FSE

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formerly SoFurry search engine

(3)

Well, anyway, Phosphor and I fucked like rabbits for that entire week, inhibitions about hell-magic be, pun intended, damned. It was weird, wonderful sex that left us both famished each time. By Saturday, we were both getting cheeky comments about walking straight, but hey, so were a lot of folk on campus, especially anyone with a rodent or rabbit boyfriend. It was spring. Maybe some cultures are immune to the changing of the seasons, but one full of animal people is gonna bang basically continuously for a couple weeks every March-April-May. Just, it was a new thing for the two of us in particular.

We also kept arguing. Anything related to the blender demon, as we started calling it, became taboo after just a few days because it strained the relationship to breaking. The emotional highs and lows were wreckage to our sleep schedules, on top of the fact that between five and six am, we would get a text from Fasted, who would bound in and get in bed with us for the rest of the morning. We managed to convince him that he had to at least run a comb through his fur and wash his hands after the first night. Ticks and fleas galore - had to change all the linens twice. Not that they were in particularly sterile shape, what with all the cum, but it was an annoyance.

And at some point, I needed to confront the fact that I didn't know my own name anymore. I still responded to it reflexively when I heard it on the street or in a classroom. I knew I was --, but I didn't know the sounds -- made and couldn't repeat them. I could write it if I closed my eyes and let somatic memory guide my hand, but two professors indiscreetly sniffed me as I passed by them to check for alcohol on my breath after I'd handed in quizzes with my own name scrawled sloppily in a corner.

But I didn't. I couldn't make myself tell Phosphor that the demon had taken my name away from me. I knew it would make him call the whole thing off. I'd barely convinced him not to tell anyone about the blender demon and barely convinced him not to tell anyone about Fasted. It was hard enough to justify the secrecy as it was. If I told him this... I couldn't tell him this.

We collected Fasted Saturday evening and explained the plan. I had a car that did its job and not much more. It took some convincing to get Fasted inside it. Like a dog knowing it was going to the vet, he was worried about Yonder Ranch. Phosphor had to let him curl up under the squirrel's feet to make him even vaguely okay with the idea. The car ride was quiet. It was just a few hours, but even a few hours is a very long time when there's tension in the air. Neither of us had told our parents. We had both just coated ourselves in protective gear and left notes in the apartment with our location and phone numbers.

It felt too casual. We had literally prepared for the events of our own deaths while sharing nachos and beer. Neither of us really believed this would be the end, and I think it's because we both knew, from our tastes of this demon, that death wasn't what it had in mind for us. We'd be coming back to campus, regardless. We just might not be us, anymore.

I parked the car and the three of us got out on a dirt path. The evening air was cool, but not unpleasant. The park this hot springs existed in was closed, of course, but it was "closed" the way most parks are: a security guard at one gate and a few patches of barbed wire. I had picked up a pair of bolt cutters. It was meticulous work, but it was worth the time taken to not get torn up by barbed wire. "Hidden," Fasted commented while I worked at it.

"Hm?"

"Pack mother lost an eye to this. Hides in grass."

"Yeah," I said. "It's bullshit," Phosphor said at the same time. I was in my usual outfit, but he was in muted colors compared to his usual conflagration of clothing. His arms were crossed while he watched me work, but his tail thrashed behind him. He was scared. I was, too.

"There. Help me pull this back." Between the two of us, we were able to manage the delicate task of making a big enough opening so none of us got snagged. Snakes slithered and grasshoppers bounded with our steps, but we were able to stay far off the dirt path from the security outpost to the little cabin and picnic area that seemed to exist at every natural park in the country.

We felt a little like a tiny wolf pack once we wound around back to the main trail, all because of Fasted. He would trot ahead by a hundred yards, come back to us, trail us by the same distance, run ahead and catch up. We had about ten miles to walk, and neither I nor my squirrel man were cardio enthusiasts outside of bed, so we let him scout on his own time while we used the light of our cell phones to read maps and reassure ourselves of which charms were in which pockets. The path was mostly uphill, because the park was basically one side of a low mountain. It was peaceful. Insects sang and owls hooted. Racoons occasionally crossed in front of us. Nothing was out of the ordinary.

