Face Your Enemy

• Chapter 17 in the Chronicles of the DragonRider

The Blasted Lands was a place where few visited voluntarily, and those who did were almost uniformly unpleasant. It was a wasteland that made even the Great Desert seem like a fertile oasis by comparison. The ground was dark and cracked, and in many places magma could be seen seeping up through the cracks. Numerous full-blown volcanoes dotted the area, but while the ashes they scattered would normally create a fertile ground for all kinds of growth once it cooled, this particular area remained barren and lifeless.

From the skies, the Blasted Lands looked like a dark scar on the world itself - a patch of black amidst the green, brown and blue. And that, indeed, was not far from the truth, for it was no natural or geological process that had created this thoroughly inhospitable region. Here was where the Forces of Hell - led by the dread demon-prince and Lord of Terror, Diablo - had entered the world of mortals and been met by the united forces of the civilized world. Hundreds of kingdoms and city-states had put aside their individual grievances and vendettas to join forces against the demons, and they had successfully rebuffed the invasion, forcing the demons back into Hell, before finally destroying the dread artifact that had allowed them to open the portal in the first place.

It had been a great and terrible battle, which was still sung of by bards to this day... and even though the battle had happened some 5000 years ago, the battleground remained as it had become that day: A small patch of Hell, stuck in the world of mortals. No plant would take root there, and no animals would go near it. The only people who were insane enough to visit were demon-worshippers and demon-summoners... for the infernal aura of the Blasted Lands made it much easier to penetrate the barrier between the world of mortals and Hell itself.

The one thing that had kept the place from turning into an outright sanctuary for people like the Bloody Dawn Cult was that... well, even NORMAL demon-summoning was risky to the point of being outright suicidal. Maintaining control of a summoned demon was enormously difficult, and in the Blasted Lands, it would come across with much greater power and fury, making it near impossible to keep on a leash. Virtually all who tried it, died. Even those who deliberately sought to simply unleash demons on the world - like the aforementioned Cult - could make little use of the area, for the blood of the thousands upon thousands of demons who had been slain during the invasion had seeped into the blasted ground, creating a prevailing aura that drove any demon who crossed over in that area insane. Which tended to make them shred their summoners regardless of the strategic implications, preventing further summoning from THAT particular batch of 'True Believers'.

Thus, only the craziest of the crazy ventured into the Blasted Lands, and unsurprisingly few of those came back out. It was a depressing sort of place to fly over. Blake and Anitra hung silently above this unpleasant sight, Blake's black wings easily floating on the updrafts of the many magma-leaks. They could have easily conversed directly, for there was little in the way of wind - and even if that had not been the case, their telepathic bond remained an option. But despite their confidence that they could handle any 'Trial' sent their way, seeing the Blasted Land beneath them had made their confidence sag somewhat. Thus, neither of them trusted themselves to speak, lest their voices - physical or mental - betray their worries to the other.

"We're almost at the marked point." Anitra finally spoke, glancing between the clay tablet in her hand and the lifeless ground beneath them. The only landmarks around here were volcanoes, ranging in size from molehills to mountains, but that was plenty - the magically-created map had a pretty good level of detail, and it was guiding them towards a specific point between them. It didn't look like much from up here. There was no sign of movement, and no active volcanoes close to it. Just another nondescript patch of coal-black dirt with an occasional sliver of reddish light penetrating up through it to speak of the volcanic flow beneath.

A couple of minutes later, Blake's claws dug into the thick layer of volcanic ash as he landed. A human would have found it painfully hot without specially-made insulating shoes, but to a dragon, the surface was merely pleasantly warm to the touch. Anitra made no move to get down from his back as both of them swiveled their heads, searching the featureless landscape for any sign of an 'enemy' to 'face'. There was no signs of life, of any kind, anywhere in sight - and even Blake's ability to distinguish magical effects as a visible aura was useless here, since the entire area was covered in a sooty-red aura of infernal residue.

Blake was just turning his head back towards Anitra to ask if she was REALLY sure they were in the right place, when a harsh, guttural laughter rang out through the ash-choked air. "I cannot believe my luck... you just walk right in here - right into my grasp? This is almost too good to be true..." Two heads - one draconic, one human - zipped around to center on the voice. Almost dead ahead, a small pool of lava had appeared in the middle of the ash-plains, and from it rose a humanoid figure... which was definitely not human. Its hide resembled the land around them - fire-blackened, but shot through with veins of liquid fire. Clouds of thick, oily smoke emerged from its mouth as it spoke.

Anitra briefly recoiled in shock as she recognized the figure before her. Then, a cruel smile played across her lips as she leaned forwards, eyes fixed on the monster she had created months earlier. "Sharanaman! Old buddy, old pal - I hardly recognized you with your new tan..." Blake blinked, then narrowed his eyes as he recognized him too. During their visit to the temple of the Bloody Dawn Cult, he'd been too busy wrestling with a particularly large and violent demon to pay attention to the mostly-dead cultist writhing on the floor. But he did know of him, from Anitra. The corrupt 'power behind the throne' of the Cult, his blood had been lit on fire by Anitra's sword, BlackFire, and it was only due to the intervention of the Demon-Prince Legion that he had survived.

Anitra, still grinning, jumped to her feet on Blake's back and then ran up his neck to leap from his head, landing nimbly on the ash-covered ground with sword in hand. "You look kind of... lonely, though." She continued, even as she approached the ex-cultist. "Where's your friend, Legion? Y'know, the guy who kept me from killing you last time - just barely? Oh, right! I almost forgot - if he showed up here, he'd be driven mad and probably eat you whole. Same thing goes for any other hellbeast you might care to call up." The charred remnant of Sharanaman bared his blackened teeth at her. "You underestimate me, wench. You think me helpless without my demonic allies. But my Master is wise... and he knows how to turn a weakness into an advantage. So now, I get to have my revenge - and my Master, in turn, will have this world..."

Sharanaman held out his right hand, palm up, and above it a shadow formed - swiftly materializing into a heavy tome, which proceeded to hover above his hand, open. The pages were yellowed with age and covered in thin, spider-like scribbling in an unknown language. Blake hissed, jumping back on instinct, and Anitra felt herself recoil as well. The book was surrounded by a dark aura unlike anything she had ever seen before - it seemed almost alive, composed of crawling, writhing shadows and indistinguishable, screaming faces. Just looking at it she could feel some part of herself, deep inside her mind, scream in immediate and unreasoning panic. Sharanaman, seeing their reaction, began to gloat.

"Afraid, wench? You should be. This is the Necronomicon, the most fearsome tome on demonology and the beings of the Beyond in the world. No mere human could hope to wield it without being driven irrevocably insane... but with the blessing of my Master, I can! The power it channels can draw on the corruption of this land - without calling up any demons. Neither you nor your dragon can resist its dark grip!" Anitra gritted her teeth and forced her body to move forwards again. Okay, so this guy wouldn't be a pushover like she'd hoped... but really, she should've known better. This was supposed to be a Trial, after all.

In spite of all the... 'complications', however, the situation seemed fairly straightforward. Sharanaman's dark powers no doubt had great range and greater impact, but that was still no different from fighting a sorcerer - and she knew from her mother's tales and hard-earned experience what the rule of thumb was for those: Close the distance as fast as humanly possible. Magic-users, in general, tended to be less than formidable in close combat, especially when facing someone with a magic-nullifying sword. Anitra's sandals dug deep into the loose ash as she jumped into a sprinting charge, sword by her side as she rushed towards Sharanaman, hoping to catch him unaware while he was busy gloating.

But apparently, he was ready for that. As soon as she began to move, he made a contemptuous gesture with his free hand, and a roaring wall of hellfire rose up before her, too high for even her to jump. Closing her eyes, she continued through it without slowing, and felt a sting of satisfaction at Sharanaman's surprised gasp. The heat closed in around her, seeking to suffocate her - empowered by the dark book and the infernal taint of the Blasted Land, this wall of fire could have chewed through both her armor and her inherent resistance to magic and fire... if it hadn't been for the fire-crystal set into her breastplate. She felt it burn hot as its protective field extended across her entire body, and a moment later, she was through the wall. Judging from the smell, a few stray hairs from her head had escaped the field and gotten burned, but otherwise, she was unscathed - and still sprinting towards the surprised demon-worshipper and his book.

BlackFire arched out, aimed more at the thick, leathery cover of the Necronomicon than the crippled sorcerer wielding it - it was already clear to Anitra where the real threat laid. Unfortunately, she was just a tiny bit too slow. The badly-burned demon-worshipper suddenly disintegrated into a thick, dark smoke - along with his book - and her sword parted it without resistance. A heartbeat later, the cloud reformed on top of a basalt boulder several yards away, and Sharanaman bared his blackened teeth at her. "You thought it would be that easy? The Necronomicon looks after itself! No matter how fast or powerful you are, you cannot be faster or stronger than the ancient, unearthly spirit that inhabits this tome..."

It was unclear whether he had intended to continue ranting after that point, seeing as he got interrupted by the sudden impact of an incandescent thunderbolt hitting the boulder underneath his feet. The explosion sent him flying - screaming all the way - along with several hundred small, sharp fragments of basalt, and she heard Blake laughing in her mind. _Seems like his book forgot to look down._She glanced over to where he was standing, his claws raised as smoke drifted from the tip of those razor-sharp talons, and flashed him a grin. Then she leaped into the air, her sword carving a black arc through the air once more as it sought her target.

