Unearthed

Part 3 - The Interlude

Although the merchant passed him coin freely during his entire stay, Bowen was quietly pleased to be seeing the back of them. He had been as accommodating as possible, and was certainly able to replace all the furniture that was broken and to - barely - stomach the varied and many messes that had appeared in most of the rooms of his establishment at least once. The lusty intentions of the guards towards his wife and daughter, however quickly they were dealt with, had soured him. The point of breaking had been fast approaching, and thankfully he wasn't going to break. This morning they had left, along with his son: while Bowen was well beyond the age where impulses danced you towards the line of ruin, his son was right in that age, and he could see the signs of an angry young man on the verge of doing something stupid.

It was easy to tell which way to send them: from the inn, there were only three ways to go, and Bowen's skill at inn-keeping wasn't so great - nor was he deluded about his own skill - that he expected merchants to travel for the chance of staying one night with them. The merchant's party had come from one direction, and that's the one that he sent his family along. He didn't expect them to be heading down the road that led to the mines, but he didn't fancy sending his family anywhere near a bunch of sex-starved slaves. Or worse, the men who kept them there, ones who got used to being rough and demanding... no, not for his family.

Bowen was just about to let his guard down when someone barged in, disturbing some of the merchant's men who'd been carrying something out to the caravan. He seemed like a dangerous wild-man, for there was no mistaking the gleam in those shining eyes of his. But he wasn't the strange, weak crazies that wandered around, begging for food. As dirty and tired as he looked, his muscles seemed to twitch and writhe with some hidden demon's strength. The strange man slammed right up against his bar. Bowen, shocked to silence, looked up from his cleaning. He hoped the man just wanted a drink.

That didn't turn out to be the case: he instead seemed to wince and stated, "I need a room." He paused, as though he was trying to clear his mind, but that doing so was like physical combat. "No, actually I'd like to purchase your inn."

Bowen wasn't foolish enough to laugh at a madman, but the idea was just absurd. Why would he sell? "I'm not interested in selling it," he answered, "thank you all the same." It didn't hurt to be polite, Bowen thought, but it might hurt not to be.

Not content with just his appearance as a surprise, the stranger then performed another feat of astonishment. He dumped a small fortune onto the counter: the coin was similar to some that the merchant had given him - Bowen noticed that quickly, since some had foreign designs - but the quantity suggested that if he had traded with the merchant, he must have had something exceedingly valuable.

"There was a very bad fire at the mines," the stranger explained. "Most of the buildings have been destroyed, including most of the slave halls. The mining company workers need somewhere to live, especially the new slaves to rebuild everything. We need lodgings." He took one ragged breath before continuing. "You can keep running it as an inn for all I care, and keep a share of the profits. Fuck pretend you still own it for all I care. My master and I just need a way to make money, and somewhere to house workers temporarily." He grunted, his body sagging over the edge of the bar, before he squeezed out an addition. "And confidentiality."

Between the money Bowen had made from the merchant, and this amount, his family were well-placed. They could move to a moderately-sized town and buy a large house. Perhaps they could invest in other businesses: the idea of his son learning a trade, his daughter marrying to a nobleman, and his wife wearing the jewellery she never asked for, but he knew she would love to wear. "Well, let me think it over," Bowen answered after some thought. "At the very least, I can offer you room and board. Most of the rooms will be vacant..."

Bowen was about to offer the rich stranger his choice of the rooms - once he had cleaned them, of course - but just then he moaned as though in some strange mixture of pain and ecstasy. He looked like a balloon about to pop, sweating profusely. "Thank you," he grunted out, "but maybe later. I think I'd like to be outside for a moment." His shaking hand appeared, and he dumped yet another treasure to the horde on the bar.

The green crystal was unlike anything Bowen had ever seen. He hadn't seen many, save during his visits into the village. He wondered if his wife would like one like this; then decided not. Still, it seemed to hold some kind of allure, since he found it difficult to keep his eyes off of it.

"Look after this for a while too," the strange man requested, "keep it in your safe."

He didn't seem to wait for a reply: he stumbled past Bowen, who felt rooted in place, and burst out of the back door. Bowen went to check, but the now very dirty madman was crawling along the ground. The man's clothing had been so dirty and dishevelled that he hadn't realised that it was actually a uniform belonging to the mining company.

