In his dreams, Alex was ravishing Amethyst's throat. He was vaguely aware that it wasn't real. He could sense the disconnect between his stirring body and his slumbering mind. While his imagined self held the slime tomboy's head, his real body was thrusting automatically. On both sides of the divide, he felt pleasure.
The reality of the warm body he was humping gradually pulled him out of the land of dreams and into his, somehow superior, reality. He was grinding against a soft ass, gliding back forth between the cheeks of a nice and round bubble butt. His cock prodded an entrance. The clenched texture made it clear it was the wrong one. Curiosity did not get the better of him. He did intend to train his women in anal eventually, if only to say he had claimed all their holes. Even half-asleep, he had the presence of mind not to start that training with a surprise penetration.
Lazily he grabbed his cock and angled it. His eyes were still closed, his mind still rising from the series of wet dreams. The little spoon in front of him must have had her own arousing fantasies, wet as she was. "Mhmmmaster…" Sofia cooed as he glided inside her. "Thank you… Alex… yes… make me your little breeding slave… parade me around, I don't mind… mhmehehehe… so what if all the CEOs see me crawling for you?"
The perverted mumbles mixed with her rising moans. They both rose gradually from their sleep, the shared pleasure making remaining unconscious impossible. Thrust for thrust, Alex got his heart to beat and his brain to banish the tiredness. Cry by Cry, Sofia grew louder, a long yawn interrupting the individual sighs.
Alex blinked to full awareness and stretched. A satisfying pop aligned something in his shoulders neatly. Immediately after that, he bent down to kiss the lips of the brunette cocksleeve. Sofia greeted him readily, her tongue surrendering to his conquest just as he brought her to the first orgasm of the day.
Their kiss broke as his pleasure spiked. The urges of his morning wood demanded release. He rolled on top of Sofia, pinning her face down and prone beneath him. "Ma-ah!-Ah!-AAH!-Ah!" Worshipping, choppy cries were pressed out of her lungs every time he hammered down on the back of her wide hips.
Smacking of skin on skin mingled with her voice to form the alarm that awakened the rest of the harem. "Blessed are we to see that first thing in the morning," Tess prayed - literally she put her hands together and rose into a kneeling posture, watching her Master leisurely plough Sofia. The initial observation swiftly changed into a hornier type of worship, her hands disappearing between her white thighs.
Alex paid no further mind to his surroundings for the moment. His thrusts accelerated, his voice came out in strained grunts, and Sofia screams echoed in the huge room. Finally, the contractions of her pussy became too much. "Bless me with your supreme seed, Master!" she managed a singular coherent sentence, before the flood of his cum silenced her entirely.
The asleep humping had smoothly turned into him dumping the first load of the day deep inside his willing cocksleeve. Writhing and twitching beneath him, Sofia took every drop like the sheathe she was - for him, anyway.
Alex let out his held breath in a relieved sigh, before pulling out of the now happily giggling brunette. "Blessed is she who receives the first load of the day," Tess moaned. In a few days time, that could become a mantra of the Cult. Given its basis, that was far from absurd. "You appear to glow, Sofia - and I mean that figuratively. Given the island, I need to add that."
"I feel so good," Sofia swooned. Once Alex was off her, she quickly stretched. "Better than ever, really."
"You look different… and yet not," Alex remarked.
"I feel different, yet not…" Shacking off the last of the post-coital sluggishness, Sofia rose to her feet. Following simple intuition, she stretched her hands out in front of her. Two swords manifested, instruments of grey metal with sharp edges. A flex of her will and a spark of supernatural light replaced them with a singular rapier, then it was replaced with an axe, then she was back to two swords. "Interesting…"
.
--------->
.
"Oh, that's just great! You get to have a whole armory and I get to be small!"
Everyone turned to Kiara. What initially struck Alex as just her usual whining about having been turned from an already short woman into a dwarf turned out to be a warranted complaint by the orange-haired Irishwoman.
