Chapter 6: The Demon's Awakening
The queen’s laughter was a silver crackle of triumph as her curse, a writhing filament of black light, shot from her fingertip and sank into the base of Kaelen’s shaft. His body seized, a roar of pain and shock tearing from his throat as the flesh beneath his grip began to ripple and swell independently, the veins thickening into pulsing cords as the glans darkened and reshaped itself into a grotesque, leering demonic shape. “A fitting key for a font,” she sneered, watching the now-sentient, ravenously twitching member strain toward the stunned women.
The grotesque appendage throbbed with a hunger all its own, straining against the twilight air as if it could scent the women’s terror. A wave of nauseating wrongness washed over Kaelen, but beneath the horror, the base, physical demand of the curse was absolute and commanding. His own hand, moving with a shudder of grim necessity, closed around the fever-hot, veined girth of it.
He stroked his giant demon dick, a single rough pull from root to the leering tip, and the world narrowed to the brutal pulse of corrupt pleasure firing up his spine. A guttural sound, part agony and part dark release, escaped his clenched teeth as the thing in his grip seemed to swell further, appeased for one monstrous moment.
The queen’s icy gaze, having assessed her handiwork on Kaelen, snapped toward the thief with malicious precision. “Your chatter needs proportion,” she declared, her voice dropping to a silken whisper. She flicked her wrist, and a coil of compressed reality lashed out, wrapping Kestrel in a cocoon of shimmering force.
Kestrel’s furious curse dissolved into a muffled yelp as the world violently telescoped inward, her perspective lurching nauseatingly upward as her body compressed with a sound of grinding bones. In an instant, she stood just over two and a half feet tall, her now-gigantic leather armor swallowing her dwarfed form and her prized daggers becoming comically oversized weights at her hips. “What in the seven hells?” she squeaked, her voice a high, incredulous rasp of its former self.
Vesper’s cry of “Kestrel!” was cut short as the queen’s spectral hand, moving faster than thought, closed around Morwenna’s throat. The sorceress’s arcane scream dissolved into a choked gurgle, her emerald eyes flaring with powerless fury as the queen yanked her close. “My turn with the thief,” the queen purred into her ear, and the world exploded into a convulsion of blinding silver light. When the afterimages faded, the center of the clearing was empty, leaving only the scent of ozone and Morwenna’s absence hanging in the air. Kaelen’s cursed flesh throbbed in the sudden silence, and Vesper could only stare, one hand still hovering over the spot where her ally had stood, the other instinctively reaching for the tiny, sputtering thief at her feet.