But once again, a cloud of dark smoke parted neatly before her fury, only to reform on the ground further away, and she cursed under her breath. That smoke-teleport-thing really DID seem to respond impossibly fast - there was no way Sharanaman would have had the presence of mind to activate it after getting the ground blown out from under him, so it was apparently an automatic reaction by the cursed tome. How the hell was she supposed to get through that minor issue? Well, there was a silver lining, at least - Sharanaman was sufficiently shook up from his ballistic flight and close brush with death that he didn't manage to pull himself together and throw another attack at her while she was still airborne.

It was less than a second from the point where her sandals hit the volcanic ground to her hearing Sharanaman's shouted curse as he hurled a handful of burning projectiles at her. They spread out in a fan, each with a sullen, black spark in its center, and something told her that she shouldn't count on her inherent resistance to magic and fire to stop these. Jumping over them seemed tempting, but she couldn't dodge in midair - so getting her into the air where she'd be an easier target could very well be the whole point of the attack. So instead, she simply stood her ground and concentrated on the timing. As the arc of fire swept over her, her blade flashed out, cutting neatly through the three fireballs most likely to hit her. The spell that held them together flickered and died at the touch of the anti-magical blade, and they vanished in a puff of brimstone-scented smoke.

Blake, on the other hand, had no compunctions about taking to the air - after all, that's where he was strongest. His shadow passed over her as he swiftly closed the distance with Sharanaman, letting a roar of his own dragonfire sweep out across the landscape. Normally, he would have focused his flame into a coherent beam in order to burn through any defenses the sorcerer might put up, but that smoke-trick the guy had used to evade Anitra's attacks worried him. By coating the entire area in roaring flames, he hoped to catch the smoke-cloud itself - parting around a sword was one thing. Ignoring the unnaturally intense fire of a black dragon's breath was something else.

And yet, Sharanaman neither turned into a cloud of smoke, nor put up any defenses, nor even flinched. He stared into the approaching inferno and grinned broadly as it swept over him... with absolutely no effect. He laughed up at the dark-scaled dragon hanging in the air above him. "Hah! You think your fire would touch me? That same flame already flows in my veins, thanks to your rider... I have absorbed its heat, and it no longer has any hold on me!" He leered up at Blake, and with a gesture, sent several flashes of zig-zagging lightning up after him. Blake cursed and twisted his wings to dodge - he could see that the bolts were infused with both infernal power and something else, something worse that clearly stemmed from that accursed tome in the sorcerer's hand. He did not feel confident that his scales would be able to blunt this attack.

He was right to worry. Several bolts flashed past him as he whirled in a breathtaking display of aerial acrobatics, and out the corner of his eye, he could see Anitra dashing towards Sharanaman again - perhaps hoping to catch him unaware while his attention was focused on her lover. But the bolts kept coming, and finally - just as Anitra's approaching sword once again forced the dark tome to rescue its wielder with yet another smoke-jump - one of the bolts slammed into his flanks. The electric charge flashed through him, making his muscles spasm. The bolt hadn't quite penetrated his scales, but it had been a near thing, and the impact knocked the air out of his lungs. Gasping for breath, his wings not responding properly to the desperate pleas of his brain, he fell from the sky. He could hear Anitra's wordless outcry of denial both vocally and mentally as she saw him fall. Then the ground came up to meet him.

Fortunately he hadn't been very high when he took the hit, and though the inertia inherent in his sheer mass ensured a crushing impact nonetheless, dragons are built to last. He blacked out only for a second as his head bounced off the ground, a cloud of volcanic ash whirling around him as it was kicked up by the impact, but he felt fairly confident that he hadn't broken anything... he had, however, fallen awkwardly. One of his wings was trapped underneath his body, and his limbs still weren't responding properly to his brain. Given another five seconds, he could have shaken off the last aftereffects of the thunderbolt's paralytic effect and pulled himself upright to join the battle once more. But he didn't have that long.

Cackling in triumph, Sharanaman held the dark tome above his head, chanting several words in a long-forgotten tongue. The cover of the book flashed, and for a moment, the leather seemed to pull together into something resembling an utterly inhuman face. The response was immediate. Chains of dark, pulsating energy shot out of the ground around Blake, encircling his body and pulling him into the ash-covered ground hard enough to make breathing difficult. He could feel his wingbone creak at the pull of the chains was added to the weight of his entire body and grimaced at the pain even as his other wing was lashed tightly to his body. Separate chains rose to catch his forelegs and hindlegs, just a second before he could finish figuring out what kind of spell he could cast to get himself out of this pinch.

He struggled mightily against the chains, but he wasn't surprised when they held. The energy pulsing through them was the same dark power that seemed to surround the dark tome itself. In a desperate effort, he breathed a gout of fire down at the chains holding his front claws, hoping to thus dissolve them - but even as he winced at the heat washing over his claw-hands, the chains held - and he didn't get a second chance, as yet another chain rose to encircle his jaws, pulling them tightly together and effectively muzzling him. Then it pulled taut, and his head smashed into the ground again, kicking up another cloud of fine ash. He sneezed as it drifted into his flared nostrils, and directed a glare of sheer hatred towards Sharanaman. It was the only weapon he had left, after all.

Anitra was already dashing towards Blake, turning her back to the sorcerer. BlackFire could cut those chains, she was sure of it. Whether her confidence was misplaced or not, however, she never got a chance to find out. She was still well short of her goal when a gargantuan sword materialized in the air above Blake - the blade easily as tall and broad as two men. The whole thing glowed with dark, unearthly energy, and the blade was covered in runes that seemed to twist and writhe before her eyes, as if they were only too eager to get down to the killing. The tip of the sword was hovering directly above Blake's head, and there was no way she could reach him before the sword fell.

"NO!" she cried, and turned on the spot as she came to a stumbling halt. One last, desperate ploy flashed into her mind, and she raised the blade in her hand to point it at her own throat. "Stop, Sharanaman! You said your 'master' needed me - if you kill Blake I'll follow him within a heartbeat, and your plans will be crushed!" She glared up at the sorcerer, whose last smoke-jump had landed him on top of a small cliff where the volcanic underground had forced a piece of the broken land a few yards upwards. Her eyes burned with hatred no less virulent than Blake's, but her hand was steady.

Sharanaman leered down at her. "Now, now... no need to be so dramatic, my dear. Your lover will remain alive... so long as you do exactly what I tell you to. Should you defy or attack me, however, the Sword of Damocles will drop in an instant. Now... throw away your sword!" She gritted her teeth. She wasn't sure what Sharanaman - or his master, Legion - wanted with her, but it wasn't likely to be pleasant. She also had no idea how she'd get Blake out of his present predicament. She needed to buy some time. Maybe she'd come up with something, maybe Blake would come up with something... heck, maybe Sharanaman would screw up and give them an opening.

She glowered up at him, and with a flick of her wrist, sent her blade flying in an arc across the Blasted Land. It landed at an angle, tip-first, and buried itself deep enough in the ash to remain standing. "Fine, Sharanaman... but make no mistake. I'm both willing and able to bite off my own tongue and bleed to death if you kill him." Based on his tone, she suspected that Sharanaman would have been rolling his eyes if he had any - instead of a pair of scorched hollows lit only by sparks of hellfire. "Very admirable, my dear... but why should I care enough about whether he lives or dies to take such a risk? As long as you go along with the plan, I'll have everything I - and my Master - needs." Then he leered again, and continued. "Now... take off your armor. All of it. Throw it away."

She complied, throwing her dragonscale armor together in a pile - including her sandals - leaving her naked as the heat of the volcanic ash slowly penetrated the soles of her bare feet. She could feel Sharanaman's eyes sweeping across her luscious curves, but simply returned the favor by glancing at the spot between his legs. He could look all he liked, she reflected, but he wasn't exactly equipped to rape her. There was barely any trace of the tool that had once dangled there - only a small knot of carbonized flesh.

Following his instructions, she walked away from the piled-up armor, to the tune of several yards. Then he told her to stop, and began to chant something in a guttural, inhuman-sounding tongue. Anitra glanced up at him, wondering what it was he was after. Revenge, she could understand, but how was she supposed to play a key role in some 'master plan' by one of the Lords of Hell? Then, suddenly, a yawning chasm appeared underneath her feet, the ash-blackened ground opening to give way to a much darker rift. Before she could fall more than an inch into the gap, however, several tentacles shot out of it, encircling her arms and legs, holding her suspended and indeed lifting her further into the air.

The tentacles were grayish-green and slimy, and smelled like something that had spent a long time lying on the bottom of a particularly deep ocean. They undulated slowly in the air as more and more of them rose out of the darkness beneath her feet, surrounding her body in writhing flesh and the smell of rot. As they encircled her waist and chest, and wound further around her limbs, she was soon unable to move much more than a finger - locked in an embrace that even her inhuman muscles had no hope of breaking. Sharanaman grinned down at her as he descended from the cliff he'd been standing on, floating on a dark cloud, and it was most definitely not a PLEASANT grin.

"An experienced adventurer like yourself is no doubt familiar with Demonspawn, yes?" he said conversationally as he floated in the air in front of her. "Children of women who have been graced by the attention of a demon... as powerful as their demonic father, yet at home in our world, and not easily banished. Unfortunately, the women almost never survive the experience... and with more powerful demons, the odds of her even surviving long enough to carry the child to terms becomes increasingly minute. Most are stillborn." He shook his head in mock sadness. "A most deplorable situation. However... the flexibility, stamina and accelerated healing of a DragonRider changes the equation somewhat, doesn't it? You could no doubt survive bearing the child of even a very powerful demon, hmm?" He leered at her, but she returned the favor with a smirk and a raised eyebrow. She knew better. As the Drow Elves had found out to their annoyance, DragonRiders are a lot harder to 'crossbreed' with than ordinary humans. Her body would reject even a demon's seed, and accept only that of a black dragon. If Sharanaman was planning to use her to raise an army of Demonspawn, he would be sorely disappointed...

