ourselves to visit the blighters and document what they know before they all are gone.”

“Why do they have genitals at all?” Rahm wondered, mostly to himself, “Why are they outfit for intercourse? Senet beasts cannot reproduce. Why are they sexually distinct?”

“Good compeer, we are here today as scholars of natural philosophy and zoology; here to interview an unimaginably old being and glean from her clues as to the mysteries of our world and the origin of the human soul.”

“You’re here to fuck her,” Rahm scoffed beneath his breath.

Bastion recoiled from the words. “Do you think me so arrogant? An enormous snake-bitch older than time itself? I am here to be fucked.”

Contrasting with the cool corridors leading to it, Evelyn’s chamber was sticky-hot. The great, leathery body Bastion straddled was hotter still. The efheby’s sex wasn’t particularly slick beneath his thighs but its lips were so large he wasn’t sure if that was a matter of his own inadequacy or merely geography.

“This isn’t going very well,” he relented, and stopped thrusting.

It felt like humping a damp hamper of warm laundry. Geography was indeed a concern. There was simply too much cunny on the map and his was an unsatisfactory military force to marshall against it.

Fortunately the landscape did feature something like a clitoris. It was in the logical place, shiny and purple, and felt like a very hot grapefruit in his hand. He gave the thing a ginger squeeze. In response the great monster gazed down at him, her eyes half-lidded, her smile reptilian and wan. A few soldiers deserted, and his army shrank further.

“You might have told me not to bother,” he accused, faintly. His arms dropped atop his thighs.

When the efheby spoke her voice was cavernous; deeper than a human woman’s. Bastion felt it roll pleasantly out of her, up her tail, between his legs, bobbing his prick. He briefly vibrated like the falls of Ethelmik.

“You seemed so eager to remove your clothing,” she rumbled, “I did not want to interrupt you and make our meeting awkward. Are you satisfied?”

“Well. No.”

“You have troubles, I think.” She gestured to his softening erection, black lips politely pursed. Bastion winced.

Lady Ilganyag demanded all her Black Tongues be gelded, and her favourite son was no exception. When the Lady was not his partner nor orchestrating his unions to her amusement, he had some difficulty... rousing himself to life. Well, Lady Ilganyag was jealously absent from his physiology today, and it wasn’t helping matters. He felt as big around as a pauper’s sausage.

And Evelyn was enormous, twice his proportions; twenty-five feet from her undulating head of happy tentacles to the tip of her meaty snake tail. Her skin was the colour of dried blood, pulled taut over bulky bone and muscle far harder than his. Beneath her clavicles her chest was bare of skin and he could see the glistening, chocolate-coloured, rib-hugging musculature beneath. It looked tender and raw but didn’t seem to discomfort her. The face above was fair, mild of mien. Soft, pretty lips covered her deadly fangs. Her eyes were empty pearls in deep, bruised sockets. Her long, long neck was tendinous, supple, and he spied no evidence of the bulging venom sacs he’d seen in old engravings.

Adequate breasts. Only two, which was mildly underwhelming. Their nipples were six inch long tentacles. Sort of weird, kind of made up for it. They twitched at him idly, as if mocking his more modest proportions.

“You belong to that bird,” she decreed in her inhuman, body-quaking voice, “She is as possessive as any efheby, Bastion Winalils, but the featherfolk do not love. They have many, many faces but none of them love. Love was not yet invented when they were made.”

“I cannot agree,” he answered carefully. Never knew when the Lady might be listening. “We love each other very much. She came to me as a boy, in a time of great need, and directed me to her Black Tongues so I might have a place to thrive and learn. My family abandoned me but she has been my benefactor ever since.”

“Was your need great or was hers?”

Evelyn grunted her own judgment before he could answer, shifting without effort beneath the human’s slight weight. Bastion ignored her insinuation, and thought about having another go at her hole. He dropped a hand to her clitoris again, testing its spongy rigidity. He rather wished to bite it. Instead he scooted himself a few inches further north, until he could centre his red prick against the purple bulb, and knead these two hot focii together, experimentally, between his hands.

She positively glowed with heat, like a mechanism that had been spinning and spinning for too long. It was a strange effect in a serpentine body. Snakes of course were cold-blooded, but this creature was an endotherm. Where was her heart? It had to be huge to pump blood all the way to her winding tail; too huge for her disproportionately petite chest. Did she have two hearts? Three? Bastion felt a pulse beneath him but couldn’t decide.

“I have some friends in the Black Tongues,” said Evelyn, utterly indifferent to his ministrations. Bastion stubbornly worked the meat of his palms into their union, grim as a pre-dawn baker punching down dough. “Long have I been here in this pleasant burrow with pleasant friends happy to bring me what I want, bare their necks to me, open their minds. But they are furtive smalls. People of small passions. Small ideas. I look to the men of the Black Tongue and I understand Ilganyag’s attraction towards them. You are wild men. Insane. Full of longing and flavour.”