She was tiny now. Her head was about the height of his crotch. Though her head had lowered in height, her tits and ass looked to be almost untouched, resulting in a figure utterly dominated by her feminine goods.
"I guess it's not all bad," the former PR manager muttered, looking down at herself. Every little motion caused her melon-sized mounds to jiggle. When she bounced on the spot, testing the changes in balance her new proportions brought, her ass smacked against itself with as much attitude as fit on her smug, freckled face. "Guess I'll just mind control all of you with my shortstack assets. Do my bidding, minions!"
Kiara put a hand on her hips, cocked her head back, and adjusted the hat that suddenly appeared on her orange head. A big, green top hat with a silver sash tied around the cylindrical top and a big, four-leaved clover attached to its front.
.
----------->
.
"Seriously, the Irish shortstack is a leprechaun?" Charlotte laughed. "How does it feel to be stereotyped by magic?"
"Like I am a living good luck charm with a huge hat and even bigger tits," Kiara shot back immediately. Despite her initial reaction, she seemed rather content with her new state of being. "By all means, mock me for being an adorable Irishgal with all the fortune of my people. Totally a stereotype I loathe to embody."
"I think…" Selana suddenly grabbed Kiara's tits from behind, squishing the enormous, pale mounds with her dark fingers. Every bit as sensitive as before, perhaps even more, the leprechaun moaned as she was felt up by her fellow member of the huge titty committee. "...that someone just worked out that she's now so small that she can be carried everywhere."
Alex visualized it for one second, then let out an agreeing: "Huh… I suppose she fits on one shoulder."
Janette squatted down next to him, studying the profile of his cock. As per usual, he was still hard. He just ignored the need for the moment. "Can you still carry her on this? Will it fit?"
"Of course, it'll… ah… fit!" Kiara exclaimed past the pre-orgasmic trembles. "What kind of magic would it be to make ssssshhortst-ah-ck that you can't fuck?"
"We'll test that later," Alex promised, his attention now claimed by the last of the women that seemed to have changed that morning. Niara had quietly walked to the middle of the room and now gestured at herself to give everyone the chance to take in the changes.
They were not quite as drastic as the ones to Kiara. Though it was difficult to compete with shrinking to standing blowjob size, Niara came close courtesy of the total inversion of her hair colour. What had been a cascade of black was now a grey-tinted white. The insides of her wolf ears sported light blue fur instead, almost matching the colour of the ethereally glowing markings on her ebony body. They had a tribal character, flowing lines with pointy cut-ins and protrusions forming simply patterns. Only the mark on her womb, integrated into her new aesthetic as seamlessly as she was integrated into his harem, was a more elaborate heart-shape.
The marks primarily covered the sides of her hips and thighs, with a moderate amount on the rest of her legs and just a few more on her upper body. Two rings around her upper arms, highlights on her collarbones, and a diamond-shaped mark on her forehead, that was the totality of them.
.
---------->
.
Alex did one more scan of his women, assuring that no one else had changed overnight. Then, Janette casually wrapped her lips around his cock. The eager slurping was the beginning of the chain of events that occupied him for the next thirty-ish minutes. After that he bounced from bedroom to bathroom to breakfast. They disengaged from erotic activities as they ate, getting their bellies full.
The rumblings of a brewing storm vibrated faintly in the bark.
"Sounds like the weather will suck today," Astrid remarked.
"I enjoy the rain," Amethyst said, to no one's surprise.
Alex caught Kiara's gaze and gestured for her to come hither. Obediently, she did, staring at his unattended cock. "Someone needs to find out what shortstack pussy feels like," she smugly stated. "Hat on or hat off?"
"Hat off," Alex remarked drily. "I don't want it to bob against my chin."
"Suit yourself." A tap of the brim caused the lucky charm to disappear into whatever place all the magical items went. Climbing on top of his throne, Kiara straddled him. In all of her thickness, she struggled to do even that. She was tiny, probably a little less than 1,30 metres. At WELL over 2 metres, he was closer to double her size than her size and he was muscular too.