The plan was simple and stupid. Find the demon. Confront the demon. Plan A was to demand it remove its influence from us or we would confine it in a Spirit-It-Away (TM) Ethereal Containment Vessel. Or six - they came in packs of six. Plan B was to offer it a way back to the nether realm using an O R'lyeh? Yah, R'lyeh! (TM) Single-Use Netherworld Access Lens that one of my creepier contacts at the library had given me packaged like condoms. That was assuming it was stuck and wanted to go back at all. And all of this assuming, for no reason at all, that its body had remained at this location for the last couple centuries.

Plan C was every plan's plan C: run like hell, try not to die.

Eventually, well past midnight, we heard the distant burbling of a falls. The springs were near. Phosphor's hand sought mine and squeezed it. I squeezed back. "Plan C is always a good plan," I said quietly.

"Why would it still be here? Why would this place even be open to the public?" he whispered nervously. We'd already tried to figure that out a dozen times. "Is it just waiting? There aren't, like, regular missing persons reports from here, are there?"

"We checked. There aren't. It must be weakened or trapped. We're going to be fine."

"Why didn't the exorcism pills work?"

"I don't know. Probably because it's not all demon. Most of it's ink. Those pills are designed to only find discrete sites of corruption."

"Oh... oh, wow. Well that's beautiful."

We stopped as the falls came into view. Steam rose from a series of descending pools that started out of a bare rock face of the mountainside and emptied into a subterranean river by slipping through cracks in the rocks beneath. The water was slow, lazy, drifting from one falls to the next without causing much disturbance. The tree canopy had receded from around the rocky ground such that the rising moon could be seen reflected in each pool from different heights. And dotting each pool, sustained by the microclimate made by the spring, were dozens and dozens of water lilies.

This was where the Order of Lilies had done it. This was where they had died. Or... ceased.

"I'm scared, --," Phosphor said. His hand was painfully tight in mine. Fasted was walking nervous circles around us.

"What is it? What's there?" he asked. He walk-crawled ten feet towards the lowest pool, then stepped away, then back again, turned around, and trotted back to us.

"A demon. And a lot of hopefully dead druids."

Phosphor cleared his throat. "I'll put down the candles. You do the circle."

I nodded and we approached. We could feel the heat of the water and the way it thickened the air. He produced a handful of Votivate! (TM) votive candles while I spooled out some Knock 'em Dead Thread (TM) into a circle. It really was a blast living in a world with commercialized magic, let me tell you. Pain in the ass to write about without getting slapped with a lawsuit, too.

Our ritual wasn't complex. A circle, some candles, and as always, an offering of blood. Everyone knew how to summon tiny demons and pixies and other frivolities to do things like pick up a pizza or throw a surprise party. It took focus and serenity and a couple supplies you could get at a pharmacy. I stood in the center of the circle of thread and intoned, "Come forth, demon of blurred lines. Come forth, inspiration of synthesis. Come forth... line?"

"'Muse of broken boundaries,'" Phosphor supplied.

"Muse of broken boundaries!" I projected my will into my words. I felt fragments of myself diffuse into the air. I had done the incantation properly.

But, nothing happened. The moon reflected in the pools was motionless. The lilies were still.

"One of the names must not be right," Phosphor sighed.

Fasted was staring at me. "Name?"

"Yeah," I answered. "Supernaturals need to be called three times. Named to show that you know what they are and have power over them."

"No," he stated. He was still looking at me. "What is your name?"

I returned his gaze. "I, I uh," I stuttered.

"What are you?" he pressed.

Phosphor looked confused. His expression started changing to a glare. "What's he talking about?"

I started trembling suddenly. I couldn't explain it. My lips moved to try to make the sounds that gave me a name. I felt like I had sleep paralysis.

"He does not know his name," Fasted said. "I knew when we met. I didn't have a name, but I said who I was. He did not say who he was."

"--? Your name is --. What happened? What didn't you tell me?" Phosphor demanded.

The words echoed softly off the rocks and over the pools of water, somehow. I tried to repeat them. Sounds tumbled out of my throat, but they didn't articulate anything.

What is your name? You want to be everything. What could your name possibly be? The demon whispered in my mind, taunting me. I clenched my claws into my palms hard enough to draw blood. I bit down on my teeth. Phosphor moved towards the circle.

I sucked in air and in one breath, I told a novella. I didn't know the sentences as they came out of me. I couldn't hear what I was saying. Later, I could recall every word perfectly, but in the moment, I simply spoke, far beyond what my lungs could sustain. Phosphor didn't move. Fasted didn't move. They watched me spill forth verse upon verse without refrain. Time passed, and at the end, I met Phosphor's eyes and belted out, as the final line, "... I knew I would be okay. Everything would be okay."

