Chapter 6: The Aftermath Confession
The cold bit deeper than before. Gideon sat in his armor, the metal leeching all warmth from his body, but the chill inside him was worse. It was a hollow, clean cold, following the feverish burn of his degradation. He stared at the dead fire, a mound of gray ash where embers had once pulsed. The only light came from the guttering torch, stuck in the ground near Gresha’s sleeping form. She hadn’t moved since turning away.
He could still smell her. It was in his nose, on his skin, a phantom fingerprint on his soul. He’d scrubbed his hands with dirt until they were raw, but the scent persisted—that intimate, musky tang of her sweat and her arousal. It was quieter than Drakna’s, but more permanent. A human stain.
He finally found his voice. It scraped out of his throat, a dry rustle in the vast quiet. “Gresha.”
She didn’t stir.
“I… I am sorry.” The words were pathetic. He wasn’t even sure what he was apologizing for. For being weak? For liking it? For existing? “For my… my will. It’s ash. You were right. I’m not a knight. I’m just a…”
“Shut up, Gideon.” Her voice came from the darkness, flat and tired. “I don’t want your epiphany. I want silence.”
“But you were right about everything,” he pressed, a desperate need for some response, any response, clawing at him. “It wasn’t just her magic. It was me. There’s something… broken in me.”
A long sigh. The blanket shifted. She rolled onto her back, staring up at the jagged teeth of the overhang. In the torchlight, her profile was sharp, unyielding. “We’re all broken. You’re just late to the party. You thought your ‘pure heart’ was a shield. It’s just a target.”
“Are you broken?” he asked, the question leaving him before he could stop it.
Her head turned. Her eyes glinted in the low light. “I killed a man for a minor insult and felt nothing but a satisfying stretch in my cunt. What do you think?”
He had no answer. The wind moaned through the pines below, a lonely, endless sound.
After a minute, she spoke again, her tone shifting, losing some of its edge. “It’s not really your fault, you know. Not entirely. We’re gnats buzzing around a dragon. She rewrites reality with a sigh. Our wills are just stories we tell ourselves to make the buzzing seem important.”
The unexpected, almost absolution in her words made his eyes burn. He blinked rapidly, looking away.
“Still,” she continued, and now her voice held a familiar, teasing note. It was lighter, but it carried a dangerous current. “That doesn’t explain everything, does it? Last night was… a particular flavor of defeat.” She propped herself up on an elbow. “Tell me something, knight. And be honest for once in your miserable, principled life. When I had you like that… did you like it?”
The question hung in the cold air, more violent than a sword thrust. He felt his face flame. His mouth worked, but no sound came. The memory was immediate: the crushing warmth, the utter helplessness, the shocking, shameful arousal that had followed.
“I…” he stammered.
“You what?” she pushed, sitting up fully now. The blanket pooled around her waist. Her gaze was intent, curious in a way that felt more invasive than any spell. “Did you hate it? Did you pray for deliverance? Or did part of you finally feel… at home?”
He closed his eyes. There was no lying. Not anymore. The truth was a physical weight in his gut. “I… I liked it.” The confession was a whisper, torn from him. “I have never… I have never felt so…” He fumbled for the concept, the horrible, beautiful reality of it. “So exposed. So owned. It was like… like I ceased to be. And what was left… it belonged to you.”
The silence that followed was absolute. Then, Gresha laughed. It wasn’t her cold, clinical laugh. It was a warm, genuine sound of amusement that seemed to startle even her. “Oh, Gideon. You really are a singularly fucked-up individual.” She shook her head, a smile playing on her lips. “All that armor. All that hope. And your deepest desire is to be a little piece of grit in a woman’s sweaty crack.”
He flinched, but the words, instead of shaming him, felt like an acknowledgment. A diagnosis.
“Do you want to do it again?”
His eyes snapped open. She was looking at him, her head tilted. The question was casual, as if she were asking if he wanted more stew.
“W-what?”
“The spell. I have the energy for it. One more time.” She shrugged. “Consider it… therapy. You get it out of your system before we trudge back to the capital in disgrace. Or maybe you lean into it. Maybe this is your system now.”
His heart was a frantic drum against his ribs. Every instinct of his former self screamed no. But that self was dead, its corpse stinking of Drakna’s perfume and Gresha’s sweat. What remained was a raw, wanting nerve. He looked at her, at the powerful line of her shoulders, the capable hands that had wielded him so effortlessly. He remembered the crushing intimacy, the total absolution of responsibility. To be nothing. To be used.
He nodded, once, a brittle, decisive movement.
“Good,” she said, and the warmth in her voice now had a possessive, hungry edge. “Come here.”
He stood, his armor clanking, feeling absurdly oversized, a clattering shell. He knelt before her, as he had on the blanket when he’d returned to his full size. She placed a hand on his chest plate. “This is ridiculous. Take it off.”
With trembling fingers, he unbuckled and stripped away the gleaming plate, then the chainmail, then the padded gambeson. Soon he was kneeling in just his breeches, the night air raising gooseflesh on his skin. He was exposed, vulnerable.
Gresha didn’t weave an elaborate pattern this time. She simply placed her palm over his face, her thumb on his forehead, her fingers splayed against his cheek. Her skin was cool. “Minimus Redacto.”