But his grin just widened. "...alas, my Master's research into the nature of your kind suggested that a demon simply wouldn't be able to impregnate you in the first place. So he sought out... other options." The sorcerer caressed the pages of the darkly glowing book in his hand, and smiled fondly down at it. "Few mortals even realize that the Outer Planes exist... a realm far more alien and inhospitable than even Hell, where dwells the Great Old Ones, Empty Lords of the Starless Void. But they exist, oh yes... and with the right rituals, they can be invited into our world - at least partially. And they do not follow... quite the same rules as the rest of us."

His grin turned - if possible - even more vicious. "My Master has assured me that the Old One whose embrace you're currently feeling WILL be able to fill your belly. And while no ordinary mortal would be able to survive the process - let along succeed at carrying the resulting Star-Spawn to term - you almost certainly can. Not that it will be... particularly PLEASANT, I'm sure." His expression was increasingly elated, and the spark of hellfire burning within his empty eye-hollows flared with fanaticism. "No-one in this realm has seen the likes of a Star-Spawn... not for thousands of years. But with you as the incubator, we will raise an ARMY of them, and sweep all resistance aside - and then, this world will belong to LEGION!"

He thrust his fist towards the sky with that last word, an exulting expression on his face - then he lowered his hand with a sickening smirk. "You'd best get used to your present... plight. It won't change for a while. In fact, you can look forwards to spending the next few decades being raped, being painfully and enormously pregnant, or giving birth to terrifying monsters. My master still isn't certain exactly how long your body will be able to handle that sort of punishment, but we fully intend to find out." He gestured towards Blake, still chained to the ground with the immense sword dangling above his head. "Oh, and don't worry about your... friend, there. We'll keep him alive, too, and probably assign a couple of succubi to 'milk' him now and then... an occasional dose of dragon-sperm should strengthen you, so you can keep surviving and birthing more soldiers for us."

With a final grin, he drifted down to the ground and sat down on a basalt boulder, glancing up at her. "For now, though... I think I'll just sit here and enjoy the show. It may not have any particular bearing on my Master's plan, but on a purely personal level, I will enjoy watching your torment IMMENSELY." Anitra gritted her teeth and glared down at him. There wasn't much point in trying to exchange cutting jibes with him, considering her current, unenviable position - and besides, she had better things to do, such as trying to come up with SOME way out of this mess.

While glaring, however, she caught sight of something else below - a new cluster of tentacles rising from the pitch-black rift beneath her dangling feet. These looked different from the ones currently holding her immobile... they each had a bulbous head, and were decidedly phallic, though their size varied widely. The biggest were further around than her wrist, with a head easily the size of her fist, while the smallest were barely larger than one of her fingers. They all rose together, however, swaying back and forth as if they were searching for something... which, she knew, they were. And she had a pretty good idea as to what.

Sure enough, guided by whatever otherworldly intelligence lurked beneath the impenetrable blackness of the rift, the cluster of tentacles rose to her groin, where her thighs were pulled widely apart by the tentacles' larger, stronger cousins. The moment the bulbous heads caught the scent of her pussy - which was getting wetter by the minute, as her body betrayed her in spite of the desperate situation - they began to thrash around like a nest of angry serpents. Then they rushed up towards their target.

She gasped in shock as three of the largest tentacles buried themselves simultaneously in her pussy, instantly stretching her out far enough to sting. They, like the ones enfolding her limbs, were too cold and clammy to be part of anything that could be reasonably considered 'alive'. Even the cold-blooded serpent she had so passionately mated with in the bedroom of the Sultan of Mirage City had been undeniably alive, pulsing with life and vigor inside of her. These tentacles, however, were only pulsing with dark energy - they felt not merely dead, but something beyond that. Like they were channeling the very antithesis of the life-creating, life-affirming act that Sex is.

The sensitive flesh of her labia seemed to shrink away from the tentacle's clammy touch, even as several more, smaller tentacles drilled their way into the gaps between the three large ones. They were very effective at filling her out completely, more so than any single dick every could... and while the three big ones were too much in each other's way for any of them to get a straight shot at her cervix, the smaller ones were not so impeded. Several pushed past the twitching heads of their larger fellows, and forced their way into her womb. As if lured by the promise of the unoccupied space inside her, more of the smaller tentacles - ranging in size from an inch and a half across, to little-finger-sized - pushed forwards to exploit it.

Wincing, she felt her cervix stretch further and further open as more of the small tentacles pushed the entrance further and further apart. Soon, it would be completely opened, and she entertained no illusions that the three fist-sized tentacles would fail to take advantage of this to advance fully inside of her. Already, they were writhing inside of her, trying to push up inside a gap that was still too small for them. More of the smaller tentacles danced around the tautly-stretched edges of her outer labia, seeking to gain entrance and reinforce their fellows - but she was already well filled, and somehow she didn't feel particularly inclined to relax her muscles and invite more inside.

The tentacles, however, were determined - and suddenly, one of them found a gap. Eagerly, it pushed its way inside, driven by otherworldly strength and lubricated by an unidentifiable slime. Anitra gasped as an unfamiliar sensation washed up from her groin, and glanced down to see one of the finger-thick tentacles writhing alone in the tiny, tiny hole right above her tautly-stretched pussy. A urethral penetration. Had it occurred under any other circumstance, she would have welcomed this new source of pleasure - for the sensations now radiating from her urethra and bladder as the tentacle vibrated its way inside were anything but unpleasant - but as it was, she could only curse at the fact that this... THING had stolen the last sort of virginity she'd had left. Not, she granted, that there was any way her beloved BLAKE could have ever done it...

The tiny tentacle soon found its way into her half-full bladder, pushing past the untrained urethral sphincter with ease. Its head - smaller than the tip of her thumb - danced around the cavity, caressing the insides of her bladder and making her moan in spite of herself even as slow drips of urine began to run down the tentacle towards the dark rift beneath. As before, the tentacle seemed to telegraph the discovery of an as-yet unoccupied cavity to its fellows, and several more similarly-sized tentacles rose to answer the call. With monstrous determination, they pushed against the edges of her newly-deflowered urethra, forcing their way up along the shaft of the first scout. With the addition of three more finger-sized tentacles, her urethra was stretched as wide as an inch and a half, and if it hadn't been for her inhuman elasticity, that would have been more than enough to rupture it outright. As it was, it merely erased the unfamiliar pleasure she had felt, in favor of an equally unfamiliar pain as the nerves in her urethra and bladder screamed out against the attack. The remaining contents of her bladder quickly emptied out the gaps between the tentacles, and in its stead, she found herself filled by a writhing ball of alien tentacle.

Meanwhile, the tentacles assailing her womb had achieved their main objective - her cervix was stretched as widely as it had ever been, and two of the three fist-sized tentacles bulldozed their way into her already-full womb. The third, however, found its way barred - the dozens of smaller tentacles, along with the two arm-sized ones, simply took up every bit of space her inhuman cervix was capable of giving, and number three's insistent attacks on it only succeeded in sending shocks of agony tearing through her, bringing tears to her eyes.

Two, however, were more than enough. They were, after all, not content with simply penetrating. Instead, they continued to pull themselves inside, curling around each other into an ever-growing Gordian knot of writhing, inhuman flesh. The gripping tentacles encircling her stomach and chest, sensing the pressure from within, released their grip and disappeared back into the gap - with the monstrous thing now being solidly anchored in her insides, it didn't really need more of a hold on her than it could get from her four limbs, anyway. Their removal made it apparent that her stomach was already visibly distended, with a smaller bulge beneath it showing the location of her bladder - and in both cases, the unceasing motion of the tentacles were visible through the tautly-stretched skin.

The third of the large-scale tentacles, however, was seemingly discontent with being shut out of the party, and pulled out of her pussy - giving way for several one-to-two inch shafts to take its place, some of which actually managed to push their way past her cervix by squeezing into the gaps between the rest. Dancing like an angry snake, the fist-headed tentacle danced around her groin, pausing briefly to attempt to force its way in between the four finger-sized tentacles in her urethra - unsuccessfully, of course, but painfully so. Then, at last, it searched further back - and hit paydirt.

Her asshole was a tiny, puckered thing - pushed aside and compressed by the wide spreading of her pussy - but it was an orifice, and so-far unoccupied. The large tentacle wasted no time in taking advantage of this fact, and layered as it was by both its own slime and her pussy-juice, it had little trouble penetrating her sphincter. As expected, this discovery prompted the last remaining dozen or so of mid-to-small sized tentacles to follow suit, drilling in along the edges of the large intruder. (Except one tiny, enterprising fellow who had just managed to force his way into the gap between the four small tentacles in her urethra - stretching that tiny orifice by another couple of millimeters.)

The smaller tentacles were soon curling together inside her ass, filling and stretching it out, but the first and largest seemed disinclined to stop there. It had continued the momentum of its initial penetration, and soon hit the 'top' of her ass - a rather rough patch of internal tissue, beaten into an unbreakable shield by the many rounds of rough, bone-deep anal sex she'd enjoyed since her awakening. The tentacle, however, sensed a cavity on its right... and without hesitation, it turned around the bend and penetrated deep into an until-then unexplored part of her internal anatomy.

Anitra had previously contemplated the possibility of someone going 'around the bend' - but doing so would take an extraordinarily long AND thin, flexible instrument. The only time that one of her lovers had shown such potential, there had been... other, compelling reasons NOT to try it. For a dexterous tentacle, however, that so-far unattainable feat was extremely easy, and thus she now had a fist-sized tentacle-head drilling into the deepest reaches of her ass.