“And too smart to accept your invitations,” laughed Bastion. Evelyn nodded, expressionless.

“So you must be an idiot then.”

Bastion paused and flicked his hands against the air in a helpless gesture. People had called him far worse. “If you know the Black Tongues, you know we are beyond taboo! I came here because I wished audience with one who might speak cogently of mankind’s earliest days. There are fewer and fewer of you all the time. You should be respected, courted, and begged for whatever history you might be willing or able to share.”

There was incense in the room. Something sweet and earthy. He hadn’t noticed anything upon entering the chamber, but the pair of women who’d escorted him inside after he’d left Rahm had seemed very eager to deposit him and flee again, dimming the lights on their way...

But yes, incense. And starfly lymph glowing warmly from a few globes set into the walls. Quite the dungeon aesthetic. Bastion wondered if there were human skulls littering the shadowed corners. Probably. Probably bats somewhere too.

“I have found it very safe here,” said Evelyn, watching him. He glanced up. Fogged, her eyes were like pearls; like cataracts. Golden pupils trembled wetly as she stared. Did she mean to hypnotize him? Could she?

Bastion pinched her clit, and stared defiantly at her nonreaction. Evelyn continued: “Humans were more dangerous when you were more endangered. Now you live in great cities and have mastered spells and filled your larders; and you sit at tables asking each other how to be kinder to animals, to senets, to the two-toed lizards; how to stop doing such harm when doing that harm has put you in the luxurious position of questioning it.”

“We are wretched contradictions,” agreed Bastion, “I was just telling my companion you should all be annihilated, yet here I am happily come to have secrets out of you.”

He was surprised at his own honesty. A Black Tongue prided himself on a creed of freely shared information, but that was no reason for a bloke to expose himself.

If Evelyn was shocked she hid it. Bastion mentally shrugged.

“What secrets do you think I have?”

“I know you’re unlikely to remember the First World,” said Bastion, “Anymore than I remember my first few days of life. I think it is seldom considered that Time as we know it did not exist in that first iteration of reality. Even if you possessed perfect recall, your mind was ultimately designed for a temporal world, and so was incompatible with the nature of that timeless one. So of course you remember nothing of it now.”

Evelyn nodded very slightly. He thought he’d surprised her.

“I believe the same,” she said, “Not all senet beasts were designed to continue existence beyond that First World. They were incompatible, as you said, and died with it.” She laid the flat of her hand against a wall of the chamber. Bastion saw the room had actually been carved from the living stone. From a dead Mountain Ogre.

“Yes, the mountain ogres,” she murmured as though reading his thoughts, “Yes. I do remember them. The last of them. They could not form memories. Again and again they would with surprise regard the new, time-bound world that had been willed into existence around them, and despair. A long fall of despair and confusion, until their minds broke, they struck the bottom, and they died. From their corpses? All of this. All of this continent. Shaped from bodies undone by sadness.”

“Poetic,” remarked Bastion, “And unsurprising. Whoever and whatever the Makers were, they were sadistic - or at best callous - sons of bitches. But there is a pattern at play here, Lady Snake. I believe Pain may be the heart of all the sentient world. Does it not appear that Pain is the default?”

Hissing laughter escaped the efheby, raising gooseflesh on Bastion’s arms. When she parted her lips to make the sound he saw wicked fangs curved backwards along her blue-black palate. She laughed again, her mouth hinged a little wider, and the fangs bent slightly towards him, rooted to some tendon attached to her jaw.

“The default is the Void!” she chortled, “The Void. It is only to humans that ‘Pain’ means all the world. That is because it shapes your worlds, and each of your worlds is so small.”

“The private universes of our minds,” said Bastion. The incense or whatever it was seemed suddenly stronger. Bastion mashed his forearm to his nose. The smell was making him feel giddy. Had someone thrown purple weed into the fireplace?

“If you wish to escape pain,” continued the snake, “You must escape your world. Ah, you little fools. You foolish little Black Tongue idealists. Humans have escaped so much pain by working together; raising your great creations, your cities, your art. But pain bookends your existence. The naked wet screaming of birth and the naked wet screaming of death.”

Bastion shrugged. “A mortal’s lot.”

“I do not understand it,” said Evelyn, “No matter the minds I taste, I do not understand it.”

“And that is your privilege,” said Bastion, “I suppose I can’t understand a life without despair, or greed, or pain, or even discomfort. I know they’re the black to reality’s white, and cannot be eradicated. My first Master, he spoke of pain as though it were a problem to be solved. But it’s a fundamental of existence…

“What I wish,” Bastion went on, changing tack, “Is to dull the sting of death. To make death not an inevitability, but a choice that a man makes when he is weary of his years and in envy of the Void. I think if I can understand the divisions of our human souls - the fault lines along which it scatters upon death - it may offer clues useful in stopping that scattering, and preserving the whole soul.”