Riches called back to him, and Bowen returned to the pile. He had a safe - he had learned the expense of having one was less than not having one the hard way - and although he was eager to put all of the coins away to count later, he wanted to study that green gem or crystal some more.

As he held it in his hand, it seemed to pulse and vibrate. A strange feeling ran up the arm clutching it, and when it hit his brain for a brief moment he seemed to understand everything. It was only for a moment, though. Then it was safely locked away. Out of sight.

However, it was not out of mind. Bowen suddenly wanted it not to be. His first instinct - that the gem was his, his payment for the inn - was only narrowly held in check. He needed to think about this a bit more. He scratched at his chin, feeling the coarse bristles of unshaven growth. He liked the way the bristles crackled under his fingers. Bowen felt a strange shudder, almost erotic, pass through him.

A fire at the mine campsite? If that were the truth, there would be lots of men coming to and fro: the survivors, representatives for the company wanting to survey the damage and get started on recuperating for their losses. More adventurous types coming along, seeing what they could get out of there during the chaos.

His thoughts went back to the man who had just "bought" Bowen's inn. If he wasn't a deranged slave, then - it came to him in a flash - that the crystal might have come from there. He could almost see it now, the light of a lantern gleaming across a huge cavern of green shards, filling the room like fangs in a monster's mouth.

Licking his own lips, Bowen's body seemed to move on his own accord. The safe was open, and the green shard was sliding through his fingers. His dull eyes closed, and he was transported to that cave. A face - a glorious, terrifying reptilian face - stared into his mind. He shuddered under the power of it, the same power as from the crystals. His hand curled around the crystal, the knuckles blanching the skin as he squeezed it. Fingers clamped shut slipped across his chest. He could feel his nipples scrape against the material of his tunic. The terrifying eyes bore into him as his fingers worked their way through his shirt. His hand opened, the crystal biting into his skin. A thin vein of blood trickled down his chest from the scrape. He barely felt the bite; it seemed a small price, with his body shuddering and the leather of his pants creaking, the cords tying the front together starting to unravel as his slumbering manhood started to stir.

A vibrancy he hadn't felt for many years swirled through Bowen. His legs bowed as he squatted and grunted. With the crystal in his hands, all the gold in his safe - in the world - didn't seem to matter. Neither did the people whose faces he could see sharply for a moment, before they faded back into the fog.

"Come."

The word had sprung into his head. The intention was clear: he was supposed to travel to the mines, to meet his new master there and plunge into the depths. The crystals called to him. His manhood stirred to their cries. As it thickened, he wondered if perhaps it would plunge through the earth itself, a personal pickaxe.

The thought seemed to break some of the spell, and Bowen clutched at the bar. The mysterious faces floated back into recognition: how could he forget his own family? He cursed and admonished himself, then returned to studying the crystal. The light swirled in his eyes.

Out of the corner of his ears, he heard the merchant's party leaving. He paid them no heed: when he moved, he wasn't going out to meet him, but upstairs. There was an energy to his thoughts that he had not felt for some time. The harshness of life had driven it out of him, but he remembered very well when he felt it every day, the struggle to hold it back whenever a pretty face turned his thoughts. Supporting a family seemed to take the sting out, as had age. Now, though, he wondered if it needed to be that way.

When he opened the room, he saw the bed was still unmade. Bowen's nostrils twitched: he could smell the scent of the sweaty guards that had slept in here. The vision of their sleep-sweaty, muscular bodies groaning and writhing nakedly on these very sheets became comforting and oddly seductive. How many of his guests - his male guests, Bowen immediately corrected - had felt the stirrings of passion in their loins, and having no other outlet had turned to themselves for comfort. It was embarrassing, and immoral.

Immoral or not, it didn't stop Bowen from plunging his face into the rough woollen bed coverings. He fell onto the bed, his shirt tearing unnoticed as his arm muscles flexed, the reinvigorated muscles bulging as he imagined pushing his way in, looking down at the sleeping form, feeling the strength writhe and thrash underneath as he seized it to - to what? To fuck? To enslave? Possibly both? Yes; that is what he wanted to do: fuck them and enslave them. "Send them to the mines," he grunted.