Over the next several minutes, the tentacle continued to bore deeper and deeper. It traced the sharp angles of her large intestine, then found its way into the small intestine, which stretched to accommodate it only thanks to the inherent elasticity that was part of the DragonRider's gift. Whatever remnants of her last few meals lurked in those passages, they were easily squeezed aside by the tentacle's muscular girth. Fortunately those deep parts had few, if any, nerve-endings, and so she was spared the full weight of the pain this should have inflicted. All she felt was a peculiar sensation of uncomfortable fullness and nauseating movement as the tentacle's path continued further up through her digestive system...

The tentacle's path left in its wake a thickly distended, multi-layered slate of intestine, pushing outwards against the still-growing knot of tentacles inhabiting her uterus, forcing it to push even harder outwards against the subtle skin of her belly. By now, she looked something like 6-7 months pregnant - with a clutch of particularly energetic serpents. This, at least, was something she could enjoy - the sensation of having her womb stretched out was something she'd learned early on to appreciate, since a couple of cumloads from her lover would cause the same effect.

But in the meantime, the adventurous tentacle continued its exploration of her digestive system. Having finally found its way through the long, intricate maze of her small intestine, it emerged amidst the sizzling acid-pool of her stomach - an even more hostile environment than it would have been on a vanilla mortal. Yet, the acid could not penetrate the layer of slime that coated the tentacle, and after dancing around the periphery for a while - generating some very odd, ticklish sensations - it found the upper entrance and continued into her esophagus.

The sensation was not entirely unlike throwing up, in much the same way that a cat isn't entirely unlike a 10-foot-long Dire Tiger. The solid form of the tentacle's fist-sized head muscled its way past the various muscular seals that were designed specifically to prevent anything from heading in that direction except in an emergency, and pushed up towards the light. The esophagus, unfortunately, had plenty of nerve-endings, and she could feel it all the way. Fortunately, this part of her internal anatomy was NOT unexplored - on several occasions, she'd deep-throated dicks large enough to nearly reach her stomach, and while having something come up from the other direction was a wholly alien sensation, the tissue itself was at least accustomed to being stretched.

It tickled her tonsils as it passed across her palate, and finally the large, bulbous head emerged in her mouth. The taste as it danced across her tongue was... impossible to describe. As bad as anything she'd experienced during that disgusting session with the camel back in Mirage City, made somehow worse by the knowledge that whatever she was tasting had already passed across her tongue once, heading in the opposite direction.

As the tentacle swept across her tightly-clasped teeth from the inside, she winced momentarily - then opened her mouth wide. She could have kept her jaw tightly shut, denying the creature the satisfaction of a 'complete penetration' - strong though the tentacle was, it wouldn't be strong enough to force open her jaw from that angle. But she needed to get the damnable thing out of her mouth - away from her tongue. She had no idea what would happen if the nausea got the better of her and she tried to throw up - with her gastrointestinal system in its current state - but she suspected it wouldn't be pleasant.

The tentacle thus emerged triumphantly from her mouth, like a particularly disgusting flower breaking up through the fertile earth. The head flexed hypnotically in front of her eyes as it danced around in the air, and from below, she could hear Sharanaman cackling. Clearly, he was enjoying the show. The owner of the tentacles, meanwhile, was apparently satisfied that he had, by now, penetrated everything penetrable about her. Suddenly, the bunched-together knots of tentacles inside of her began to unravel and straighten, only to weave together in a more orderly fashion. The tentacles shifted, still mostly buried inside of her, turning into something resembling a meaty braid... a sort of super-tentacle pulled together from all the smaller tentacles of each individual orifice, each sized precisely to the maximum stretch-limit of the hole.

The biggest braid was, of course, in her pussy - with two of the arm-sized tentacles at its core, it extended all the way into her womb, and was every bit as huge as Blake's prodigious shaft, if not an inch or so larger - with her lover within close range, her stretchiness was fully boosted, and they had taken advantage of this fact. Above it, meanwhile, the 5 tiny tentacles that had explored her bladder and urethra had now combined into something roughly resembling the girth of an ordinary, averagely-hung human cock. The ones in her ass were only braided as high as the 'bend' - none of the smaller tentacles had followed the long-range exploration of their larger brother, having been too busy testing the stretchiness of her lower intestine. (Test results: Pretty damn good.) Thus, the last foot or so of the tentacle now threaded all the way through her digestive system was effectively thickened to twice its normal girth. It was nowhere near the biggest thing she'd taken up her ass, but with her pussy stretched to the absolute limit, the limitations of her hip-bone were coming into play - and under those circumstances, it was quite a stretch.

And, of course, the 'braid' ensured that each of these combi-cocks was a mass of bumps - a texture that effectively ensured that she'd be able to accurately feel every inch that passed into or out of her. A fact that became abundantly clear when they started moving, all at the same time. Unconstrained by such petty obstacles as a skeletal system or, indeed, a BODY, the tentacles were able to adapt their strokes perfectly to the limits of each orifice - pulling out far enough to touch air with the large cluster of heads that formed the tip of each, and then thrusting all the way to the depth in one smooth movement. The fact that this required each tentacle-braid to thrust with a different rhythm seemed to cause little trouble for whatever unearthly sentience rested at the other end of the tentacles.

The tiny braid in her urethra had the shortest stroke by far, with no more than four or five inches going from her by-now well-stretched peehole, to the back of her battered, overstretched bladder. But it took advantage of this short trip to build up speed faster than the rest, creating a high-speed grind of bumpy tentacle against mostly-virgin internal tissue that rapidly stirred unfamiliar - but not unpleasant - feelings in her... even as the composite cockhead repeatedly rammed the top of her bladder, sending painful shocks up through her abdomen.

The massive braid in her pussy, meanwhile, was going at it slowly - its own mass and inertia made it hard for the thing to build up any real speed, but it made up for it with the length of its strokes. From her outer labia, the huge cluster of tentacle-heads at the top of the braid - easily the size of a melon - would rampage all the way up her birth-canal, pushing past a cervix that had only barely begun to pull itself together from when last it was vacated, all the way to the point where it was pushing her stretched-out womb halfway up into her chest. Each thrust was easily visible from the outside as a large bulge on her stomach, traveling from just above her venus-mound to a point just below her bouncing breasts with every thrust.

Both of them, however, failed to have the sort of impact that the braid in her ass had. The braided part of that one wasn't very long, but it was clearly determined to make full use of what there was, pushing the cluster of smaller tentacle-heads from her sphincter to the top of her lower intestine in long, slow thrusts... and forcing the several yards of tentacle threaded through her digestive system to do the same in order to keep up. Every time it pulled back, the fist-sized head of the larger tentacle would be pulled back inside her mouth, all the way to the back of her throat. Its size and location effectively forced it into contact with her tongue on every pass, rubbing it in the layer of gunk the thing had picked up when passing through her intestines.

Fortunately, she was too busy orgasming repeatedly to fully appreciate this nauseating impact. Despite the disastrous situation, the fact remained that the hundred-odd tentacles were working together to stimulate every erogenous zone in her groin - including one that she hadn't even realized she had - with maximum efficiency. No mortal lover - not even a dragon - could have hoped to equal this feat, and despite her determination to think of a way out of her present plight, she found her mind swiftly flooded with pleasure. Under those circumstances, even the feeling of a living tentacle snaking all the way through her intestines and moving back and forth by over a foot, seemed intensely arousing...

Her body began to react, as it tended to, without checking in with her brain. Her pussy and ass clamped down on the invaders, enfolding them in the tight, muscular fists of her well-trained pussy and ass... which, of course, did nothing to slow the slippery tentacle-braids, but merely ensured that she could feel their passage even more keenly. Her soft lips, meanwhile, covered her pearly-white teeth, and she started sucking on the tentacle in her mouth as it passed in and out, her tongue dancing around shaft and head alike, whichever was in range. The taste neither registered nor mattered - she was caught in the throes of pleasure, and there was something meaty moving in her mouth and throat. Sucking and licking on it was a purely pavlovian response.

She lost track of time almost immediately, but Blake could later tell her that this particular stage of her protracted tentacle-rape lasted somewhere close to an hour. Either the otherworldly nasty-thingie was having a hard time getting his equally otherworldly (and probably nasty) rocks off, or it just wanted to make sure that she was thoroughly warmed up for what came next. Either way, it made no difference to her - time flows swiftly when you're utterly submerged in bodily pleasure. At long last, however, the tentacled thing beneath her reached its climax... and what a climax it was!

Nearly a hundred bulbous tentacle-tips - of various sized - started spraying a grayish-white goo at high pressure, all at the same time. This coincided with all of the 'braids' pulling nearly all the way out, so that their composite heads formed a tight seal with their respective orifices - effectively acting as 'knots' while her insides rapidly filled with the alien sperm. The quantity was dizzying. It now became clear why the tentacles had been so busy curling themselves into her various cavities at the start of the whole thing. They'd been stretching her out like a balloon, priming her for this... if they hadn't she'd likely have burst when the main cum-jet in her pussy inflated her womb to capacity in a handful of seconds.

Her stomach had barely started tightening back up after the earlier tentacle-knot assaults, and now it was rapidly pushed back out - ballooning into extreme size as her pussy, ass and even bladder all strained outwards for space. The pressure on her bladder, in particular, was painful - it was entirely unaccustomed to such an assault, and even with a mere 5 tentacle-heads spewing their cum in there, the tiny thing quickly filled to the point where it stood out from her abdomen as a rock-hard bulge. Her womb, at least, was somewhat prepared, having received this sort of treatment several times before... if not in quite this quantity. If past dalliances had made her look like she was about to give birth to twins, this one pushed her past that stage. Her entire stomach stood out in a large arc, the churning mass of cum practically visible through the skin there. It was becoming increasingly understandable why ordinary mortals stood no chance of surviving a mating with a creature like this. Anitra's enhanced physique, fully boosted by the close proximity of her lover, barely held up, though not without severe, agonizing pain.