“I know nothing of this thing you call a soul.”

“But you’ve tasted so many minds!” Bastion protested, mashing his nose again and then his eyes. He wished he could get away from the smell, take a deep, fresh breath.

Evelyn touched his hair with her two-fingered hand, parting a few strands from his cheek. He saw the weird, bare muscle of her chest glimmering. A brown syrup was foaming inside. Was… was this where the smell was coming from?

“I like Pain,” said Evelyn Five-Eyes, “And I like Pleasure. I like pulling these from the minds of men and tasting them for myself. Sometimes I keep them, and they are happier for it. Where, in all of these minds, was a soul? I think nowhere. If I can take these pieces of a man and make them my own with so little effort, of what common stuff must a soul be made. And yet humans think it lasts the ages? That it carries them through Time that does not belong to them?

“It is foolishness. We senet beasts have lasted the ages. We are strong sinew and bone. Your khert cannot touch us. Time is your burden. Pain is your burden. And your privilege is to make more of yourselves; not to exist in perpetuity like we senets you so revile. The happiest of you understand this but you - you grasping Black Tongues - pointedly cut away your privilege and strive to possess what you were not made to have. You must make another of yourself and live on that way... but you have not; you will not. And you will die miserable and unrenewed.”

She didn’t sound angry yet something about her demeanour had shifted. How many times had she said these words to wisdom-seekers wandered unwisely into her den? Bastion felt so small and tedious.

But not afraid, strangely. Actually… actually he wasn’t sure what he was. He suddenly couldn’t find purchase in his thoughts. Every attempt at the intentional slipped away from him.

It wasn’t alarming though.

It was fine.

He leaned heavily forward onto one hand.

“Pleasure, then,” he murmured, staring down her cleft, “Perhaps we each understand pain differently, but pleasure - we both speak that language.”

Evelyn’s right hand grabbed for his cock. It was an unimpressive worm in her huge fingers; only a squeeze of meat. “This is not pleasure,” she hissed, and gave it a painful wrench. “Horrid animals. I’ve watched you grow from squealing rodents, rutting and murdering in the undergrowth. You remain dull rats, but improve all the time, yes. All the time, bit by bit. In another ten-thousand years perhaps I will understand why the Makers have gone to such trouble for you. For now… Little Black Tongue, someone told me your life has been uncommon.”

Bastion jolted, recoiling. She let him go and he dropped a hand protectively to his lap, his head swimming. “What..?”

“I allowed you here for what I was told you would bring. I will have it.”

“I’ve nothing for you, Lady Snake. I am come for YOUR tales-”

The efheby lifted her too-long arms abruptly to her throat, pushing away the flesh-tendrils that spilled from her head like coils of hair. Beneath, Bastion could more clearly see the shape across her chest. The brown, wet muscle wasn’t as unprotected as he’d thought; a silken, semi-transparent membrane spanned it and now was oozing a funky molasses down her breasts. She heaved as a drip of it traced the length of one astonishingly long nipple. Bastion reached for it impulsively and the hot tendril coiled around his finger.

“At’gwe,” he swore, and laughed a little.

Somewhere… somewhere in his befuddled brain he remembered reading that these monsters excreted scent and rubbed it across the walls of their dens, at the extents of their territory, and

Upon their claimed prey.

More thick, slimy lines of brown dribbled down Evelyn’s breasts and shoulders. Gods, it smelled like rank, caramelized sweat. Bastion’s head swam.

Efheby are the Enemy of Man.

“I think,” he slurred, “That I want to go and try some of that famous roast pigeon dish. What… is the name… of the cafe?”

Evelyn chortled. “This is a new thing to me,” she said, clacking a claw against Bastion’s torc, “The bird has put her collar on you. I do wonder if she intended it to befoul an efheby’s fangs.”

She darted suddenly forward and Bastion’s pulse boiled in his stomach. He thought she meant to bite him! Instead she threw her moist and sticky chest in his face, crushing him against her bosom. Hot excrescence bubbled from what he now realised was her scent patch. He thrashed his head back and forth to escape but it crept into his nostrils, his eyes, coated his cheeks and brow. It ran down his chest, between his nipples, tickled his belly. He coughed at the stink, needing to breathe, but then it was in his mouth.

“Swallow,” she ordered. He choked in response, but the stuff was as numbing as Valyndian gin, and killed his gag reflex. It was easiest just to gulp it down. And Evelyn’s tone hinted he had little choice in the matter.

“You are ugly creatures,” she said, passionless again, “And so self-pitying. Such plaints you have of your short lives yet always wishing for more. The thing you seek to do is impossible, and wasteful. Men already dilute themselves with every year. You are already older than I care for, Bastion Winalils. Already watered-down. Already bland. The Makers should have made you all like the snow-haired men of the north. They are concentrated and sweetest.”