A shimmer of emerald thrummed across the surfaces of the pools as though summoned. It leapt up from the water and into the lilies. It spilled ghostly light into them and they began to move.

"What a name," called a voice like an avalanche. The water began to ripple with movement like snakes. "A fine name... for me," it declared. Phosphor shone his smartphone flashlight towards the springs. The lilies clustered together in the largest pool. They tightened in formation and rose up, supported by twisted, knotted vines. The mass of vegetation swarmed and writhed about itself until it took the shape of an animal face, with glowing, violet eyes sunken into black pits between petals. A humanoid body gradually took shape and walked out of the pools.

With a crack like a whip, a thick cord of vines swept out of the dim light and sent Fasted sprawling. Phosphor started after him, then looked at me, then began fumbling in his pockets and bag for charms. He managed to break open a few vials and an envelope before, to my horror, the tendrils swept around him, covered him, and drew him into the body of the demon of synthesis.

"Release him!" I commanded. "I know your name. I am your name. You are bound to my will and spirit and you will release him." I bared my teeth. My tail lashed behind me.

"I am bound by nothing. By my nature, I am unbound. All you have done is expand me." It was a lie. It had been stuck here. What had kept it here? I thought back to the book. It was broad. It would take more than it could contain, and spread itself too thinly across the world, across organisms. But I had no concept of what was too much for it. How many druids had been in the Order? I had read the book about them dozens of times.

It grew as it spoke. It occurred to me I didn't know how deep those pools went. Vegetation swirled around and within it, continuing to emerge from the waters. I heard cracking sounds coming from inside the mass. I prayed it was Phosphor's phone and not his bones.

It writhed its body against the circle of energy I'd erected and began breaking it down. It absorbed the essence I'd poured into my ritual bit by bit, crackling along the edges, blurring the line between its will and mine. It formed itself into the mimicry of me it had made before and it was then that I noticed the vegetation wasn't green. It was inky black, through and through. A loss, an absence of color, where everything melted into everything else. It opened its maw and I saw Phosphor's head within. I wanted to leap in with him. That same sensation from when we'd met in the archives poured into me, suffused me, made me want this thing, this essence, this uninhibited identity.

So I did. I let the wall fade out of existence. Its alien maw smiled. It swarmed me with vines that wrapped around my limbs and held me off the ground. I could my desires melt into its. A vine pressed past my lips as its tongue had once before. "You understand," it rumbled in unyielding glee. Plant life filled my maw and slithered into the back of my throat. "A name of so many things for us to become. You will be so much more, as me." It made me weightless. I didn't know if it removed my clothing or if the demon simply made it part of me. Vines pressed up between my cheeks and slid inside me. I wanted to be more. It coiled around my cock, which I hadn't realized had become achingly erect. Its otherworldly version of lust had made this union sexual, unbearably so. A tendril pushed against, then inside my cumslit. I squirmed, but couldn't make sound. Vines coiled around my neck, filled my ears, but the ones inside me simply kept sliding in... and I swallowed. I had become Phosphor and Fasted. I had become a predator and prey. I had become someone who hunted demons and someone who mated with them. I had become a father and a lover. And there were so many millions more things to be.

Its laughter was a susurrus and an earthquake. Its flesh swarmed under my skin, in my throat, in my belly, in my cock, in my balls. It poured essence and mass into me. As I watched, helpless to its endless invasion, I grew. It transformed me. It reveled in its ability to mold me. Each foot of infernal, living vines I swallowed made me larger. Those vines met themselves in my stomach and knotted together, making a loop of the demon through my body, and still it slid and squished into me inch by inch. "You and this man... had such a wonderful time together," its gravelly, whispering, roaring voice mused. "So much new. Now, there's so much more you can be together." Its form heaved in a long wave of coordinated movement to regurgitate Phosphor from its maw. I stared in horror, in shame, in lusting, ravenous hunger.

"Give him... give him to me." I don't know how I said the words. My throat was plugged. My lungs didn't have space inside my chest cavity. I wasn't aware of whether my heart was beating. Maybe I didn't say them out loud. Everything was surreal. But I wanted him.