The world dropped away. The sensation was no less terrifying for being familiar. The ground receded, the torch became a furious sun, and Gresha’s face filled the sky. Her smile was a vast, curved horizon.
This time, there was no preamble, no walking. She was already pulling her trousers down, shoving them to her knees. She didn’t lie back. She remained sitting, and hooked one powerful thigh over the other, opening herself to the night—and to him. The sight was monumental. The coarse, dark curls were a forest. The folds beneath were shadowed, a deep, complex topography.
“You wanted to be owned,” her voice boomed. “So let’s be specific about the property.”
Her hand descended. Her fingers parted her, revealing the damp, pink inner flesh. The scent bloomed, overwhelmingly real and female—musky, salty, slightly sour. It was the smell of her power, her use of him. “This is the altar,” she said, her fingertip hovering at the entrance. “This is where you worship now. Not with flowers. With your whole, insignificant being.”
She picked him up. He didn’t struggle. He was rigid in her grasp, vibrating with a terror that was indistinguishable from anticipation.
She didn’t press him into her ass this time. She brought him directly to her exposed cunt. The heat radiating from it was a physical force. She held him there, letting him feel the sheer scale of it, the moist breath of it against his entire body.
“You’re going inside,” she stated, no tease in her tone now, only command. “You’re going to be my little secret. My living, breathing gem. And you’re going to stay there until I decide you’ve learned your lesson.”
She pushed.
The resistance was immediate, a soft, fleshy barrier. She applied steady pressure. He felt himself compress, then sink into unbelievable, slick tightness. The walls of her cunt yielded, then enveloped him in a seamless, heated embrace. He was consumed. The outside world vanished, replaced by a universe of pulsating, velvet flesh. The sound was a wet, swallowing roar, her heartbeat a deep, rhythmic thunder all around him. The smell was everything—organic, potent, alive.
She gasped, a sharp intake of breath that shuddered through the muscles imprisoning him. “Fuck… you’re so small. I can barely feel you.” She clenched down, experimentally.
It was a vise of wet muscle. It squeezed the air from him, mashed him into a fold of sensitive tissue. He couldn’t move. He could only exist, buried alive in the hot, dark core of her.
“That’s it,” she murmured, her voice a muffled, blissful rumble. “Just a little lump. A thought I had and swallowed.”
She began to move. Not with the jostling of walking, but with a deliberate, rocking motion of her hips. Inside, it was a cataclysm. The walls rippled and massaged him, sliding over every inch of his trapped form. He was a speck in a tidal wave of sensation. The friction was exquisite, unbearable. His tiny body, pressed against her swollen inner flesh, felt every minute shift, every clench.
“You like that, don’t you?” she grunted, her movements growing more purposeful. “You like being my little cunt-stuffing. My plaything.” She slid a hand between her legs, and from his perspective, the world went dark as her fingers found her clit. The pressure on him increased as she rubbed herself, her hips grinding in a slow, dirty circle. “I can feel you… a little pulse… right there. Are you hard again, you filthy bug? Are you getting off on being vagina-fodder?”
He was. The crushing, all-encompassing intimacy, the sheer filth of his purpose, the vibration of her pleasure echoing through him—it had fused into a blinding need. He was a particle of lust lost in her ocean.
Her breathing hitched. The rhythmic rocking became sharper, more frantic. The muscles around him began to flutter and spasm, a rapid, clenching series of contractions that milked his trapped form. The wet sounds from outside were obscenely loud, a symphony of her use of him.
“That’s it… that’s your job… be my tiny little come-toy…” she gasped. Her other hand joined, fingers digging into her own flesh, spreading herself wider as she fucked herself on his minute, immobilized body.
The orgasm, when it hit her, was a localized earthquake. A deep, guttural cry tore from her throat. The walls around him clamped down with stunning, brutal force, holding him in a vise of contracting, wet muscle for one long, endless moment. He felt the hot flood of her release, a sudden rush of wet heat that bathed him, sealing him in his tiny tomb. The pulses went on and on, wracking her body, and with each one, he was utterly, completely crushed.
Slowly, the tremors subsided. The pressure eased to a firm, possessive hold. Her breathing slowed, heavy and satisfied.
He floated in the afterglow, drowned in her fluids, his own tiny release a forgotten, insignificant event lost in the magnitude of hers. He was no longer Sir Gideon. He was saturation. He was proof of her pleasure.
After a long while, he felt her shift. Her fingers found him, slick and slippery, and pulled him out into the shocking cold. She held him up, a tiny, glistening figure coated in her juices. She looked utterly spent, a sheen of sweat on her brow.
“Not a word,” she whispered, her voice hoarse. She didn’t reverse the spell. Instead, she set him down on the folded blanket, a tiny, discarded thing. She pulled her trousers up, then lay down on her side, her back to him once more. “The spell will wear off by morning. Sleep.”
And she did, her breathing deepening almost instantly.
Gideon, the size of an insect, lay on the vast plain of wool. The smell of her was on him, in him. The memory of her internal convulsions was his new heartbeat. In the distance, the wind still howled, and from the direction of the mountain, a new sound began—a low, grinding tremor, as of stone sliding against stone, getting closer.
He was too small to shiver. Too small to be afraid of anything but the eventual return to a size that would have to mean something. For now, he was just a secret, cooling on a blanket, owned by the dark and the woman sleeping beside him.