Kiara grabbed his cock and pressed it against her body. It was an absurd sight. Though Alex's height was borderline inhuman, his cock was 'merely' huge and certainly not some the kind of length that could be used as a murder weapon. Compared to Kiara's torso, however, it might as well have been.
The tip of his throbbing erection sat between the lower curves of her gently sagging mounds. From where her pussy hovered near his base,the length of his shaft covered the entirety of her midriff. A bit of concern rose within Alex, mixed entirely with excitement. Magic was at play. Porn logic could very well work. If this island had taught him anything than it was that intuition had power and Kiara's intuition made her bite her lower lip in anticipation.
Kiara could not raise her hips high enough to reach the tip of his cock, not while straddling him. Putting one foot up, she raised herself diagonally until he drooling pussy met his cock. Petals slick and swollen with arousal greeted him. The tiny woman's sex immediately pressed down.
The tightness was intense but not too much. Wet walls twitched all around him. They felt a bit odd and Alex quickly realized why that was. There were folds to her insides than any other woman he had been with before, notably more "Ooooh, that's gooooooood." It was neither groan nor a whisper, more of a dreamy sound of strain. "Fills me so completely."
At just past the halfway point, Alex felt what should have been the end of the journey. The love tunnel ended, her cervix greeting the top of his cock. Now, the pilot had not paid the closest of attentions during sex ed, but he knew well enough that, one, the cervix was not actually situated at the direct endpoint of the vaginal tunnel and, more importantly, he was absolutely certain that it should not be shoved deeper into a woman.
Yet, Kiara kept sliding downwards, howling as her pussy clenched and quivered all arouind him. Pussy juice squirted in intense waves as she made his cock lay claim to more and more of her insides. The obscene bulge went further up her midriff as her organs got rearranged to make room for it all. All she did in response was cum her brains out. Tongue lolling, eyes rolling, pussy wetting the seat, she was the picture of a well-fucked cumdump before she had even made the first bounce.
She was made for this. She was ecstatic about it. She was a shortstack cocksleeve with a pussy that begged to be stretched out. As her dense folds were pulled along her elongating depth, more sensitive nerve endings were exposed to erotic friction, previously hidden in the crevices between. The deeper he got, the better it felt for her and the act of having her flexible insides be forced to accommodate him was the greatest of them all.
Kiara's left foot slipped backwards. She was fully straddling him again, sitting down on his lap as she took the last few centimetres of his length into her. Lips twitched into a pervy smile as her cervix was pushed just a little bit deeper into her. Alex did not even try to work out how her insides must have looked at the moment. He was fucking a feisty Irish PR manager turned leprechaun in front of his harem of nubile, athletic tomboys.
There was no need to have the answers to some questions.
"Okay… oooooo—ooo-o-o-okkaaaaaaay," Kiara half-sung as her brain slowly restatrted. "Holy moley, I lost myself for a second there. Master, you are… good, it feels like my entire soul is filled with your COCK!" she shouted the last word just as she bounced on it for the first time. She utterly lacked the range of motion to get even close to the tip. The only way for her to get off his cock was to stand up entirely or get lifted off. "Master, I am so sensitive!" she continued to babble, audibly drunk on sex.
"Sounds like you came down a bit," he commented.
"That first penetration was something else… I wonder if it'll be like that every time you make my insides your personal sleeve." Kiara bounced again, moaning but also groaning in disappointment. "Are you just going to watch me or are you going to do the man thing and handle me already?"
There was only one response for such a bratty comment. Alex grabbed her by the waist. A chocked obscenity got stuck in Kiara's throat when his massive hands effortlessly encircled her waist. Never before had he been this able to actually use a woman as a cocksleeve.