The demon grinned. It wound Phosphor's body into a cocoon from its throat, then pressed its massive lips to mine. My body reacted with fire and burning, hedonic arousal. Phosphor's eyes were open. I could see through the weaves of the demon's skin that he was watching me. He was working some subtle magic, but it was only working in fits and starts.

I only half cared. I just wanted to eat. I wanted to eat him. Become him. Surround him.

My jaws stretched open, held together by elastic, unnatural skin, and the demon fed me Phosphor. His head slipped inside my maw and my entire body pulsed with erotic pleasure. I continued growing, continued stretching as the beast warped my form into its creation. Phosphor's shoulders pressed against the sides of my lips, but I simply spread my jaws wider, opened my throat further, as he and the web of wet, ink-black vines slid into my throat. When he was halfway inside me, his body bulging out my neck absurdly, I felt through the blender demon that Phosphor, too, was aroused. The demon sensed me notice it, sensed my mind flash back to what had happened in the shower a week ago.

"New," it purred, "and more." It pulled Phosphor back from my greedy, swallowing gullet and I snarled viciously as my prey was stolen from me. It laughed as I tried to fight it for a meal and forced my head down to look at my groin. I saw where a single tendril was still feeding itself into my penis. I saw, somehow in the starlight, that tendril moving and worming around as it stretched the urethra and then coiled and twisted inside my sack. The growth I had been enduring in the rest of my body ceased as the demon redirected its efforts. It laughed louder as my eyes rolled back in my head when another vine dove in alongside the first. My cock grew. Eight inches, ten, steadily throbbing thicker and longer, transforming into a monstrous size compared to the rest of my body. A third vine, a fifth and sixth, a tenth, plummeting down the new pathway directly from cock to balls. A foot, half a meter, thicker than my arm, than my thigh. I would have screamed in shocked pleasure had I been able.

And then, it revealed Phosphor in his squirming cocoon again. I refocused my gaze. It lowered my boyfriend to my hips - well, to two feet out from them - and shoved his nose inside my member. I writhed. I hated it. I feasted on it. I felt new musculature, the same he had developed, grip and tug him inwards. In the same way he had been going down my throat, my cock slid over his muzzle, hid his eyes, engulfed his head. I felt every inch of him on the entire journey inside me. I stretched to contain his shoulders, I felt the curvature of his chest and back. I had known every inch of his body before, but now I knew every inch of it in a way I had never imagined. I felt as his head pressed down into the vine-filled cavern of my enormous, swollen scrotum. I felt his hips and his own erection as I claimed them; I felt his tired body attempting to squirm in protest, in ecstasy, in resistance and submission. I watched with rapt attention as his long, plush tail slithered into my colossal member, with thighs, knees, calves, and twitching, kicking feet. And then, he was gone. He was mine. He was entirely, wholly inside me. The peristaltic gulping of my cock brought him fully down into the elastic chamber of my ball sack and something like orgasm washed over and through me.

I felt the demon's thoughts as it indulged in my pleasure. I felt it enjoy not just subsuming, but overwhelming us with its mass and its power. Those snake-like vines bunched up inside my gut, bulged out my throat, plunged past, and past, and past nerves to grind against my prostate and tantalize the still-crashing, still-ablaze nerve endings of my shaft_._ I could feel my distorted chest, imagine as the snaking, ever-writhing tentacles invaded until I was more it than me.

Then, I felt it grow bored. It was ready to simply absorb me, now that it was done manipulating my experience. I was drawn towards its chest, which opened in welcoming preparation to surround and absorb me. It paused and seemed to sag. Deep inside me, now partially insulated and as much mine as our captor's, Phosphor had cast whatever he had been trying to cast. Tension went out of the form of the demon. The plant life inside me remained turgid, living and full, but the lilies that comprised our captor gave up their water and withered. Without it, in this form, the demon had no strength. I wasn't sure what Phosphor's plan was, because it was already inside me and it wasn't constrained by boundaries of physical form. It was part of me. I couldn't regurgitate it, not meaningfully. I had to decide quickly, though. It didn't need physical mechanics to do what it did. It was beyond matter and physics.

I, however, was beyond reason. I was still in the grip of my urges. I wrenched my hands free, snatched at the vines still outside me, and swallowed. It had dared to pretend to invade and manipulate me. I would consume it. I would dominate and destroy it.

More. The echoing, gluttonous hunger Phosphor and I had both endured became a mantra. Deeper. Primal urges, to be filled and satiated, lanced through our entwined bodies.