The arms of Bowen's shirts were now a scraggly mess as he buried his face into the bed, smelling the male stink. Older scents buried underneath poured up through the fabric as he breathed it in. Drool trickled out of his mouth, flowing over teeth that cracked open, fragments moving to the side and fusing into new jagged shards growing from his jaw. The teeth slipped past his lips; Bowen stretched his mouth wider, tasting the dregs of the scent with his tongue, falling from his mouth, throbbing as it lengthened one moment, then widened the next, then thickened through the next.

"Fuck them and send them to the mines," he repeated. The sound of his unintentionally loud voice muffled a the sharp ripping sound of his shirt splitting down the middle of his back. Bowen stretched out his arms, continuing to thicken: thin, aged cords becoming invigorated, massive ropes of flesh. His body needed them even more: his bones were coming tougher, and his hands and feet beginning to swell; the muscles needed to move such a massive, growing machine needed such strength and power.

The smells and tastes enhanced his imagination. The fabric in front of his pants became tight, a thick outline of his manhood becoming more prominent. His cock quested in a random direction, trying to escape his pants, drawn out by the idea of him forcing himself on one of the men that slept in here, one who needed the changing fluids of his body. Once designed to create new life, they changed to produce an altered form; changing the host to suit the purpose of the voice that had spoken in his head.

Bowen grunted, barely paying attention as his shirt continue to tear. It became nothing but long, sweaty, stinking strips of cheap, sturdy fabric. The skin showing off thickened, slowly showing a hint of green to match the crystal that he had coveted so much. His pants, which needed to be sturdier, had lasted a bit longer. His lower body wasn't immune from the growth: his enlarged torso needed bigger legs to support. The pants tried to disappear up the crack in between his buttocks, now half as large again as they had been.

Raising his face from the bed, Bowen left behind a large puddle of drool. A similar thickly wet, but far more pungent and sticky patch, appeared in front of his tightening pants. Supporting his heavy - and still growing - top made him dig his fingers deeper into the bed, which began to creak from the extra weight. A dark streak ran down the centre of each nail, leading to a jagged point shooting out. Leaning a large, bulky elbow against the bed, he reached down, using his growing fingernails to dig through his pants. A guttural roar bellowed from deep in his gut, and his heavy fingers caught the fabric and tore it open. Sweet relief ran over him as the thick, straining club of his penis swung down to smack into the bed.

Bowen moved his arm back. The bed wobbled beneath him. The front of his pants, stinking with the first drips of sexual fluid, waved about like a crude loin-cloth; ill-suited for his purpose. Two large orbs jostled as, wanting relief, ground against the bed. Adding his own scent and fluids to those already in the bed, Bowen grunted as the heavy, greening foreskin pulled back from the intensely pink flesh of his head, clear fluid drooling out into a puddle.

The face that twisted into a lecherous grin was vastly distorted from the one that had entered the room. To accommodate the huge fangs jutting out of his mouth, his whole head had twisted. His jaw was as large as his hands together had been, sporting teeth that were yellowed and gleaming with thick saliva. A large tongue slobbered over the proportionately thin lips that curled away from the gums. The top of his head, still somewhat resembling the common man that he had been, was beginning to flatten down. That meant losing mass to the brain inside, adding to the changes to his voice caused by his throat thickening and face changing.

"Fuck dem, to da hole!" Bowen bellowed, crashing the hard club between his legs down on the bed. The bed frame could not take any more, and it collapsed around him. Roaring in anger, Bowen pulled himself from the bed's wreckage, clenching the start to thick claws into his well-padded palms.

Bowen squeezed through the door frame, his size causing the wooden supports to creak and groan until he was through. The stairs also complained about his added bulk as he stomped down the stairs. The place suddenly felt very confining, and he wanted to get away. Everything in that building seemed fragile anyway: not that he worried about that, but he instinctively wanted something more steady. The large room downstairs was better, but he pressed through the door, emerging out into the sky.

Points appeared on his ears, which protruded farther out of his head. The top of his skull had shrunk down into something flat that started to align with the top of his shoulders; even his reinforced neck had trouble keeping the weight of his head in its old human position. He blinked, his skin - now very obviously tinted green, but still changing colour - warming under the sun. Jaundiced, feral eyes stared out of his head. He had, somewhere, lost his shoes; his wide, clawed feet were luckily covered in sturdy skin that could ignore all the sharp rocks and prickly weeds that peppered the road.