Bastion was sopping with her sticky brown flavour. He felt drugged and stupid; light and weak and unconcerned. It didn’t stink so terribly now. In fact… he licked the musk from his lips. Palatable.

Her bony digits pressed the crown of his head, guiding him towards the bottom point of her scent patch; between her breasts, where the musk oozed thickest.

“What..?” he struggled.

Evelyn growled, pearl-eyes slitting. “Taste me.”

Licking it seemed ludicrous... but when he flicked his tattooed tongue against the shining flesh, Evelyn snarled, shivered, and crushed his face into it. It hurt his nose; she was terribly boney.

This was her weak spot though? Well, then what were her nethers for? Other efheby? Ach, but for a two foot dick.

Grasping as much of her tits and nipply tentacles into each hand as he could, Bastion relied on them for purchase as he applied the whole of his mouth to her quivering chest cleft. Though it caused his lips to numb and tingle, he lapped the warm excrescence with canine fervour.

Suddenly it tasted sweet? Perhaps the toxin had rigged his taste buds, just like that bizarre flavour-swapping Crescian berry you could buy at market for pranking friends. Now it was the texture that was the most off-putting. It was thicker than a human woman’s juices. Treacly. Gooey. It coated his teeth and stuck his hair to his cheeks. But the numbing effect was worse, striking brain and body both. After a few obedient minutes of lapping Bastion felt so acutely sedated he found it difficult to stay upright. The edges of his vision broke apart into chromatic scintillation. He suddenly wanted only to lay down and sleep... though a prey instinct in the back of his head warned if he stopped, Evelyn might strike.

“That is good, Black Tongue!” she hissed, and twisted her giant hand into his hair. In retribution he squeezed her nipples with all the strength of his puny mortal hands, but she seemed to enjoy it, smashing his face harder into her fetid torso. Bastion sputtered, but soldiered face-first into a second wind. With long, fierce strokes of his tongue he attacked her sticky clavicles, then dove lower to trace where the scent patch bordered her red skin. This made Evelyn growl again; a sinister sound, angry. Bastion tried to bark back but his mouth and throat were insensate; full of her funk. He tilted his head back, gasping, as the weight of her swallowed arousal sloshed warm in his belly.

The both of them dripped. Her sex, too, finally bubbled and overflowed beneath his ass. He thought he’d slide right off if not for her convenient handholds. Perhaps not every bit of an efheby was an Enemy of Man.

“We efheby war with each other,” said Evelyn, breathing hard, “We mark our lands and our prizes, and attack other snakes with great anger when they trespass. And we do not share our humans. I think Ilganyag is like us.”

She regarded him with her stormcloud eyes - possessive eyes. What did she want of him? What bloody story had she spoken of-

Ach, why did his dick hurt? Bright bloody stars, had she ripped it off?

Bastion looked into his lap and saw he was as stiff and red as an uncut teenager; so skin-splittingly erect it ached with every breath.

Had Lady Ilganyag arrived at the fete?

No… no, there was nothing in his head but candy floss. He looked up at his partner in confusion, and saw a change had come to her as well.

Evelyn’s slim, too-long neck was different. It took him a moment to identify the change, but there were new bulges just beneath the sharp parts of her jaw. Ah, the venom glands! So thickly engorged that her red skin had gone all shiny over them.

Had his ministrations swollen them with arousal?

Fucking bizarre!

She feathered her claws across the hot orbs and made herself shiver. Then she helped Bastion’s erection squelch into the folds of her enormous slit.

“Your worm cannot please me here,” she warned, voice thickened by her swollen throat. It was almost cute. Like she had a headcold. For all her insults Bastion felt unnaturally and terribly fond of her. But it was artificial. Just like the sweetness. All of this was wrong...

Where was Rahm?

Briefly, indicatively she cupped his black head. “Here. This mind is the nectar that we efheby sip with such delight. Here you will tell me stories. Yes? I may bite you?”

“Such courtesy,” Bastion slurred, weakly grinding against the wet mess of her sex. All of this was too much. He slid to one side and hadn’t the strength to catch himself. Before he could clatter onto the ground Evelyn grabbed his arm and wrenched him back into place. The sudden movement, the sudden vulnerability turned over some rock in the efheby’s brain - mouth agape, she lunged for his neck!

A sick clack of ivory on metal followed. Ilganyag’s torc fouled her bite.

“Wait,” Bastion slurred. He tried to slide himself out of the swamp of her oversized cunny. He needed to get away. Yes, he loved her and wanted her to do whatever she wished to him but he needed to get away now too, even if he had to crawl.

“No,” corrected the snake, as incensed now by her throbbing venom sacs as Bastion by his throbbing cock. They crowded her thoughts, forced all lesser matters to the periphery. She had to bite, had to empty them, had to know. Bastion struggled, but she held him tightly now. Definitively. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered, stroking his hair, “I have never killed a man who did not wish to die. You have no reason to fear me.”