Me.

I began mentally reciting the name I had called out, but not just the book of poetry it had greedily made me name myself and it. I latched onto every name and action of the druids it had consumed and seared them into it. Just putting the entity inside me was meaningless to it. I had to diffuse it among plethoras of ideas so it could have no identity at all - so that it could be spread thinly among urges and concepts, but contained physically inside me.

As I named each individual druid, one complete plant detached from the anastomosing mass and I swallowed it completely. I felt one blossom, then a second, third, fifth, tenth, as I parsed the demon among its former victims and one by one sucked them into myself and used its own powers to fuse them throughout my body. Throughout it all, the erotic pleasure in each orifice continued to burn through me in perverse, ancient ways.

I don't know what brought that tremendous name forth. Creativity, unstoppered? The urge to be more, to grow outward? Our shared greed for experience? To become and contain, expressed as lyrical prose? Like electrons filling cracks and driving fractal patterns through wood, I ignited the demon of synthesis with my name. I overwhelmed and splintered it with too much of itself - too much of me.

In response, it cracked the ground beneath us. Its self had seeped into the landscape, into the stone and earth and water, into the mountain itself. The entire springs came to life to rise up and attempt to break me and stop me that way. I welcomed them. I stepped into the steaming pools of my own accord, slowly, while the demon attempted to puppet me. I sank down into them and extended my senses into the stone. This was my specialty - the earth. Phosphor with his botanist magics and I with my earth lore had intimate knowledge of this creature's current reality. I drained it out of the landscape and commanded its demesne while I sat in its former prison like a throne, with the enormity it had given me rising up from the waters like a god.

I was ten thousand petals and ten thousand suns. I was spiderwebs and ripples on still ponds. I was songs without words. I had taken its erasure of my name and made vast libraries. And it tried to consolidate and know what it was, and became mine.

More vines bloated and stretched my form. My cock jutted out from the springs and swelled larger with each writhing tendril I sucked down into it. My sack could have contained tigers. My chest cavity ballooned outward, filled with its unending meal. As time passed, my bones creaked and strained and grew, stealing fiber and stone to expand my frame so it could support the mass and volume and power I was forcing it to contain. And still, I swallowed and grew. My mind was a constellation of minds. My body was a fusion of bodies.

I don't know how long this went on. I know that in the end, it struggled against me. It had finally become small and discrete enough that it knew itself, but that was too small to fight. I watched the flash of its sickly, luminescent eyes flicker over the waters again as I gripped the many lilies that made up its alien muzzle in both of my hands, stretched my jaw wide, and pressed it down my throat. I slammed my teeth shut after it and swallowed.

MINE.

A few feet of several tendrils slid into my cock to vanish from view. That titanic shaft raged and throbbed with pleasure. I didn't know how tall I was. Ten feet? Twelve? Twenty? And yet that shaft reached past my chin when I held it against my chest and began to stroke it in narcissistic adoration. All I knew of my shape was that I had a head and four limbs and was maleness embodied. My flesh was amorphous, slick, black-purple-green-white. I had become one of the fertility gods so many of those ancient religions worshipped. I was endless. I was life. I was a font.

I spilled precum like I was a new source for the springs. All the pleasure from the consumption and that blending of hunger with arousal had left me on the edge of orgasm without release. I felt inside my body for where Phosphor lay in my sac. I embraced him with vines, changed the timbre of the invasion, and shared that pleasure with him. I felt him twist and turn. I stroked the river of precum over my shaft. Climax built like a thunderhead above. I moaned. I pushed my feet out against the edges of the pool and my back against the stone of the mountain.

Cloudburst. I came like a geyser. Gyzym formed from digested, demonic matter soared upward in a column of white. My body devoted itself to orgasm and my mind parted in fractals to make way for the bliss of climax. I came a dozen - no, dozens - of feet in the air, dozens of times, and as I did, my body shrank. A small voice of reason demanded I know whether this was simply releasing the creature again - no, and no. I owned it now. The tiny remnant that was it was encased in my flesh and would remain that way. This explosion of virility was me, and it stormed through my body, and thus through Phosphor, as we echoed pleasure back at one another until the springs were full of me.

"Siber?" came a small voice from far below my head, when I was cognizant enough to understand language again.

I looked down. "Fasted."