Kiara's blue eyes snapped from his hands - or what little she could see of his hands past her gigantic tits - up to his face. "Do it." It was a plea, despite her choice of words. "Do it, Master. I'm not playing coy. I need to know what it feels like for you to utterly and mercilessly use me, for you to make me your relief toy before you pump me full of divine baby batter. Please, Master… you have to break me."
"Who am I to refuse such a polite request?" Alex asked aloud - and lifted her up.
It wasn't that she was light. Relative to her size, she was actually rather heavy. It seemed more than the texture of her folds had become denser. Regardless, he lifted her with his superhuman brawn. Then, he drove her back down, impaling her on his cock. The echoing clap made the other women moan.
"Mor-" Kiara started her plea, but he had already pulled back up halfway through. He slammed her back down. He pulled her back up. Over and over again, her pussy gushing, her voice rising back to the volume of that first penetration.
Then, he started to thrust up into her. The first one was an involuntary bucking of his hips, prompted by her tightness twitching all around him. Past that, he was just mesmerized by the power he had over this orgasming little toy. The rush of dominant glee that came over him as he manhandled the orange-haired cocksleeve fuelled a savage rush of motion.
PLAP! PLAP! PLAP! PLAP!
The wet echoes overpowered the climactic moans of a harem that had broken out into a sapphic orgy, all of it dedicated to watching him remodel Kiara's insides. No matter how much he stretched her, she remained tight. No matter how often he battered her cervix, all she did was squirt.
Huge tits jiggled up and down, side to side, and in no particular direction at all. Alex was so taken by the need to fuck her that there was no stability to anything he was doing to her. Every thrust was a unique angle, making her hair fly and her eyes disappear behind her fluttering lids. One of his hands glided down, possessively squishing the obscene softness of her plump ass.
"FUCK!" he roared, his orgasm coming hard and sudden. Pinning her down, thrusting up into her, he was a bridge from his heels on the ground to his back against the throne. Kiara had no contact to anything besides his cock. She was a set of curves, sex soiling the place they were joined with spraying pussy juice. Her entire being tensed and released alongside the shaft pumping hot cum directly into her womb.
It was no metaphor. Alex could feel her cervix pressed against the tip of his cock, open slightly to receive every spurt directly into her. Every second proved that this body, this short and sinfully stacked body, was built even more for procreative sex than women already were. A biological size queen, a depraved brat, and an eager sex slave all rolled into one tiny, Irish package with attitude.
Alex was tempted to keep fucking her all morning, but there were other things he needed to take care off. He lifted Kiara off his cock. As a quick of her new anatomy, the trickle of cum that left her gaping hole was barely notable. It really did appear that she had it all gathered up in her womb.
It was unfortunate that the curse was still in effect.
The orgy died down as quickly as it had started. The tomboy returned to their seats along the long table. Kiara blinked a couple of times, managing to return to reality after drinking a cup of water.
The empty pillows around the throne awaited those that would accompany him that day.
-x-X-x-
"Amethyst," he made his first choice. "I want to see how much absorbing that essence has improved your abilities in the field."
"I'll do the best I can, Master," the slime tomboy promised and crawled on over, kissing his cock as a sign of her submission for the day. Not that anything else was expected.
The other two, Alex chose more or less on a whim. "Blair, Sofia, I want you two to come along as well."
"Understood," the redhead stated.
"As it pleases you, Master," Sofia cooed.
Both crawled over as well, helping clean the leprechaun juices from Alex's manhood. As they did so, breakfast was finished and the wider harem began to discuss what they would be doing for the day, segmenting itself into various parties to hunt, explore, craft or do whatever else.
It was all nice and harmonious.
_________________________________________________________________
Alex found himself alone with Sara.
The brunette was on her back, laying on one of the loungers that grew from the walls of the many bedrooms. Her skin shone from the hot water Alex had rubbed all over her skin. In the absence of oil this was the best way he could massage them.
In the right light, Alex felt like he saw something else shimmering not just on her skin but as part of it. 'An early sign of her transformation?' he theorized. The changes always seemed to progress slowly, then manifest all at once over one night. 'Likely, most of the prep-work happens unseen and the visual changes are just the final switch being flipped.'