It was true. Everyone had said she was very fair.

“You are calm now. You feel safe now, with me.”

Quite against his better judgment, Bastion’s breathing slowed. Evelyn moved her mouth near his jugular as though feeling his small pulse. It, too, gradually calmed.

“You are warm, yes?”

He was. Quite comfortably warm, yes. Her breath against his neck was so warm. He nodded and slumped.

“Very warm,” she emphasized, “And without fear. You wish to feel good?”

Well, why not? If he had a personal creed it was to as frequently as possible feel as good as could be expected. He nodded again.

She orbited his skull, sniffing, tasting his sweaty nape. Her skull tentacles pushed past his hair, exposed his white throat, his ears, the indentations behind them. Her great red countenance hung over his own like a blood moon.

“Shh,” she soothed, drawing closer still, “Your mistress’ torc means I must be careful. I do not wish to break your neck or crack your skull.“

Only a slight flutter of horror from him at this idea. And another, slighter, as her tentacle hair convulsed, wrapping around his head and shoulders with slithery susurrations. Meaty phalanges curled over his eyes, pressed them closed. They kissed his lips. Warm and firm they stroked the sides of his sticky face, tickled down his neck, swirled in the depression at the base of his throat. And slowly they grew rigid, locking him in place as her mouth completed its exploration. At the same time, some unannounced limb uncurled from the efheby’s monstrous nethers and took rough hold of his prick. With half a dozen rough tugs she had an orgasm rolling out of him, he supposed, but it was an insignificant thrill of pleasure as Evelyn did the same, punching her knitting-needle thick fangs through the meat behind his ear.

Excruciating!

She was killing him! He bucked and shouted but his head was in a vice, his arms were gripped by steel fingers! He could not move!

The venom glands in her neck pumped powerfully, audible as a heartbeat. Evelyn sighed through her nose with pleasure.

The pain stopped. There was a moment of vertiginous bliss, then boiling fullness roared into Bastion’s brain. It was white water smashing his thoughts against black rocks. His muscles became jelly, his joints as floppy and pliable as a broken doll’s.

Another spastic pump spread the liquid fire down his neck, into his chest. Her knuckles kneaded his heart through his ribs as though pressing the wildly fluttering muscle into her service. Now he thought he understood his suddenly cooperative cock, for her musk must quicken the circulation to help speed her venom on its way. What marvellous medical applications it could... could have...

Again her throat convulsed, Evelyn moaned against him in ecstasy, and yellow venom jetted from her hollow fangs. He was being filled. He felt turgid and too hot. The efheby’s dark lips worked over the wound she’d made, neatly slurping the blood that fell and the sweat that ran from his scalp.

Again. Suffocating. He was falling. He couldn’t remember how he’d come to be here! He couldn’t talk, he’d forgotten how!

Again.

Bastion gasped for breath as

the world

turned

black

Whatever form he occupied, whatever entity this was bobbing in eternity, it tingled with the bliss of incorporality. Mortality peeled from him like a dead flower’s petals.

Beneath, every spectral molecule hummed, liberated and unbound.

He stretched out. He had a million toes. A trillion fingers. They might stay attached to him or they might not. Didn’t matter.

No, they might not. A few digits drifted away, somewhere at the periphery. Stragglers. Stupid things. He giggled at them. Shouted at them! Infant nothings! Newborn nothings! How bright it all was outside the womb. Warm niceness; warm crook to sleep in. Don’t take it away or he’d bawl!

Ah, and there the squawking worms went, gyring into oblivion.

Bye! Don’t need you!

Oh, here was Hettie.

Hello, Hettie!

Did she see all these stupid things? He pointed a few thousand fingers at them, at the stupid newborns, for her benefit.

Hettie was always flickering like a moth in the peaceful place; in the shadowed happy place he kept for himself in his thoughts. He’d visited that place less and less as he grew older. He’d feared it had finally died just as she had but no, here it was. Bastion scrambled for it. He was a billion scrabbling scarabs with a trillion-billion legs.

He pulled them all up into the peaceful place; gathered together all himselves, and regarded his new perch.

The Wood was here and, on the horizon, beyond a long field of goldengrass, was Morningmont, where he’d been a child. But Morningmont was a manor of horrors and loneliness. He turned away from it. It was here in the Wood where the brook sang songs and the ghosts told stories and the sun could not quite penetrate the cool verdancy of the thick summer canopy that his peace waited for him.

Where Hettie always waited for him.

He laid there, in pieces. Beside his older sister.

She had black eyes like his. Everyone else in their family had blue eyes but she and Bastion were the black-eyed devils, the weird wee co-conspirators who spent too much time together in the Wood making up miserably amusing stories about dead children, and holding mock funerals for any bird or rabbit carcasses they found. The Wood had been full of ghosts too of course, but most of them had been friendly.