Of course, at the same time as all the rest, the fist-sized tentacle-head that had been dancing in and out of her mouth for the past hour also erupted with a potent stream of cum. Like the rest, it had also pulled back in preparation, and was lodged just at the entrance to her throat - her mouth closed over it as her lips prepared to caress its surface on the way out like it had done so far. The first jets of cum hitting her womb and bladder caused her teeth to snap shut in shock and pain, several seconds before the same stream made its way through the several yards of curled-up tentacle lodged in her intestines. When it finally made it to the end-goal it filled her mouth explosively, forcing her cheeks to balloon out like a chipmunk's.

She noticed the taste for an endless second as the goo utterly drowned her tongue, even as her jaw-muscles desperately wrenched her teeth and lips back apart before the pressure could cause severe damage. It was... nothing like what she had imagined. She'd expected it to be foul, perhaps tasting like rotten fish and waterlogged corpses, to go with the looks and smell of the thing. Instead, what she tasted was literally indescribable. It could not be called good or bad, because it didn't exist on that spectrum. It was a taste out of this world, of something that human tastebuds had never been designed to analyze. She could feel it tingling on her tongue, but no more describe it than a blind man could describe colors. The only thing she COULD say was that it felt... alive. Not in a biological sense, but a magical one - shifting, moving, vibrating with barely-constrained power, tickling her palate like it couldn't wait to get to work.

The second ended, and as her mouth opened, a fountain of cum exploded out of it, emerging into the dark air before falling down on her upturned face - with a thick tentacle filling her throat, doing anything ELSE with her face wasn't really an option - coating her face and hair. Her eyes blinked instinctively shut, but she could feel the thick goo burning around the edges even as she squeezed her eyelids tightly together. From below, she could hear Sharanaman cackling. It probably looked quite a show.

Then, suddenly, things started to shift ominously. The thick tentacle in her throat prevented her from swallowing any of the cum now filling her mouth, and what didn't spray into the air wound up flowing out the corners of her wide-open mouth to run down across her shoulders and breasts. But the dozen-odd tentacles in her ass were a different matter. Blithely, they had shot their load along with the rest, filling her lower intestine - and, seconds later, the rest of her large intestine - with a flood of thoroughly alien cum. Her enchanted metabolism sensed this presence, and pounced on it. Normally, it would draw the life-force from the sperm it caught, thus redoubling her power. But what it found in this goo was... different. As Anitra had observed before, this thing was different - there was no force of life, no spark of creation in it. The enchantments woven into her very soul found darkness where it had expected light.

And it didn't care.

Anitra's eyes flew open, staring blindly up at the sky - a mass of roiling, volcanic ash-clouds. Drops of cum landed on her eyeballs, but she didn't blink. The black, vertically-slitted pupils in the middle of her eyes were expanding, opening like a tear in a piece of cloth. First they swallowed her bright-blue irises. Then, the sclera - the whites of her eyes - turned black as well. It was a thoroughly disturbing sight, though - for better or for worse - literally no-one was in a position to observe it. Neither Sharanaman nor Blake had an appropriate angle to see her eyes. Neither realized what was happening. Not until a split-second later, anyway.

The murk that surrounded them all suddenly seemed to contract - as if the very darkness and shadow of this hell-blasted land was being pulled towards a single point, in the center of the mass of tentacles that surrounded Anitra. Then, a black shockwave emerged from her body, violently pushing away all the tentacles that grasped her. In some cases, the jolt was so powerful it tore the muscular tissue apart, sending severed tentacle-ends tumbling into the rift beneath. Even the tentacles lodged inside of her were forcibly ejected, wilting beneath her like a flower caught in a hailstorm. The shockwave made no physical noise, but both Blake and Sharanaman felt it - as a ripple across their souls.

Only one tentacle was still attached to Anitra - the one threaded through her digestive system. It was too deeply lodged to be easily exorcised. Responding to the sudden, shocking violence of the event, the fist-sized tentacle-head had emerged from her open mouth again, weaving in the air as if it was trying to gather clues about what had just happened. Then her mouth snapped shut, and her teeth sheared off the head. A sickening, tearing sound was audible from between her legs at the same time, as her suddenly supercharged sphincter clamped down on the other end of the tentacle with incredible force... enough to tear through the thick, muscular tissue. Both ends of the tentacle fell into the rift beneath her, trailing droplet of greenish blood. There was now nothing left holding her up.

She still hung there, though - hovering in midair, surrounded by an aura of sheer darkness, and her head slowly tipped forwards so that her jet-black eyes could catch Sharanaman's empty eye-hollows - wide-open with shock now. Within the three seconds this took, her monstrously distended stomach shrunk rapidly - but not because the cum was draining out. In fact, despite the sudden removal of the tentacles that had plugged her lower holes, not a drop was escaping her. It simply disappeared, as if it had evaporated... or been absorbed. This left a clear outline along her suddenly-flat belly - an outline of her entire digestive tract, to be specific, still enormously stretched by the bitten-off tentacle inside of it. Then, in a second, that too was gone. The sperm that caked her fair skin and jet-black hair went the same way - in all appearance the very pores of her skin were sucking it up, the way a sponge sucked water.

By the time her eyes met the tiny flames that burned inside Sharanaman's eye-hollows, her body was as clean and fit as it had ever been, bearing not the slightest hint of the abuse she had just suffered. His mouth opened and closed a few times as he looked at her, his mind racing as a string of inane babbling ran from his slackened lips. "This can't be... the DragonRider's powers draw from a partner's lifeforce... the Great Old Ones have no such thing! And even if she could absorb that sort of energy, there's no way her body and mind could contain it... no way at all. However enhanced, she's still human underneath! This is... INCONCEIVABLE!" The last part came out as a keening cry, while he frantically scrambled to his feet and began backing away from the dimensional rift, clutching the dread tome Necronomicon to his chest like a security-blanket.

His retreat, however, was halted when a piercing, ear-rendering cry of agony rose from the rift. It was more than merely a physical sound - though there was certainly enough of that to have burst his eardrums, had he still possessed such a thing. Like the shockwave before, it seemed to resound on a spiritual level, and in a heart-stopping instant, both he and Blake felt their very souls strain against the chains that bound them to their mortal flesh, in a desperate, instinctive attempt to escape from the sound. It was a primal call of surprise, pain and warning, made by a creature which had forgotten the very concept of pain eons ago.

It washed across Anitra without stirring a hair on her head. She did not appear to even hear it, much less be affected by it. Even as the remaining, ragged tentacle beneath her rapidly retreated into the gaping pit, her hand gestured imperiously towards the sword stuck tip-first in the ash-covered ground, several yards away. It immediately jumped into the air, flipped end-over-end several times, and then landed in her hand even as the rift below squeezed itself shut - disappearing without a single physical trace - save for a single drop of greenish blood being rapidly absorbed by the dry ash covering the ground.

With her sword in hand, Anitra descended towards Sharanaman, who was still frozen in place by the aftershocks of the otherworldly keen. Her feet still weren't touching the ground - she saw no particular reason to bother with walking. So inefficient. When he finally managed to pull himself out of his shocked paralysis, he stumbled backwards, landing squarely on his ass. Fear and desperation was visible in his eyes, despite their infernal nature. His mind was racing, even as his body was stunned by shock. "He knew. The Master knew this might happen! That is why he didn't want to be directly involved! He didn't want to be anywhere nearby if something like this happened... but... but it's fine! He gave me the book! The book will protect me!" He was actually saying all of this out loud, but his throat seemed constricted by fear, and it emerged as barely a whisper. If Anitra heard it, she gave no sign of such. She merely lifted her sword. He lifted the thick tome in his hands as a shield.

The book was possessed of a sort of malevolent, rudimentary intelligence. Enough to have a sense of self-preservation, and a desire to find its way into... appropriate hands. Hence, it would protect its wielder... up to a point. The book, even moreso than Sharanaman, could sense the dark energy now flowing through Anitra. And it could sense that it was directed at its wielder, rather than itself. There were others who could take up the tome. And so, in a silent cloud of darkness, the book vanished from between Sharanaman's charred hands. He only just had enough time to feel despair nearly stop his unnaturally-beating heart, before the sword plunged down - straight through the space the book had occupied a split second earlier, and into his chest.

The flames that suddenly sprang to life around the blade as it pierced his chest were not the bright yellow-red of dragonfire. Instead, for the first time, the enchanted sword BlackFire was living fully up to its name. The flames were coal-black with purple-hued edges, twisting like alien tendrils rather than living fire as they spread out from the point where the blade pierced Sharanaman's chest. He screamed - once - as the flames devoured his body and shredded the tattered remnants of his soul. Then he was no more - not merely dead, but erased from existence altogether. A satisfied smirk curled across Anitra's full, red lips as she lowered the blade, the flames dying out seconds later.

With the death of Sharanaman and the disappearance of the Necronomicon, the magic he had spun with its help dissolved like fog on a hot day. The dark chains holding Blake bound to the ground vanished, even as the dread sword dangling above his head faded from existence. Fortunately, Sharanaman had been too terrified and shocked by Anitra's sudden transformation and attack to drop the Sword of Damocles as he had threatened. Blake grinned as he pushed himself up from the ground, spreading his wings and flapping them experimentally to make sure everything was still working. His captivity had not, it appeared, inflicted any lasting damage - though his wingbones were still quite sore.