Alex recalled Charlotte's fox ears suddenly popping up from her hairline and chuckled.
Sara's questioning hum vibrated through his dick. Stood next to the lounger, Alex enjoyed a casual blowjob. Focusing entirely only the head and upper third of his shaft, the bunny-eared woman had an easy time of it - though her inexperience had been vanquished anyhow over the last few days.
"Just reminiscing about the first time we saw one of the changes," he explained, brushing the soft fur of one of her animal ears as an extra point of clarity. "It was quite a chaotic moment."
"I-I can imagine," Sara answered between gentle bobs. "We're… all changing, bit by bit."
"We are," he agreed, hand trailing over the mark on the bottom-heavy woman's womb. He ventured a little further, to her pubic mound, finding the slick wetness between her shapely thighs. "Maybe it'd be good to remember where we came from sometime too."
"...Maybe…" Sara's reluctant answer was immediately followed by a light moan.
"I want to hear it." His voice was just as much a mixture of softness and insistence as his penetrating fingers were. "I know who you are right now and I love you." The confession, if it could be called such, made Sara squeak happily. "If it's the kind of story you'd rather tell seriously, then I can stop…"
"N-no!" The tennis prodigy was quick to assure, pumping Alex's manhood with her hand now that her soft lips were otherwise busy. "This - ah - is how we live, right? I… I like this… plus it's not… ah! R-riight there!" A weak orgasm made the bunny-eared woman incapable of speaking for five seconds. A gulp later, she continued. "...it's not that serious."
"Tell me, then, please," Alex requested.
"D-do you… uhm… this sounds so self-aggrandizing… b-but do you know who I am?"
"Sara Mendoza, daughter of a tennis prodigy, herself the talent of a generation," Alex summarized what he knew about her. "Debut at age 15, a streak of tournament wins only interrupted by injury, whispered to be virtually guaranteed to take gold in the upcoming Olympics."
"Y-yeah…" Sara squirmed a bit under his fingers. "That's… what they say about me… I suppose."
"And who is the true you?" Alex wanted to know.
Sara gave his cock a quick kiss, before taking a deep breath. "My mother always shone a bright light on me," she whispered, voice straining frm present pleasure and past pains. "I didn't really understand it when i was a child, b-but looking back at it, its pretty obvious that she always just saw me as… the next step in her career. She was always strict, but when I was 7 something shifted entirely. She practically dragged me to a tennis court and began to drill me. 'You were born for this', she told me… a-and… well… I sort of was."
Alex's fingers slowed but did not pause, respecting Sara's wish to bask in their current lifestyle even as her childhood trauma spilled from her lips. "What do you mean by that?" he encouraged her on, when she fell silent for a bit too long.
Content, Sara closed her eyes. She was still except for the continued up and down of her hand. "The racket in my hand. The motions. The approval my mother gave me when I hit the ball just right… it all felt… correct. I liked tennis, b-but… I learned already that my mother only loved me when I did what she expected me to…"
Alex bent down, quietly putting a kiss on her forehead. When she took a break again, he didn't prod her with a question, just coaxed her to another orgasm. Even as the sole man of these islands, even has 'divine Master', he was nowhere near that controlling and had no intent of being. His love was no such transactional a thing. 'What a horrid thing to do to a daughter,' he thought.
"I… w-was just a child…" Sara continued. "So… I thought that was just how things were… a-and I got really good at what my my mother wanted me to be good at…. She was so proud of me when she entered me into the 18-and-under national championship… I was 15 and I won…"
That was the debut that Alex had already heard about. "How did you feel?"
"I went to the hotel room and cried," Sara confessed. "Not because… I was happy… When I received the trophy, my mother hugged me like she had never hugged me before… all the reporters called me 'heir apparent'. That was all I was to my mother and the reporters, the heir. I bawled my eyes out because… I just didn't know who I even was."