The tiny wolfman fixed me with his gaze. He was unafraid. "That is still your name, isn't it?"

I had responded to it. I certainly seemed to think it was who I was. But that hardly made sense anymore. "I'm not sure."

"Where is Phosphor?"

I felt down into my sac. It wasn't hard to find him. The Order of Lilies had been gone so long that all that really remained of them was their names, but Phosphor had been safely sheathed inside me. Even so, he felt... small. My paws found his shape, but he was in a diminished form, not so different from Fasted's. I had taken part of him. Used part of him. I snarled in frustration, and went to work bending the demon's powers back against its entire raison d'être.

No part of the creature I now contained liked what was happening. It howled against my mind and gnashed unseen teeth. It cried out that nothing should have form, nothing should have a beginning and an end. It clawed at my senses and several times, I hungrily sucked Phosphor's essence back into my greater being before starting the glacier-paced process again, like stacking grains of sand together.

My body warped. I couldn't live, couldn't keep my mind, if I didn't mold and make my shape hold. I would just be another version of this inky creature. Blackness retreated from my skin. Plant flesh retracted like a husk and waves of white fur followed in its wake. Inside me, vines and roots wrapped around my spine so that this would always be in my brainstem in every sense. Organs shifted and a second stomach, like the one in which I'd fashioned Fasted, settled into place. My reproductive tract transformed as well to resemble, but improve on, the stomach-like organ the blender demon had made it. There, I grew Phosphor's body again. It wasn't something new. It wasn't something corrupted. I brought him back from the maelstrom of me.

Once done, my internal tendrils drew him up into my abdomen, then chest. I felt him ascend through me. I caressed him with my senses. I formed an opening through my vertebrae that curved up, out, to support the shape of an enormous lily that spread out from between my shoulder blades and beyond my body. From the middle of the blossom, Phosphor rolled out. I caught him with a prehensile vine. They were mine to control. I made the black in them retreat, down, containing it only in my lips, my through, my member, and my internals. I set him in front of me beyond the lip of the springs.

He opened his eyes. I saw my own reflected in them - no longer the pale green I had been born with, but a deep, burning, wine dregs-and-amethysts hue.

"I'm leaving you," he said.

"I know," I said. Most of my spirit and mind shrieked in protest. He was mine. I could swallow him again. I could force him to understand.

Shakily, he brought himself to his feet. He felt at his ribs where I'd scarred him a week ago. The marks were gone. His eyes became wet when he touched the skin where I'd left a mating bite to find it, too, was gone. I couldn't leave those claims on him. I knew he had to leave me after all I'd done and what I'd hidden from him.

I used magic I didn't yet comprehend to fold the remaining mass of my body in on itself. Much of it was draining into the mountain's interior, I'm sure to terrify some unwitting spelunker. Importantly, I proved to myself that I could bind myself. I could maintain myself, like this. I shrank down to my usual height and looked at him in the cool, gray morning. Despite my proximity to it, I still saw the green flash some say never comes zip across the pools of the hot springs.

He stepped towards me. I stepped forward onto the lip of the pools so I was on the boundary line of them. Delicately, he pressed his lips to mine one last time. "I wish you had told me."

"I should have."

"But you wouldn't have. And you didn't."

I shook my head. I couldn't speak. It was quiet out.

"Are you coming back to campus?" he asked.

I whispered, "I don't know." I felt around inside me for the memory of car keys. With a vine, I extracted them from the flower behind me and set them in his hands. It was bizarre modernity in the face of the eldritch magics that had just been on display.

He took them. "Did you see the flash?" he asked.

I nodded. I held a hand out to him mutely. He took it and I stepped in to embrace him, fully. We were bare and I tried as hard as I could to treasure his precious warmth, the look and feel of him. It lasted a fraction of a moment. I didn't trust myself not to consume him. He didn't, either. It was't close to long enough. It ended. It ended so quickly.

He stepped away. He said, simply, finally, "I want you to be okay. I have to leave. Take care of Fasted." He paused to rub the little wolfman's ears, then started down the path back to the car.

--

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was not okay. Everything was not, in fact, okay. Years later, I was found, trapped, and arrested for mass atrocities and crimes against humanity by an international court of mages. They tried me, found me guilty, and made me the first signatory of The Disagreements in the Deep, a contract so powerful it not only forbade, but made impossible, magic the world over.

I couldn't blame them, even if I were capable. It was the only way to stop me.