"Nice work, my love. Guess that idiot WAS stupid enough to ignore the power of The Quickening... I honestly wouldn't have guessed." He said offhandedly as he walked up to her. She hadn't moved since she finished off Sharanaman, and was still just standing there - or rather, hovering there - buck-naked, with the sword hanging negligently from her hand. But he was getting an odd feeling. She wasn't responding to his voice. Experimentally, he pushed out his mental voice across their telepathic link, only to find it running into a mass of concentrated, living darkness. Flinching, he halted his steps and pulled himself back. It saved his life. In a split second, Anitra had whirled around, swinging her sword at the exact point his neck would have occupied if he had continued walking.

Shocked, he jumped several yards back, adrenaline pumping through his veins once again. He'd just convinced himself that the battle was over. Apparently he'd been wrong. Anitra, his beloved rider, was now bearing down on him - her feet still hovering a few inches off the ashen land - with sword in hand and murder in her eyes. Well, mostly, there was just a lot of BLACK in her eyes, and her face was as unmoving as if it had been carved from granite - expressionless except for a cruel smile pasted across her pleasantly-curved lips - but he was pretty sure it all added up to something in the general ballpark of 'Kill stuff'. She hadn't attacked Sharanaman because he was the enemy - she'd attacked him because he EXISTED.

He could see it now, though he had to squint - a black miasma hovering around her, radiating the pure, unadulterated essence of negation. The dying of the light, the ending of life, the drowning of thought... it was the kind of energy only a being entirely alien to life on this plane of existence could possess. That was why he hadn't immediately spotted it. Seeing it with his magic-vision was like trying to hear a tone that was almost outside audible range. It was obvious where it had come from - the creature that Sharanaman had called up. Anitra's quickening had absorbed its dark powers, but because of the alien nature of that power, she'd wound up with some sort of... anti-Quickening. Normally, the very nature of the Quickening cleared the mind, pushing aside both outside influences and internal trauma. This one, instead, was clouding her mind with an overriding desire to kill and destroy.

All of this flew through his mind while he continuously danced back, claws digging into the ash to give him the purchase he needed. He changed directions quickly, crabbing left or right as often as back, forcing Anitra to change course often to keep up. Her levitation was very impressive, but without ground to push off from, she simply couldn't alter course as quickly as him. And that, unfortunately, was the only reason he was managing to stay ahead of her, just out of her lightning-fast blade's reach. And he couldn't keep it up forever. His muscles were still shaking from the electric shock he'd received in the earlier fight, and from struggling against the unyielding chains that had bound him to the ground. He'd tire soon. He had to come up with a plan of action.

Well, if her presently addled state of mind was caused by this 'Dark Quickening', the simplest solution was to wait it out - it was, after all, a temporary boost. But he'd seen how much of that tentacled thing's sperm she'd absorbed - enough that it would probably take HIM 3-4 loads to match that sort of quantity. And on top of that, she'd apparently absorbed one of its tentacles as well - somehow! He had no idea how long it would take her to run outta fuel, but his increasingly shaky muscles assured him that it would definitely be well after HE did. Of course, he could take to the air - his wings weren't that tired - but Anitra's levitation indicated that she would still be able to pursue him, and he wouldn't be able to change directions as quickly up there. In fact, based on her movements, it seemed likely that taking to the air would put him at a suicidal disadvantage, much as it galled him to admit it to himself.

An idea occurred to him, leaping into his mind all unbidden. She apparently needed to get in close to attack him. He, however, was not so constrained. His fiery breath would be able to burn through even her supernatural defenses in short order, and she wasn't entirely immune to his magic either. He couldn't keep dodging her forever, but he was fairly certain that he COULD kill her. And that was the exact moment when he realized that he actually capital-L Loved her. Because the very thought of taking such a measure, even to protect his own life, made him sick to his stomach.

He'd known since their first night together that she was completely dedicated to him - that she'd sacrifice her life if necessary to protect him. It was a level of dedication that could only be called love... and on several occasions, he'd found himself wondering just how much of those feelings he really returned. She'd freed him from the loneliness that had possessed him before - given him someone to share his life with, and eased the pressure of his desires with masterful skill and enthusiasm. But she was still at least half human - as she'd demonstrated and admitted on several occasions - and it made no sense for a dragon to care so much about a lesser being. So he'd convinced himself that, while he certainly cared about her, the single-minded dedication she'd showed him was entirely one-sided.

Now, faced with a situation where he could save himself by killing her, those convictions shattered like glass. He knew - with absolute certainty - that she'd WANT him to do it. That she was still in there somewhere, behind the cloud of darkness. Watching herself kill him, unable to control her own body, would cause her incomparable agony, and she'd likely take her own life when the Dark Quickening finally wore off. If he cut her down now, she'd thank him with her last breath. But despite that - or perhaps, because of it - the very thought of doing so sent a surge of pain through his chest strong enough to make him gasp. And it didn't come from his hard-working lungs.

No. He couldn't kill her. But he couldn't allow her to kill him either, since that would be even worse for her. There had to be another way. Experimentally, he started chucking nonlethal spells at her, even as he continued to dodge and retreat. Between her natural anti-magic and her dragonscale armor, she was normally the next best thing to immune where ordinary magic was concerned - but since that protection came from HIM, HIS magic was exempt, and she wasn't wearing her armor right now, either. Theoretically, he should be able to paralyze or incapacitate her with magic, and then wait out the Quickening.

In practice... not so much. The dark miasma surrounding her seemed to have its own way with magic, and his spells seemed to come apart before they even reached her. Glowing chains turned to dust in the air, blasts of raw force dispersed into a light breeze, and bolts of paralyzing lightning fizzled into nothingness before touching her skin. Growing desperate, he started putting more force into his spells, hoping to overcome this newfound resistance - but even when some portion of his spell got through, she merely batted it aside with her sword. He'd forgotten about that - the sword had magic-repelling properties of its own, courtesy of the starmetal from which it was forged. None of his spells were doing more than mildly inconveniencing her, and the effort was wearing away at his dwindling supply of energy. He was avoiding her by inches, now, instead of feet.

And yet, in the middle of all that, he found that he could not ignore her beauty. Maybe it was because of the shocking realization he'd had moments earlier, but the way she glided naked through the air, her pale skin glistening in the sooty glow of the nearby volcanoes... it made him suddenly realize just how beautiful she truly was. A goddess amongst mortals, whose perfect features, voluptuous curves and jet-black hair could make even the heart of a dragon cry... but this, he tried to remind himself, was not the time to think such thoughts.

Or was it? The thought hit him like a hammer. It was crazy, dangerous, desperate. It was as likely to kill him as her. But it was all he could think of under these circumstances. He had to risk it while he still had enough strength left to have even a slim chance of pulling it off. Bunching his exhausted muscles, he suddenly reversed course. Anitra's expressionless face showed no sign of surprise as his retreat suddenly turned into a charge. She merely raised her sword to strike.

But Blake was moving faster than ever. Perhaps faster than he ever had. He'd certainly never been in a fight this intense before. Blood and adrenaline was pumping through him, pounding in his ears, as he desperately dodged around the flashing sword and its dark flame at close range. He jumped, skidded, flipped, ducking under the blade by millimeters on several occasions. Sometimes he didn't manage that. Three times the blade licked him, biting through his normally-impenetrable scales like they were made from paper. Bleeding gashes appeared on his front-legs and chest - though not deep enough to be dangerous - and a solid chunk was carved out of one of his horns. He barely noticed, so focused was he on watching the blade - and the woman swinging it. And finally, he saw his chance.

A sudden reversal of direction brought him around the blade one last time as he closed the last bit of distance between them, and his front leg flashed forwards - tipped by razor-sharp talons. But he struck with the blunt top of those talons - coming as close to making a fist as a dragon could - and aimed this blow squarely at Anitra's upper chest, where the ribcage would provide at least SOME protection. Still, it was a blow with most of the body-weight of an elephant-sized dragon behind it. The impact drove the air from Anitra's lungs and sent her flying through the air in an impressive arc, cartwheeling several times before hitting the ground chest-first and skidding across several yards of ashes on her face.

Before she could recover from her tumble, Blake was on her - literally. In a mighty, wing-assisted jump, he followed her path through the air, landing almost directly on top of her. A rather risky approach, considering that her right hand still clung to the hilt of her sword, with an iron grip unaffected by the impact and subsequent ballistic trip. A large front-claw, however, rapidly descended on her arm - not the taloned tips, but the pad behind them. Hard, covered in rough scales, but at least not razor-sharp. Her other arm was similarly pinned, and with Blake's entire weight bearing down on her - pushing her arms visibly into the black dust - even her currently-boosted strength was insufficient to dislodge them. Her legs kicked up as she arched her back, seeking a weak point in the scaled belly above, and the strength of the impacts worried him. His ballsack was covered by scales, but they were thinner and lighter than most - if she managed to find it with her feet, he was fairly sure he'd notice it.

But he had more limbs to work with than she did. His prehensile tail whipped down between them and roughly encircled one of her legs, pulling it to the side and down to the ground. A moment later, that too was pinned - this time by one of his hind legs. The other leg was given the same treatment, and now he had her pinned down, spread-eagled... with his entire, ponderous weight resting on her joints. It was fortunate that the ash below them was flexible enough to compact beneath her, allowing some of his weight to rest on the ground instead - but even so, he could feel her bones creak. The sensation was almost physically painful to him, but he knew she could heal such damage fairly quickly. There was no helping it, anyway. Besides, even with such bone-crushing weight holding her down, she hadn't stopped struggling... her arms and legs were flexing, digging into the ash. It wouldn't take her very long to create enough of a gap to free her arms, at which point he'd be in mortal danger again. Holding her like this until the darkness in her mind dissipated was out of the question.