Another pause. This time, Sara opened her eyes again. Those hazel pools were deep and met his gaze surrounded by the light wrinkles of a wide smile. For as little as Alex liked to hear all of this, he was not dealing with a person damaged by any of this. This tomboy harem of his was full of the strongest women a man could ask for.
Sara rolled onto her side, her lips once more wrapping around his cock. The casual blowjob from before was replaced with the determined deepthroating of a woman eager to make her Master cum. Already at the brink, it took Alex barely any time to fulfill her wish, filling her mouth with spurt after spurt of cum. His fingertips curled against her g-sport, massaging that most sensitive point while his supernatural seed did its work, pleasures intertwining into a squirting orgasm that marked the bed of self-cleaning cotton.
"I gulped it all down without permission," she apologized after.
"The permission is a play, the most important part is always that you like what I am doing to you," Alex assured her. "What happened after?" He began to lick her juices off his fingers. They tasted pleasantly odd, like… the air of a foggy night.
"...w-well… I had the problem that I was… t-too young to really go up the ladder, both because I still had to mature physically and because of legal things… s-so I became part of a Catholic relief mission to an island hit by an earthquake as a… PR thing…"
"Your mother planned that?" Alex asked, his eyebrows pulling together. "When you were fifteen?"
"S-sixteen, but yes…"
Alex clenched his jaw. He had already disliked the woman for the drilling she had imposed on his Sara, but sending a woman that young to some disaster zone, ripping her out of her social circle and placing her amidst strangers? That was just the cherry atop the dung pile. "Forgive me for saying this, but I don't care for my mother-in-law."
Chuckling, Sara answered, "N-neither do I… so…"
"Yo, Alex!" Insistent and cold in equal measure, Blair shouted as she turned the corner. She must have followed their voices without eavesdropping, that was the only way she could have been surprised by the air of the room she strut into. "...Is this a bad time?" she asked, apologetically.
"N-no!" Sara sat up, a reassuring smile on her face. "It's… uhm… this is a good point to stop for a bit, so you're doing me a favour."
"Is that so?" Blair did not sound convinced, but it wasn't in her nature to question people, especially not when she wanted something. "We're waiting for you in the exit area."
"Right." Alex had gotten so used to time apparently standing still in the mornings that he hadn't even given that thought. With one more glance at Sara, he let out a loud sigh. He wanted to hear more. If she was happy to stop there, then he would respect that. "We'll talk more later," he said.
"Later," Sara agreed.
-x-X-x-
.
---------->
.
-x-X-x-
Amethyst got the backpack and Blair the gauntlet with their utility items. That was except for the Necklace of Regulation, which Alex put on once more. The axe was also given to Blair. Amethyst wasn't the weapon-wielding type and Sofia was her own arsenal.
'She looks really hot when armed,' the man of the island thought, staring at his fiery succubus. One arm covered by the stone gauntlet, the other clutching the crude shaft of the weapon, and completely naked besides that, she was a toned tomboy goddess. 'My toned tomboy demoness,' he corrected himself mentally.
A thunderstrike rumbled through the open entrance. It was another day of horrible weather and if the last thunderstorm was anything to go by, it would be this way all day. Thunderstorms that lasted an entire day uninterrupted were unnatural in basically any climate, but Alex found them especially odd in the tropics. Swift weather changes were pretty common in this area of the world.
Physical sense was scarce on these islands, however.
"We probably won't explore far today." Alex stared out into the ashfield - what little he could see of it through the intensifying rain anyhow. Now that they had explored it and with the heat transferral broken,marching through it on a day like this was not nearly as imposing. Still, having to march through the slurry of mud and ash would slow them, as would the wind once they made it into the jungle.
"Progress is progress," Blair stated bluntly.
"I'm… h-happy to follow you wherever you want to go, Master!" Sofia exclaimed.
"Same," Amethyst assured.