Most of them.

Bastion looked away from Hettie, from the Wood. Someone else was here. Not a ghost.

“This isn’t yours,” he told Evelyn stiffly.

“I don’t want it,” she answered, “Tragically dead women are common stodge.”

A wet sucking woooosh skimmed the rim of Bastion’s consciousness, leaving him with a vertiginous confoundment unlike anything he’d ever known. All his pieces panicked, reaching for some stable platform from which to launch a thought, but everything overturned at his touch. His insect swarm self threatened to fly apart.

Then stillness. An insuperable strength crushed him into an unwilling calm.

Gods, the Wood had never been this warm. Alderode was never, ever this warm, not even in the heart of the Thaw.

How was he so warm? He was nothingness?

“You were fourteen when Ilganyag led you to the Black Tongues, yes?”

Was he?

Bastion felt strangely compelled to look for the memory. He felt the intruder glide unctuously along his own reaching thoughts, a hitchhiking snake in his pocket travelling with him towards yesterday.

He didn’t want her there. He didn’t want the weight of this tyrant on his back. But he couldn’t get away from her. Her heat and darkness overwhelmed him.

On Lady Ilganyag’s advice and with a great deal of his father’s money he had made his way to the Crescian town of Lurick. When he tried to visit a certain office, someone had touched the back of his neck, and he’d collapsed. He’d awakened in Juste, the Black Tongue stronghold, goggle-eyed to find a place that existed outside the bounds of rationale and the khert’s law.

The Black Tongues inhabiting it had not been happy to meet him. They were jealous lovers; old, bitter, preoccupied; envious of this bright-eyed youth so talented and ready to serve. Lady Ilganyag loved him fiercely and she did not hide this from any of her ageing wards.

What had Rahm said?

“What did they know of boys? The old crows.”

Oh, the Black Tongues had known nothing of boys, particularly privileged boys who had arrived uninvited and with Lady Ilganyag’s precious aegis. The Black Tongues had been given no choice; Bastion Winalils would live with them, would study with them, would learn from them. And when the time came, he would become one of them.

Until then..?

“What did they know of boys? The old crows.”

They had put him with Thierry Delicieu, another Jet from Alderode. Most of the Black Tongues had been Crescian and Sharteshanian in those days, their numbers diminished by effective Stings enacted against their Aldish brethren. Aldish sentiment had been particularly low at the time and few had protested giving the young newcomer over to Juste’s resident sadist. Ald to Ald. Jet to Jet. If Bastion had the Lady’s support he would surely be just fine no matter where he studied.

And it had been fine, for a little while. Delicieu had recently lost his last apprentice and had appreciated the new set of hands to sweep his floors, clean the workshop, and organize his library. Bastion was a delicate young teenager who’d spent much of his life being waited on by servants, but a desperation to learn quelled any distaste that might have arisen from this introduction to domestic chores. He’d found it novel, in fact! Bastion quickly came to enjoy the satisfaction of a freshly mended pair of trousers and a sparkling tabletop. He made friends with the two-toes in the cages, too, and with Gregori, a long-suffering lizard lab assistant who knew more of pymary than most rited spellwrights. Bastion had never seen Two-toes before and had found them marvellously clever. Though Master Delicieu assured him they were animals they truly could talk just like men!

But Delicieu himself was rough and cruel. He wasn’t like the kindly Lady Ilganyag who told Bastion stories in his dreams. He wasn’t even like the Black Tongue criminal Bastion had met on his father’s plantation, the one who couldn’t talk because the government had gouged out his tongue to stop its dark spellwork. That man had been patient, mysterious, and brimming with wisdom, convincing young Bastion to touch the silver wires beneath his wrinkled neck and meet his gentle bird-wife...

Evelyn laughed, enjoying herself.

Had your need been great, or had hers? 

No. Delicieu had not been kind, nor patient. Bastion was immediately afraid of him. He was much stronger and much smarter than a banished brat from the Aldish countryside. And he was utterly controlling. Master Delicieu told his new apprentice exactly what to wear. He cooked their every meal and made Bastion finish every bite. Bastion had to wear his hair as Master said, and grow his nails as Master said, and speak only in Continental, so quickly shaking his Aldish accent that the other Black Tongues started to warm to him, complimenting Delicieu on “cleaning the Aldishman out of the boy.”

“What did he do to you?” Evelyn asked. For the first time today, Bastion thought she sounded interested in him. Alert. Present.

He didn’t need to answer her.

Some bodiless gesture came from the efheby - some grasping, reaching motion as though she was advancing his memory forward - and pain spilled out of Bastion like hot blood.

Master Delicieu required pain of all his apprentices; he required this far more than the sweeping or the cleaning or the laundering of his threadbare robes. Into machines of his own design he would strap his subjects, tormenting them to attract mnemonic pain from the khert. He would capture these memories, distill them to a red nectar, and sell it to artificers who made ghastly devices.

