Chapter 8 - Pulled Under

I was sitting waist-deep in the body of an ancient creature in a blood warlock’s murder pit, and I was fine. Inexplicably, embarrassingly fine. I had half a dozen tentacles on me already, and another one was doing something slow and exploratory along my forearm that I’d stopped tracking as a threat somewhere around the tenth second of it. The creature’s heartbeat came up through my body in a slow pulse I’d absorbed long enough to stop noticing. It was almost soothing. That probably said something about me I preferred not to examine in detail.

That’s me. Takes two seconds to make peace with being waist-deep inside an ancient eldritch creature.

Gratitude. Partnership. Hope.

The impressions came fainter now. The urgent part was over. We’d done the convincing and the emotional moment and the making-a-deal, and what was left was the dark and whatever that tentacle was still doing to my arm. It was sort of poking around. Real casual about it. It hadn’t made up its mind about my elbow yet.

The pink light pulsed through the flesh around me in long, lazy waves, barely bright enough to see by. Another tentacle found my shoulder. It was warm and a little wet, and heavy enough that I felt it settle. It draped itself across me like it owned the real estate and was satisfied about it.

I looked up.

The pink light didn’t reach far. Maybe ten feet above my head it just stopped, swallowed by the dark, and above that was nothing. I couldn’t see the edge of the pit. I couldn’t see the toothy rim I’d been shoved over or a scrap of torchlight from Malkor’s chamber. It was black all the way up, and it didn’t change no matter how long you stared at it. I stared at it for a few seconds anyway.

I wasn’t going anywhere that way.

I’d been fine with a lot of things in the last hour that I probably should’ve kicked up more of a fuss about.

The air was part of it. The rot I’d smelled from the rim was gone down here, and the sweet, thick smell had been there since I landed, and I’d been writing it off as what the pit smelled like. But it had been working on me the whole time, slow and steady while I was too busy talking to notice it.

The flesh beneath me shifted. It settled its weight into a better arrangement. Something pressed warmer against my left side. Something else moved under my legs. There was a lot of me touching a lot of Ripple. More than I’d been keeping count of.

Oh.

Huh.

I felt great, and that was the weird thing. I was loose and warm all over. That was the musk. That had been the musk for an hour. The heat had been climbing too, degree by degree, and my undershirt had gone from damp to thoroughly clinging without any announcement about it. I shifted, peeling it away from my spine.

As I peeled, the shirt just fell apart.

It didn’t burst into flames or get yanked off. It just gave up. The fabric went limp and separated where Ripple was touching it, seams going first, then the cloth, until I was holding the collar of what used to be a shirt and the rest of it had become nothing in particular. I stared at the scrap in my hand. “That was my shirt.”

Warm. Soft. Less.

“Less,” I repeated. “Less clothes. That’s one way to go about it.”

The warm air hit my bare chest, and I breathed out properly for the first time in a while. I was still going to lodge a complaint. “Most people ask. Or at minimum they don’t dissolve the merchandise.”

Amused.

The musk hit differently without the shirt. It soaked in faster on bare skin, and my skin went hot and tingly with it.

I became aware of a concerning situation developing around my belt.

“Wait, that’s my belt—”

The leather gave way in a slow, inevitable sag. My trousers followed roughly five seconds later in a manner I found deeply undignified, and my boots slid off somewhere under me. Ripple, for the record, radiated nothing but satisfaction.

“Something in that air is definitely going to require a formal complaint,” I said. “I’ll lodge it later.”

Warm. Safe. You.

“Much later.”

Right on cue, more tentacles started arriving.

They came up from below, out of the flesh I was already sitting on. Something pressed up between my thighs. Something else swelled against the back of my knee. A third thing, thick and unhurried, simply emerged from beneath me and curled around my hip before I knew it was there.

The pink light pulsed once. In that half-second of dim rose I could see three of them, maybe four, and then the light faded and I could only feel them: more weight on my shoulders, and something warm rising against my spine. Four new ones was more than I’d been counting on, and I wasn’t filing a complaint about any of them.

“How many—”

Yes.

