Chapter 1: Confessions to a Raven
The hut breathed. Not in the way a house settles, but in a wet, living rasp—the sound of moss digesting wood, of damp earth exhaling through the gaps in the floorboards. Eden knelt on that dirt floor, naked, the cold seeping up into her knees. Her skin was mapped with wrinkles, deep gullies around her eyes and mouth, testament to fifty years of sun and wind and solitary silence. Her long hair, streaked black and grey like a stormy sky, hung over her shoulders, sticking to the sweat and other things smeared across her breasts.
Before her, on the warped sill of the jagged window, Bartholomew the raven perched. He was a blot of utter blackness, his head cocked, one glassy eye fixed on her.
“It’s happening again, Bart,” she whispered, her voice a dry leaf against stone.
Her hands were dirty, crusted under the nails with dark, fertile earth and something richer, something from her own body. She brought them to her face, inhaling deeply. The smell was complex, animal, profoundly shameful. It made her cunt pulse.
She reached between her legs. The hair there was a coarse, wild thicket. Her fingers, knowing and rough, found her clit. A sharp gasp tore from her throat. Her other hand trailed down, over the soft, sagging curve of her belly, through the wiry thatch of her armpit, gathering the musk there, and then back to her mouth. She licked her own salt from her fingers.
“I want things,” she confessed to the unmoving bird. “Filthy things. Things that would make a traveler run screaming back to the village.” Her fingers worked faster, plunging into her vagina now, the sound wet and obscene in the quiet hut. “I want to taste someone else’s piss. Hot and bitter. I want to swallow it. I want to be shat on, Bart. To feel it, warm and heavy, sliding down my skin. I want to be covered. I want to be soiled.”
Her hips jerked forward, driving her fingers deeper. Her breath came in short, ragged pants. On the floor beside her knee was a wooden bowl. In it, a dark, pasty substance lay next to a cup of amber liquid.
With a trembling hand, she let go of herself, picked up the cup. Her urine was still warm. She brought it to her lips, her eyes locked on the raven’s, as if daring him to judge.
“See?” she moaned, then took a gulp. It was acrid, biting. She shuddered, but not in disgust. A fresh wave of heat flooded her groin. She drank it all, every last drop, a trail of it escaping the corner of her mouth and tracing a path through the grime on her chin.
She put the cup down, grabbed the bowl. Her own feces was there, a soft, yielding mass. She dug two fingers in, scooped it up. The smell was intense, deeply organic. She brought it to her lips, her eyes rolling back in her head as her tongue darted out to taste. A low, guttural groan vibrated in her chest.
“Oh, god, it’s so good,” she slurred, pushing the mess into her mouth. She chewed. She swallowed. Ecstasy and revulsion twisted together in her gut, each fueling the other into a brighter, hotter fire.
She took more from the bowl, this time smearing it across her breasts, painting dark streaks over her hanging nipples. She rubbed it into the wrinkles of her neck, across her cheeks. She was marking herself, becoming something feral and true.
Falling forward onto her hands and knees, she reached back between her legs. One shit-smeared finger pushed against her anus. It was tight, resistant. She spat onto her hand, used the saliva to ease the way, and then she was pushing in, a sharp, stunning fullness that made her cry out. She fucked her own ass with one hand while the other went back to her cunt, fingers slippery now with sweat and shit and her own desperate juices.
“Watch me, Bart! Watch what I am!” she commanded, her voice breaking.
The raven didn’t move.
Her movements became frantic, animalistic. Her back arched, her large ass tilted in the air. She was grunting, cursing, a stream of filth pouring from her mouth as her fingers pistoned inside her.
“Fuck! Fuck my dirty hole! Yeah… fill it… I want it… I want to be fucking ruined!”
Her climax ripped through her with violent, shocking intensity. It wasn’t a wave but a seizure—her whole body convulsed, muscles locking, a raw scream tearing from her throat that echoed off the tin cup and the scattered bones. She collapsed onto her side, panting, twitching, covered in her own waste.
The silence rushed back in, thicker than before. The metallic scent of blood and iron from the earth mingled with the pungent odor of sex and excrement.
Bartholomew rustled his wings. “Cunt,” he croaked, his one learned word.
A tear, clean and surprising, traced a path through the filth on Eden’s cheek. The shame arrived now, cold and hollow in the wake of the fever.
“I know,” she whispered to the dirt.
She lay there for a long time, the cold finally biting through the aftermath of her heat. With a sigh that came from her bones, she pushed herself up. She would need to wash. The stream was cold, but it would scour her clean, for a while.
As she staggered to her feet, a sound cut through the forest silence outside—not a bird, not an animal. A crack. A deliberate snapping of a twig.
Eden froze, her filth-caked body going taut. Someone was out there.