Bastion had been one of those subjects, occasionally. He supposed. Probably. Perhaps.

It had been a long time ago. Maybe the atrocities were in his head. Maybe Lady Ilganyag kindly safeguarded his dreams from them. They slept and he let them vibrate, distant, not a concern, like Ethelmik’s waterfall. If it was always there then he couldn’t hear it.

He felt himself begin to panic as Evelyn reached deeper.

“It was not just pain,” Evelyn whispered, “With his technique he could attract any memories he wished from the khert if he had the proper lure. Pain has its price, but you rutting rats value something else even more. You’ll do anything for it. You ruin yourselves and others for it, without compunction.”

Bastion wanted to strike her. He lashed out with hands she had bound; bared teeth she’d blunted. He had nothing to fight her with. He was nothing.

Nothing but memories. Memories he had no choice but to reveal for how could his mind not stumble towards those other days in Delicieu’s machines? Those days when Master would drug Bastion’s breakfast and laugh like a child when the boy collapsed half-way through his chores. Bastion would awaken strapped to that evil machine, the receptors digging into his spine, the fat bastard’s fist down his pants, the needles in Gregori’s obedient two-fingered hands. Eventually Delicieu installed a central line in the boy’s chest so he could administer his poisons quickly. He’d not let Bastion take the machine harness off. He went to bed wearing it. The restraining rings clinked in the dark. He couldn’t escape the sound.

“Behave and you may have the dregs,” Master had always promised.

The ghosts had come for this too, of course they had. The stupid brutes. The stupid, stupid brutes. They moaned at the fringe of Bastion’s thoughts, caught up in the machine’s snares, writhing sweatily over each other and dripping into Master’s vials. Master sold those too; that precious golden syrup of condensed Pleasure. All the wealthiest whores of the world beat down Delicieu’s door for the stuff; it was the finest and most potent vintage in Kasslyne.

Did the monsters who partook of it realise the true cost? The boy who starved himself, terrified of drugs in his food? Who wished every night he would die in his sleep? Who wanted nothing more than to escape the rounds of rape and torture but who dared not tell the other Black Tongues for fear that Delicieu would murder him and all the two-toes in their cages?

There’d been no leaving walled-off Juste; not without a torc of his own. But if he did what Master Delicieu ordered, said Lady Ilganyag, he would be a Black Tongue one day too. It would all be worth it. And the machine was never so terrible as long as Bastion didn’t struggle.

Master was never so terrible as long as Bastion didn’t struggle.

He was still “Master.” Even now he was an immortal monster waiting around every corner. Prakhuta had overcome him and Bastion had watched him slump to the ground in two blood-gushing cross-sections, but he’d stand up one day. Master Delicieu would bark for Gregori to prep the injections, he’d touch Bastion’s sweaty face as though he cared for it, and then he’d turn the machine on.

“You’re looking for something better,” said Evelyn, rapt, “He let you taste the Pleasure in those days, sometimes, when you did what you were told. And you’ve never had better. You’ve never had better than the scraps your Master fed you. Perhaps if you found something better he would lose his power over you, but you never have. You never have.”

Evelyn nodded to herself, delighted with her new prize. She coiled around it, and Bastion had no fists with which to fight her off. She bit deep.

“I will try them now. Let us try them now.”

Bastion couldn’t see her smile, but he felt it; another puncture, like her fangs. Like Master Delicieu.

-----

If one were to have passed Evelyn’s burrow over the next few hours they’d have seen her rapturously curled around a mute and stricken Aldishman.

When he began to shiver, cold and streaked with dried brown ick, the flesh-tendrils around his head and shoulders relaxed. His captor withdrew them and slowly lifted her face from his temple, still holding him secure atop her body. A purple tongue rasped back and forth across her lips, then started cleaning the dribble from her chest. Her expression was serene. As she groomed, she stroked Bastion’s back like a lapdog.

He’d never felt so cold. A grey misery blanketed his thoughts, too heavy to peer past. He tried to move his forelock from his eyes but his hands shook uncontrollably. Evelyn gently tended his hair for him, smoothing it back behind his ears.

“You are very interesting,” she said slowly, paying him the greatest compliment she had, “Pain and pleasure you hold in equal measure. You will let me keep you. This is a miserable life you have, Bastion Winalils. Stay with me, warm forever, in this protected place.”

“Yes,” he agreed mildly, “I will stay with you forever.”

He was so cold. Evelyn was as warm as the sun, and she knew how vulnerable he was, now. He would melt into her and she’d look after him. He didn’t have to hide from her. No more struggling. Everything neatly concluded.

Someone was calling his name. Evelyn?

“Bastion!