A finger tapped Alex's right shoulder. He turned that way, saw no one, then turned the other, to find Janette standing behind him. The mild smirk of the successful tease was on her face. It fit her, despite her usually stoic disposition. "Asking to be spanked?" he asked the wood-antlered woman.
"Do what you must, Master," she responded evenly. "I have something to show you before you leave. All four of you."
Interested hums echoed from the day's exploration party, growing a little louder when Janette lead them to the tree's 'basement'. The underground chambers were formed less by cavities in the enormous tree and more by overlapping roots. Resulting rooms were nice and cool while the tree was resting, insulated by earth, perfect to store a lot of perishables.
Janette showed them a descending slope that lead several metres underground. "The tree made this overnight," she explained. "I checked the bottom. It connects to the complex under the volcano. Once I realized that, I came back."
"Good girl," Alex said immediately. 'Did that sound too patronizing?' he wondered, only to spot the sparkle of desire and love in the woman's eyes. 'Well, she does consider me divine…' "I would feel better if you had someone looking after you next time this happens."
"I'll consider it," Janette responded. "Are you going to explore it?"
"Anything that let's me push off going out into the rain for a bit," Alex joked and climbed down. It was a sharply angled slope, but the walls offered plenty of holds. Even while carrying his sword, Alex found the descend simple to execute.
The root tunnel ended at the side of a dark room. The amber light of the Tree of Harem Life illuminated the cracked walls of the architecture. In its strange mixture of Greek and Aztec influences, it all did remind of the buildings they had already explored.
The other three explorers were soon with him. Blair provided the glowing crystals, allowing them to see a little more. "I'll wait up here!" Janette informed them. "If I hear you scream, I will get the others!"
"Good call!" Alex shouted back, then began to explore.
There was no magma around, cooled or liquid, indicating that this part of the complex had broken off the rest a long time ago and remained isolated since. What it originally had been there for, one could only guess at. The rooms held some remnants of furniture, but nothing that could be salvaged and nothing that hinted at specifics.
They went through three near identical rooms, then emerged into a larger, circular chamber. Light crystal's glow reflected in a multitude of colourless gemstones, laid into painted circles that were themselves nodes in a much larger ritual site that stretched the entire of the ten paces of the chamber.
Amethyst held the light crystals high. Sofia and Blair kept weapons at the ready. Alex cautiously advanced and squatted down by one of the fist-sized gemstones. He tried to pick it up. Under the lightest bit of pressure, it fell apart, crumbling into a white stone dust.
"I don't like the look of that," Amethyst hissed.
Alex followed her gaze to the middle of the circle. A chaotic knot of lines had been drawn there in grey chalk. Faint yet unmistakeable, the view of the complicated weave spurred on a mixture of dread and rage in the Mongrel's soul. "It gives off the same aura as the Death Willow's other extensions," he growled.
The urge to tear the unholy thing apart rose and ebbed away swiftly. This was weaker, much weaker, than any previous lingering influences of the entity. Better to understand what he was dealing with.
Alex carefully wandered around the outer edge of the ritual circle. There was just enough space that people could have walked, though those people would have been notably smaller than Alex and even shorter than most westerners. Alex found the remnants of footprints, preserved by the lack of air movement in this space.
There were more of them between two, smaller concentric circles within the ritual site. Careful not to step on any of the lines, Alex moved over and inspected them. "Walking in the same direction as the outer circle…" he muttered.
"Is that important?" Blair asked.
"Everything is important in magic," Alex answered with confidence. Over the last two weeks he had been interacting constantly with supernatural activities and he even had a few rituals under his belt by now. "It works with symbolism and intuition. They would have wanted to achieve something by walking in the same direction… a symbol of support, perhaps?"
He looked again at the drawn knot of roots, now close enough that he could have touched it. "A-are you thinking they… called the Death Willow here?"