That wasn’t an answer. I decided not to push it.

The darkness pressed in from all sides and Ripple pressed in from everywhere else. The musk had been soaking into me for an hour, and whatever part of my brain was responsible for concern had mostly shut up.

A slender one traced the inside of my thigh. It was slow, deliberate, warm and slick, and the warmth it left spread through the skin and kept going, outward and upward, into my balls and the base of my cock, which the tentacle hadn’t touched.

Oh, I thought. That’s what that’s been doing. “Filing that complaint first thing. Top of the list.”

One curled loosely around my wrist and rested there for now, the way you’d lay a hand on someone’s arm. My hands stayed right where they were, sunk in the warm flesh.

Another found my ankle and did the same thing, patient about it.

Warm. Safe. You.

“Yeah,” I said. “You keep saying that.”

Something nudged at the small of my back, gentle but insistent, and I leaned back. The flesh rose up to meet me, warm and yielding, and I was on my back before I’d decided to be, held up by Ripple itself, cradled in the dark. The tentacle at my wrist tightened a fraction. The one at my ankle did the same.

I stared up into nothing. I couldn’t make out my own hands, only the slow pulse of pink light moving through the flesh around and beneath me, and the vague dark shapes of tentacles I couldn’t count.

The slender one was still working up my thigh.

It found what it was looking for and wrapped around my cock and I made a sound I wasn’t prepared for and my free hand shot out and grabbed the nearest tentacle, which accomplished nothing except giving it something to hold. “Right,” I managed. “Alright.”

More.

“Give me a moment—”

One pressed against my mouth and stayed there without pushing.

I pulled back as far as the tentacles holding me allowed, which wasn’t far. “Hold on. Breathing. I do that. It matters to me.”

Breathe. Yes. Safe.

From the way that came through, Ripple had already thought this through and had a plan I didn’t know about yet. “You’re enormous. I’ve got one set of lungs.”

Trust.

Right. Trust. I’d already stuck my hand out in the dark for something I couldn’t see, in a murder pit. It hadn’t bitten me once. On the long list of terrible decisions I’d made in this building alone, opening my mouth ranked pretty favorably. I’d done worse for considerably less.

I opened my mouth.

The tentacle slid in slowly. Sweet, the same musk I’d been breathing but direct now, and almost immediately it started secreting a thick, warm slime that coated the back of my throat, and my first instinct was to bite down and my second instinct was that I absolutely should not do that, and both thoughts dissolved before I could act on either. Warmth moved down my throat and spread through my chest and my jaw went slack and I stopped thinking about biting anything. Whatever it was pushing into me, it carried air. I could feel it in my lungs, clean and strange, like breathing something that was also breathing me.

I couldn’t have told you what my mouth felt like. Too much, was the honest answer. And my body had completely stopped caring about the logistics.

Good. Yes. More.

Before I could think better of it, Ripple pulled me under.

The surface opened under me, warm flesh closing over my shoulders, my chest, my face, and I was fully inside it. The pink light was everywhere now, moving through the body around me in slow pulses I could feel against my skin from every direction at once. No air. None needed. The tentacle in my mouth was handling that, and the part of my brain that was screaming about drowning couldn’t get any purchase on it.

A thicker one pressed against my ass, warm and certain, and I knew what it wanted before it pushed.

What came out around the tentacle in my mouth was a garbled yes, and I knew what I meant.

Gentle. Promise.

I thought it over for about three seconds. The musk had been working on exactly this question for an hour. I didn’t put up much of a fight.

When it pushed into me, it didn’t hurt.

The noise I made went nowhere. Ripple swallowed it, the same as everything else.

What came through the connection hit me all at once. It was pure relief, the whole creature just melting now that it finally had hold of something it’d been reaching for. It was absolutely delighted with itself.

Happy. Full. You.

Inside the body there was no dark. The pink light pulsed through me from every direction and I was touching Ripple everywhere, every inch of skin, and Ripple was touching back everywhere at once. The one in my ass worked a steady rhythm. Another had enveloped my cock completely, warm flesh from base to tip, squeezing and pulling in slow deliberate cycles that had no mercy in them at all. The secretion from the mouth tentacle kept coming, kept spreading, and I had stopped being a person with discrete parts and become something that was just responding, all of it, all at once.