He liked when Evelyn said his name. She was such a good and fair person. She’d be better with more tits, but it wasn’t her fault. Just those sadistic Makers again, ensuring every creature they ever touched was as miserable as possible as often as could be expected.

“Bastion, stand up! We’re going!”

Oh, it was Rahm.

“Rahm, this is Evelyn Five-Eyes,” he slurred. Bastion had come to be sprawled on the floor but Evelyn was still there. She looked down at Rahm so sourly. She could have reached out and snapped his neck - and seemed terribly inclined to, twitching, clenching and unclenching her fists as Rahm got a hold of her blithering prey and started dragging him towards the doorway. Bastion didn’t fight him but he didn’t really understand why his best friend looked so cross and so afraid.

“It is fine, Rahm,” he whispered, tongue so thick and drunk he was nigh incomprehensible, “She’s a pip, really.”

“We’re going to go have the frigging pigeon dish you wanted,” answered Rahm, not taking his eyes off the snake, “Didn’t you want to try that?”

“Oh, yes,” Bastion agreed.

“You’re an ugly old witch,” Rahm challenged Evelyn, “And you will not hamper our exit or Raptor Rahm of the Ilganyag will rain calamity on this hell and every soul inside! You would not do well alone, I think, you viper.”

Evelyn respected the threat. She smelled the bird’s stink on this one, too, and his torc misted red.

A few of her followers popped up suddenly in the corridor. Some of them brandished swords. Another was a wright with sparking palms. “Let them go!” Evelyn imperiously hissed, and they shrank away. Rahm dragged Bastion from the chamber and into the cold hall. Her followers watched, confused, but desperate always to please their mistress.

“It is fine! He will return to me on his own. They always do.”

It was late evening before Bastion could stand up again. A hot bath at the local inn had helped. Rahm had tended the grisly puncture wound behind his ear, helped him shampoo the positively gross efheby-funk from his hair, and even played an hour of I Spy with him out the inn’s front window until Bastion’s speech and recall normalized. Even so, every few minutes Bastion felt a tug in his thoughts. He wanted to go back to Evelyn. She’d stop him being so cold. Feeling so low. She’d tell him what all that had been about. He couldn’t quite remember, except that it had felt so wonderful. Scary, but wonderful.

“No,” Rahm quashed the suggestion every time, “There is only death there.”

Rahm was very patient when there was no other recourse. Probably from raising children, Bastion guessed.

The pigeon dinner had never surfaced but Bastion couldn’t drink a glass of water without heaving it up again. The fowl wouldn’t have had a chance. Wrapped in every blanket and sheet he’d been able to find, he lay on his side atop the rented bed and held his queasy middle. Rahm flipped through a copy of Gefendur scripture pulled from the nightstand. Every so often he’d tear a page out and make a paper bird. An entire flock was coming to life beside him. His elegant fingers folded and tore and tucked, rings prettily glinting in the candle light. Now and then he would sing a little pymary, his fingernails glowed, and he’d sear complex patterns into the paper wings.

Bastion looked away from them and rolled carefully onto his back. “Thanks.”

Rahm raised an eyebrow but focused on his craft. “You’re done with Delicieu now? I cannot stress enough how very near your own end you were. She had her mouth open over your throat like a fucking vampire. ”

“I suppose.”

“What in the Hells do you mean ‘I suppose?’ I won’t do this with you again, Bastion. I want you to go back to Fachlyne. The people there need you, and helping them brings you peace.”

“Do they?” scoffed Bastion, “And does it? I think there is no peace for men like us, Raptor.”

“Of course there’s peace. That’s what Lady Ilganyag offered us; why we gave her so much. If you cannot find peace in purpose, there’s no hope for you.”

“Then perhaps there is no hope for me.”

Rahm shook his head. “I can’t engage with you like this. Her venom will have you talking nonsense for days. Tomorrow we are going to kill all the people in that monster’s employ. Did you see them? They’re like some bloody cult. Are you up for it?”

Bastion grimaced. A thin hand poked from his cocoon of blankets and tented over his eyes. “That sounds like a lot of work. Is this a maneuver to save face? They didn’t seem like talkers. Maybe we just leave them all be.” 

Rahm laid another creation at the end of the line of birds. “No. By all appearances they are complicit in leading victims into that witch’s burrow so she can break their will and suck out their minds. She is actively stealing from the braintrust of the human race, and we will not tolerate it.”

“She didn’t break my will.”

Rahm didn’t argue. He tore another page from the copy of Scripture, then tossed the mutilated volume back into its drawer.

Bastion sighed. His head hurt terribly and all he wanted to do was crawl back to Evelyn. He’d been about to tell her something. No, no, she’d been about to tell him something. Something about Master; about his research; about pain. She had all the answers. She could tell him what to do-

“Let’s only kill half,” Bastion mumbled, mashing the heel of his hand into an eye, “Then let’s burn the fucking pub down.”

Rahm nodded, and started folding another bird.