"Seems that way," Alex said. "Though I can't be entirely certain yet…"
-x-X-x-
He inspected the ritual circle itself. The layout of it had a cultural significance that eluded him. There clearly was a pattern to it all, jagged lines and flowing curves intersecting and parting in a way that spelled out something. The only thing he did understand was that the gemstones must have served as batteries, now depleted and ready to crumble to dust.
'To dust…' Alex repeated in his mind and picked up another one of the gemstones. Rubbing the resulting materials between his fingers reminded him clearly of the remnants of the books. An unlikely coincidence. "Total certainty will always elude us," he said, "but I am confident enough in this: there was a small group of conspirators who invited the Death Willow into this facility."
"To what end?" Blair wondered.
"To be spared," Amethyst weighed in. The liquid woman pointed them at a number of patterns that, combined, created 'walls' around people that stood in them. "I would guess they thought the end was inevitable, so they might as well try to negotiate."
Alex looked around the room once more. "No corpses here… it could be that they got what they bargained for."
"Isn't the Death Willow… all against life?" Sofia asked.
"It's motto is 'No More Births'," Alex reminded her. "It seems fine with undead existences, though that's me speculating." His gaze locked onto the middle of the circle. "Though there is a way here to learn more…"
"Are you… thinking about reactivating this circle?" Amethyst did not bother hiding her raw disgust.
"No gemstones, nothing to empower the Death Willow's arrival." Alex removed himself from the ritual circle, crossing his arms as he thought aloud. "We have a skull and a root of the Death Willow, perhaps one of them could be used to establish contact."
"To what end?" Blair asked.
"To know the enemy…" Alex rubbed his chin. "Not sure how necessary that is."
Gently, Sofia placed her hand on his arm, a small thing considered to the girth of his muscles. Despite that, it was more reassuring than anything else in the world could be. "Whatever you decide, Master… I am with you." She smiled at her fellow tomboys. "We all are."
"Even if I think it's stupid, I will follow," Blair assured.
"Your will be done, Mon- Master," Amethyst echoed the sentiment.
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But what was his will? Alex had only been contemplating the possibility, he wasn't conivnced he wanted to actually do it. In fact, the more he thought about it, the less of an urge he had to talk to the Death Willow. Thinking about that enemy of life reminded him of that subconscious 'dryness' in his loins. A steady reminder that this accursed entity was preventing him from giving his tomboys what they all craved.
'There is some argument to be made that we should wait until the rose-tinted glasses have dropped,' Alex thought. 'But I'd rather make that choice on my own, rather than be forced into it by an undead tree.' Shacking his head, he made his decision. "No, there's nothing to be said to it. Let's have a look around. Maybe those that made this ritual left something of value behind."
The call had the three women relax. To make it absolute, Alex deliberately smudged one of the ritual line with his foot. Best not to keep something like this under their house, even if they were likely to move again soon.
They scanned the chamber thoroughly. Alex picked up the gemstones one after another,hoping one may have survived the ritual. No such luck, every single last of them fall apart.
"I got something, I think?" Sofia said and held up a piece of chalk that had been laying in the corner. "Look at this." The previously red bar turned to white, then black.
"Colour-changing chalk…" Alex mumbled and took the stick once it was offered to him. In its length and girth, it reminded of the sticks that were often sold to children. It was denser and heavier than that though. It was also remarkably complete.
Squatting down, Alex made a quick line on the floor, then inspected where the chalk had been rubbed off. What little was gone returned over the course of ten seconds.
"Regenerating, colour-changing chalk," he adjusted his description. "Useful to make ritual circles and leave markings. We're taking it." He handed it to Blair for storage.
They found nothing else of note down there.
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"Interesting," Janette responded, after she had been given the breakdown of what they had found. Immediately after, she presented him with a different question. "Do you want the tree to be moved today, Master? What does your 'divine will' entail?"
She said it with a hint of sarcasm, but she was a supporter of the establishment of the Cult. The dichotomy between her words and actions was purely endearing to Alex. For the question… he needed a moment to think.
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