It was hugging me.

That’s what this was, inside and out: Ripple’s version of throwing its arms around someone. It had no idea what it was doing to me.

I held that thought until the one on my cock squeezed again and knocked it out of my head.

I came so hard the pink light flared.

More.

“I literally can’t—”

Yes.

It was right. Whatever the slime was doing to my body, “can’t” wasn’t on the table. I stopped arguing. Stopped counting. Stopped doing anything except holding on to the nearest thing, which was Ripple, which was everything, which was the same thing.

Every time I came, Ripple answered through the connection. Here. Here. You. It sent that over and over, like it still couldn’t believe I was real.

Full. Warm. Safe. You.

At some point I just stayed. Normally by then I’d already be eyeing the door.

Somewhere in all that staying, Ripple began to move me.

It was taking me deeper.

The body closed in from above, more of it pressing down on all sides, and I understood dimly that this was still the creature doing what it wanted, and now it wanted me at the bottom. The tentacle in my mouth was still steady, still supplying that strange clean air, and everything else was still going. Beneath all of it, the body was working me downward, slowly, toward a stone floor somewhere below where I’d landed.

I couldn’t have resisted if I’d tried. I didn’t try.

Cold stone found my back. The temperature dropped, the warmth thinning as Ripple’s mass pushed down around me and the rock of the pit bottom came up against my shoulders and the backs of my legs. The stone wall pressed against one side of me. Through the flesh around me the pink light kept pulsing. After all that heat, cold rock under my bare ass felt downright rude.

Right where I ended up, at the base of the wall beside me, there was a crack where stone met stone, just wide enough for me to squeeze through. Ripple had brought me here on purpose, to one of the escape routes it had shown me. Cold dungeon air came through it, thin and foul, and it was the worst thing I’d smelled in days, which tells you everything about the rest of my evening.

The tentacle in my ass withdrew, the whole length of it pulling free, and the sound I made was not something I’m documenting. The one at my cock released. The one in my mouth slid out last, and real air hit my throat, cold and iron-tasting and nothing like what I’d been breathing, and I coughed once and lay there in the pink-lit dark at the bottom of the pit with Ripple pressing warm and enormous around me from every side.

I was wrecked. Genuinely, structurally wrecked. And yet Ripple’s musk was still threading through my blood, still keeping the lights on in a building that had every right to be condemned. I should have been unconscious. I was not. I resented this slightly.

The body squeezed me once, all over.

“Yeah,” I said. My voice came out hoarse. “I know.”

I reached along the bottom of the crack. Brooch: there, cold metal in a seam of stone. Boots: there too, leather too thick to dissolve. Ripple must have tucked both away for me. Trousers: a memory I was making peace with.

I closed the brooch in my fist and pulled the boots on one-handed. Ashara’s brooch was back with me, where it belonged, and that scarred asshole could go fuck himself. When I turned toward the crack, the flesh drew back from it just enough.

I went flat on my stomach and pulled myself through, inch by cold inch, slick with slime and my own cum, into the dark on the other side. Behind me, Ripple’s body sealed back against the stone.

I got my feet under me and stood in the dungeon and breathed bad air.

Ripple couldn’t leave its pit. Malkor’s bindings were holding it down there, and they were stronger than Ripple’s will. That pissed me off more than anything it had dissolved off me.

Time to find some clothes and ruin Malkor’s evening.

I put my hand on the wall. Behind it, somewhere in all that warm mass, Ripple pulsed once, faint enough that I only caught it because I was looking for it.

“I’ll come back for you,” I said quietly, and I meant it.

No impression came back. Maybe it couldn’t reach through the stone. Maybe it was already asleep, or whatever ancient pit creatures did after all that.

I turned and walked naked into a blood warlock’s dungeon with nothing but a brooch and a pair of boots and the lingering smell of something I was never going to be able to explain to anyone.