He didn't know exactly where he was going. There was a very potent masculine scent streaking the grass behind the building in a particular direction. He wanted to follow it, drawn by that scent. His cock oozed in anticipation as he stomped in the same direction. Some sniffing lead him back along the scent, which took him back towards the inn.

Inside the stables - the ogre Bowen had become no longer knew the word, though - he found the sleeping form. It was, his nose told him, very masculine. It was also very authoritative. He grunted, poking the sleeping equitaur with his finger. When the jab was ignored, he repeated it.

The equine eyelids creaked open, venomous hatred pouring out. "Who the fuck disturbs me?" he growled, looking up at the huge, swollen beast of a humanoid standing before him. His eyes widened, and nostrils twitched. "Who are..." He peered for several seconds before asking. "Who are you, and what the fuck do you want?"

"Fuck dem." The ogre tried to explain the words rattling around in his tiny brain. He pointed at himself, then patted something invisible that reached up to the end of his thick, dark green nipples. "To da hole." He pointed towards the mountain.

"The hole?" the equitaur asked, moving his lips well after he finished speaking. "Oh! The mine!" A spark of light appeared in his large horse eyes. "Ah, I think I understand now. Yes, you fuck them and take them to the mines. Make them big and strong!"

"Ya!" the ogre nodded, his face twisted into a grimace of happiness. He had been understood, which made him feel good. With that, the noises in his head became less annoying. He now had more personal wants to attend to. He sniffed the air: the scent was very strong here. He grunted, grabbing onto his huge, green cock. "Fuck?" He pointed at the equitaur, then back at himself.

"You want to fuck?" the equitaur, pulling himself backwards. Lifting his hand, he ran it under his chin as he looked over the horny ogre eagerly standing in front of him. "Do you want this?" he asked, pointing to his mouth. "Or this?" He twitched his tail. "Or maybe this?" He raised his leg awkwardly, sending a twitch through his genitals.

"Dat! Want smell!" the ogre pointed at the equitaur's genitals.

The equitaur snorted, and looked him over, then nodded. "Just don't hurt me!" he warned.

"No hurt! Only fuck!" the ogre nodded. Shaking the ground, he sat down: the scent of the equitaur's genitals was even stronger, and it grabbed his brain hard. He lost some composure and grunted excitedly, jamming his face into the large set of equine genitals as he sprawled on his back. His left hand scratched his chest, teasing the thick nipples capping his large pectorals. His right hand reached further down, past the array of muscles that made up his torso to the huge, drooling cock needfully waiting for the touch.

A glaze came over the ogre's eyes. His right hand roughly tugged down on his cock, the pink flesh flashing, covered in thick clear goo that bubbled up from the green balls distorting the torn tatters of Bowen's pants. He wriggled his toes, trying to get comfortable. Then he pulled his hand up, the ooze collecting on the wrinkled ring of his foreskin, creeping onto his hand.

After the first stroke, the second and third became faster. The urgent needs of his body made him want it to go fast. He grunted and drooled all over himself, his tongue dangling out of his mouth like a content dog as he buried his nostrils in between the huge orbs hanging off of the equitaur. It smelled good, not exactly but enough like the scent his body had been designed to track down. To bring back here. To fuck. To send to the mines.

The ogre's thick muscles jiggled over his body, which shook as the ogre pleasured himself. His head was tilted back as far as it could, so he was as close to the equitaur's musk as he could. He grunted repeatedly, imagining a puny human squirming beneath him, his cock plunging through one of its tiny holes as it stretched and grew as he fed it. The fluid oozing from his cock started to take on a greenish tint as more leaked out.

Happiness was already ringing around the ogre's head when his body reached its limit. The disappointment that he vaguely experienced up in the bedroom had faded away. Panting like a dog, he felt the fluid thicken, a pool gathering in him. It built up, gaining pressure. Then it reached its limit. He grunted loudly, feeling it race up his raw, sensitive cock. Heavy green, glowing fluid sprayed over the ogre's deeper green, broad torso. A thick sheet of fluid formed over his chest as he continued to pump frantically. The voice and his body's wants became silent: the ogre finally felt at peace.