Fortunately, that wasn't the plan anyway. Now, in this sort of situation, a heroic individual might have tried talking to her, to reach the consciousness he knew was hidden beneath the dark power clouding her mind. Maybe open his heart to her, telling her how much he loved her, in an attempt to give her the strength she needed to fight through this darkness herself. But Blake was no hero, and based on the thickness of the cloud he could sense hovering around her mind, he was fairly certain it wouldn't have worked anyway. No, he needed to show her his love in a slightly more... direct manner.

The logistics involved were awkward, at best. In order to pin all four of her limbs, he'd been forced to pull all four of HIS closely together under his center of mass. It wasn't a terribly stable way to stand, much less move, but he didn't have much choice. At least he was able to grant himself some added stability by drilling his tail into the ash behind him, even as he lowered his hindquarters and unsheathed his cock. Getting hard under these circumstances would ordinarily have been... difficult, to say the least. But his earlier appreciation of her beauty and elegance, combined with his sudden, sledgehammer-to-the-face realization concerning his feelings for her came together to make it not merely doable, but inevitable. His mighty tool slipped easily from its sheath, ready to go to work. Hopefully, the surge of a REAL, dragon-powered Quickening could sweep the darkness that now possessed her aside.

Of course, granting her something like that meant going anal. A handful of minutes ago, that would have been a simple enough thing to do, what with her groin being fairly coated by the tentacle monster's sperm - but that, of course, had been absorbed along with the rest of it when her Dark Quickening kicked in. What rudimentary self-lubrication he possessed would've been hard-pressed to overcome the friction of her eternally-tight sphincter even under ideal circumstances, and her ardent resistance made the situation decidedly non-ideal. Sadly, he somehow doubted she'd be inclined to lube him up with her tongue the way she usually did, even if he asked nicely. Which meant that he had to gamble on the assumption that his rider's basic nature was unchanged underneath the negative cloud that currently controlled her body.

Aiming even a prehensile penis at her labia - gatekeepers of her hopefully-still-sensitive pussy - under these circumstances was a difficult task in and of itself, however. Since she was face down in the ash - her bulbous boobs mashed flat as she struggled - his angle of entry for that orifice was even worse than for her ass. Fortunately, her struggle was a double-edged sword. As she shifted her weight to grind her arms and legs into the lightweight ash, her hips inevitably lifted from the ground, and with his nimble neck, Blake was able to get a good look beneath his own groin. Timing the first thrust wasn't easy, but with draconic adrenaline rushing through his veins along with the usual cocktail of horny hormones, he found that he was wonderfully focused on the task.

His penis struck forth like an angry viper, catching her groin at its apex. Her labia were spattered with ash-dust, but in spite of that, there was enough inherent lubrication to allow his head to enter. While the copious amounts of alien sperm that had coated her genitals earlier had been absorbed through the very pores of her skin, that still left behind the flood of pussy-juices that the rape had elicited from her. The ash-speckled labia thus parted easily before him, and he quickly shifted his weight backwards to thrust another few inches inside of her before she could react.

And react she did. Whether the shadow that had fallen over her mind had some instinctive understanding of what he was doing, or it was merely part of her current effort to lash out at everything that had the gall to exist within her sights, she was doing everything she could to shake him off or at least dislodge his rock-hard cock. It was a new experience for Blake. While he was certainly no stranger to rape, always before it had been a matter of intimidating some young girl into submission with his power and presence. He'd never needed to actually, physically overpower a resisting partner before - even when he'd nabbed that young golden dragon back at the Tomb of the Golden Knight, it had mostly been a matter of hurting her until she stopped struggling. That wasn't an option here - for starters, it seemed unlikely that Anitra could even FEEL pain right now.

The sensation of his prey struggling futilely beneath him, her pussy pulling this way and that as she sought an angle of escape... he found it to be strangely arousing. With growing eagerness, as lust began to push the worries and complications from his mind, he thrust harder and deeper. Her hot, tight insides parted eagerly before his cone-shaped cockhead, even as the rest of her body struggled to stop him - and as he pushed his way past through familiar tightness of her cervix, he felt with no small satisfaction that she was starting to generate a new dose of slippery, lubricating juices. The darkness might have swallowed her conscious mind, but it could not still the burning desire of her draconic blood - even now, she responded to him as she always had, on a cellular level that the dark influence could not reach or block.

Eager to promote the lubrication, he began to thrust. The awkwardness of their position was hampering his speed, of course, but he quickly adapted and accelerated his movements, helped along by the increasing slickness of her widely-stretched snatch. Far from slowing him down, her continued struggling and resistance was stoking the fires of his desires, making it less of a calculated act, and more of an expression of inherent desire. This was, after all, something new - a sexual experience he was sampling for the first time, and with his beloved Anitra at that. Even in these critical circumstances, it could not fail to arouse.

But the pussy-juices were flowing freely by now, and he had to refocus on his main reason for doing this - which was not, sadly, the simple matter getting his rocks off. The load of boiling-hot cum building in his balls would play an important part, to be sure, but on a slightly different stage... he just needed to GET it there. Gradually, he lengthened his thrusts, keeping just barely enough of his head inside at the point of least penetration to prevent Anitra from pulling away - scanning for a pattern as she tried to do just that every time. And, not incidentally, drawing out more lubrication with the resulting two-foot thrust-length.

Finally, confident that he could read her movements, he pulled all the way out - his bright-red, juice-covered cock shimmering in the air as a thread of lubrication connected it to the cocksleeve it had just vacated. She reacted as he had predicted, and his cockhead tracked the movements of her groin the way a hunting hawk tracks a mouse... adjusting its aim just slightly upwards in the process. Then, he thrust it forwards with blinding speed, aiming to impale his prey...

And impale it did. Never before had he used such a degree of raw force when fucking Anitra - there'd never been any need to, since even half of his enormous physical strength was plenty enough to rattle her teeth and jostle her internal organs. But this time, he needed to move as swiftly as possible, before she made an unexpected move - if he was forced to chase her holes around, the lubrication on his cock would soon dry in the hot air, and he'd be back to square one. So when he parted her bulbous, milky-white butt-cheeks with his tapered cockhead - like he had done so many times before - he did so with the kind of violent force that could split rocks and rend steel. He went in to the hilt in one thrust, burying every last millimeter of thickly-engorged shaft in a split second, widening her well-trained ass with shocking intensity and speed.

An ordinary mortal woman would've been literally shattered into tiny, gory fragments by an impact of such force. Even Anitra, in her ordinary state, would've been seriously injured - her intestines and several organs likely ruptured. But as she was now, empowered by an unholy, extradimensional Dark Quickening (and with her intestine vastly widened by invading tentacles only a few minutes earlier) she was actually able to absorb it. It drove her hard enough into the ground to blast straight through the layer of volcanic dust, creating a small crater that revealed the underlying layer of hard obsidian - and even that was visibly cracked from the transferred impact. A small, strangled sound - something between a gurgle and a groan - emerged from her lips. It was the first sound she had made since the Dark Quickening took over - whether because the sensation penetrated the dark pall that had fallen over her mind, or simply because the impact physically drove the air from her lungs.

Blake, however, did not have the time to consider such irrelevancies, nor even to rejoice that he hadn't accidentally killed her with the sudden impact. The shockwave had blasted a lot of ash away, and while she seemed to be momentarily stunned by that terrifying first thrust, her arms were now perilously close to the hard - and mirror-smooth - obsidian beneath it. Once her struggling resumed, it would be a labor of minutes to dig her way through the last layers of ash and dust, and with the added purchase and smooth surface, pull away from under him. There was no time to waste - nor any reason to be gentle. He'd already gotten confirmation that she could currently handle the full violence of his raw, predatory strength. With any luck, he could stun her a bit more...

And so, he began to fuck her - with every bit of strength left in his exhausted body (which was still quite a lot, what with him being a desperate black dragon hooped up on rivers worth of adrenaline and pheromones). Even an appropriately-sized and well-lubricated female dragon would have found the resulting thrusts to be painfully intense - and that's if he wasn't going anal. Comparing it to the violent attack of a siege-ram breaking down the steel-shod gates of a mighty fortress would have been more than a little flattering to the ram.

Three feet worth of well-lubricated, steel-hard, 6-inch-wide cock filled Anitra's body, deep enough to push her lungs aside at the apex of each thrust, only to vanish from her insides in what seemed like a millisecond as it prepared for the next, equally-unrestrained thrust. With every impact, the shock radiated through her internal organs, down through her chest and shoulders into the hard obsidian ground - where further hairline fractures were added to the cracked surface each time. And of course, a significant portion of the force ended up being transferred directly from Blake's scale-covered groin to her asscheeks, pounding them red and blue in a display of spanking that would make even the most disciplinary father blanch.

Even through the darkness that filled her mind like a thick fog, some of this sensation penetrated, reaching for memories and feelings the way a man fumbles for a candle in the darkness. It wasn't the pain, though - her currently-altered body was more than able to nullify that, along with any other pesky nerve-signal that tried to enter her brain. Rather, it was the feeling of Blake's huge body bent over her, being inside of her, pushing her down, taking her... a small but uncontainable thrill rose in her mind, like a tiny spark in the darkness - the enjoyment a true submissive gains from feeling on her own body that her master is finally pulling out all the stops.

This spark, however weak, was in an important place... the one which controls the muscles. After all, a good submissive does not resist her master. Her arms, which had started to dig through the ash again despite the repeated impacts, fell still. Her groin no longer sought to move away from Blake's plundering cock whenever it pulled out, but instead pushed back against him as he thrust inside, eager to please. Her face, previously frozen in a bloodthirsty grin, loosened into an expression of all-consuming desire and unnameable pleasure. She was still getting no feedback from her nerves - she could not feel his hands crushing her arms, or his cock tearing into her body harder and fiercer than ever before. And yet, the tiny part of her mind that had managed to tear itself loose from the shadowy influence was consumed entirely with pleasure - for she could still feel his presence above her, still sense that he was raping her, using her body with abandon. And that brought her a pleasure entirely divorced from whatever signals her erogenous zones might send...

Normally, Blake would have noticed this sudden yet important shift in her behavior. Right now, however, he wasn't noticing much of anything. He was in a trance - adrenaline, exhaustion and lust flooding his mind. Control of his body, and what physical resources remained, had devolved entirely to his animal instincts - and their only concern was to continue fucking with unabated intensity until an orgasm had been reached. For now, at least, he had seized to be a sentient being and become entirely a dumb, rutting beast.

The two lovers, both with minds clouded to the point of being lost, rutted together in one of the most epically violent display of mating the mortal realm had ever seen. It seemed like an eternity for both of them, but in truth it was likely less than 15 minutes - not that there was anyone around to measure the time for them. With a roar that sent tongues of flame leaping into the air, Blake came - the contents of his balls eagerly boiling into Anitra's badly battered anus. The draconic seed bubbled into her stomach, where her inhuman metabolism set to work on it even as Blake collapsed from exhaustion on top of her, barely managing to keep his limbs beneath him so that he would not crush her entirely.

As a new Quickening started, a lot of things happened at once. One of them was, as Blake had hoped, that the unholy darkness covering her mind was pushed away, returning her to sanity (or as close to it as she'd ever come). It would also have been expected that, with this influence and its power vaporizing like dew in the morning sun, she would once again become aware of the sensations running through her body - from the pain in her battered buttocks to the feeling of Blake's cock gradually deflating inside her colon. That, however, wasn't exactly how it happened.

Instead, it seemed as if all the nerve-signals that the darkness had blocked, rolled in all at once. As if on fast-forwards, Anitra experienced within a handful of ultra-compressed seconds everything that had been done to her body during the Dark Quickening. Including, of course, the epic ass-rape that would have entirely shattered her body and shredded those very-same nerves under normal conditions. The result was, quite literally, the most powerful orgasm any mortal had ever experienced, surpassing even the lucky girl who'd wound up in the middle of a rather amusing bet between the God of Fertility and the Goddess of Lust a few centuries earlier.

It would've knocked her out cold ten times over, if her brain hadn't been too busy reabsorbing nerve-signals to even CONSIDER taking a break. So instead, she just frothed at the mouth, her entire body contracting hard enough to tear roughly half of her muscles (only for them to be repaired just as quickly by the ongoing dragon-infused Quickening, of course) while her eyes rolled far enough back that she could almost see her brain lighting up like a fireworks-display behind them. The contractions of her ass were fierce enough to stop Blake's cock in mid-deflation, though not quite enough to wake him from his exhausted daze. Meanwhile, her body and mind had been fully revitalized by the Quickening.

Over the next eight hours, Blake's exhausted unconsciousness passed over into a most un-draconicly deep sleep as his body recovered from its ordeal. And in the meantime, Anitra was fully awake, fully alert, and pinned to the unyielding obsidian ground by his huge cock - which had apparently given up on softening after the initial attempt - with an astronomically intense climax fresh in her mind. She could barely move an inch in any one direction, and yet, over those eight hours, she experienced several hundred additional orgasms from the sensation of Blake's huge body pressing down on her, his turgid girth locked inside her, his manly musk filling the pocket of air she was stuck in. None of them were even a shadow of the original, of course, but quantity has a quality all its own. And when - some six hours in - her sexual charge was starting to wear off, it was abundantly renewed as the unconscious Blake lost control of his over-filled bladder, emptying it inside of her. The sensation of his warmth spreading inside of her and flowing into her stomach from below easily rekindled her desires, and the last two hours became as pleasure-filled as the first...

But finally, Blake stirred, his mind foggy from sleep and his memory only slowly piecing together the events surrounding his last couple of minutes worth of consciousness. As he drifted towards full wakefulness, his first coherent thought was "Well, I haven't been killed in my sleep - that's a promising sign." Then, with a grunt of effort, he pushed himself to his feet. A slow, slurping sound could be heard beneath him as he did so, followed by a drawn-out groan of pleasure. Quickly looking back between his legs, he was first delighted to see Anitra looking both healthy and sane, and then amused by watching her suspended in midair by his dick, while slowly sliding down it. The lubrication she'd supplied during his initial access had long-since dried out, and right now the only thing that stopped her sphincter from turning into a solid friction-seal was the copious amounts of butt-sweat that had flowed down her crack while spending several hours stuck between the volcanically-heated ground and Blake's heat-radiating bulk. Thus, his cock was escaping from its eight-hours-plus prison only slowly, generating a great deal of friction-heat in the process.

After sliding down the first half-foot or so of shaft, however, enough internal lubrication had whetted her sphincter to allow for the rest of the distance to happen somewhat more speedily, and within seconds, Anitra had tumbled off the end of the still-hard cock and gotten up to her knees. Her ass was still gaping - even with her elasticity, it would take some time to recover from the combination of an ultraviolent anal assault and an 8-hour stretch. The thin goo that leaked from the resultantly gaping pit mostly consisted of the bladderful of draconic urine Blake had released up there a few hours earlier, mixed with sperm residue and the lubricating slime of her intestines. While this gooey mix dripped down to stain the black obsidian ground, Anitra grinned up at Blake's hovering face. "Nice to see you finally awake, my love." Then she swiftly turned around and closed her lips around his cockhead.

Calling it 'ripe' was an understatement. 8 hours spent stewing inside a girl's ass - floating in a couple gallons worth of piss for the last 2 - will do that to a dick. The layer of ass-sweat that she'd left on it while sliding off just added a zesty layer of saltiness on top of the bitter core. In objective terms, it was the foulest-smelling, worst-tasting thing she'd gotten her face near since a certain unwashed camel back in Mirage City, neck-a-neck with the tentacle that had reached her palate from the opposite direction half a day earlier. But objectivity is a myth - the senses are always subjective. And to her, the smell and taste might as well be that of a gourmet meal. To her, it was the taste of love.

She wasn't stupid, after all. She knew that Blake could have easily killed her while she was possessed by the Dark Quickening - and that he'd instead chosen to risk his own life on a desperate gamble to save her. And she knew what it meant. This magnificent dick, which had connected their two bodies for the last 8 hours, had been the instrument of her salvation - and thus, the physical proof that her love for the great black dragon was returned. To feel its silky-smooth skin on her tongue, its thick scent tickling her nostrils - feeling the burning-hot blood that gave it its hardness pulsing beneath her touch... there was no greater gift. She was not, as she might at another time, simply cleaning her lover's cock as a matter of courtesy, or attempting to get him fired up with some 'dirty' play. She simply wanted to touch every square inch of his cock with her lips and tongue - so she did.

Ten minutes later, feeling oddly satisfied, her lips finally parted from the smooth shaft. She had, even if that was not precisely her intention, done a more-than-thorough job of cleaning it off - it was spit-shined and gleamed in the soft light of a distant volcano as it slid back into its sheath. Licking her lips - not really registering the aftertaste, but rather relishing the memory of the touch - she emerged from under Blake's body to pick up her armor from the pile she'd left it in, while he looked on with a smile. Neither one of them said a word - there was no need. Their telepathic link was aglow with pure, undiluted emotions. Putting them into words would only have made them poorer for it.

It was only when she'd gotten dressed, returned to his side, and fished the clay tablet out of his saddlebags that she spoke again. "Well, the map's changed... apparently we passed the first trial. I wonder who 'the enemy' actually was, though. Was it Sharanaman, or that thing in the rift, or maybe the dark book?" Blake shrugged, scratching his chin with one taloned claw. "Who knows. It could even have been your reliance on The Quickening, or the denial I was in about my own feelings, or something similarly metaphorical. Trials are like that." He sighed as he checked the surface-wounds he had acquired during the fight, lightly touching the edge of his horn where a chunk of it had been sheared off. "Either way, I hope the next trial has less fighting in it. A contest of riddles sounds really nice right about now."

Anitra looked up from the magically-rearranged map on the clay tablet with a lopsided grin. "That's not likely unless you happen to suffer from a crippling phobia of riddles that you haven't told me about, love. The Second Trial requires you to 'Face your Worst Fear', after all. Her smile wilted as they stared into each other's eyes for an endless second. Both of them suddenly, with aching clarity, knew what their worst fear was - and they had no wish to face it. Then, collectively, they shook it off as Blake cleared his throat. "Well, we've come too damn far to give up now. We'll handle it somehow. After all, we managed to come through the first trial in one piece, more or less."

Anitra's grin regained its shine, and she smiled up at him as she caressed one of the wounds she had inflicted on him while possessed by the darkness. She was confident that it would turn into a sexy scar once it fully healed. "So we did. So let's get going! At least we're heading for a slightly less pleasant environment, based on what I can see on this map... some nameless forest near the edge of the Western Steppes." Blake nodded as she climbed to his back, flexing his wings to make sure that his earlier fall wasn't still causing him trouble. "Hmm. That's pretty close to one of the bigger Dragonhomes. Hopefully we can avoid a meeting with the locals... but either way, we'll at least not need to worry about food and water." On this uplifting note, they took to the skies, eager to escape from the oppressive clouds of the Blasted Lands.

THE END

Next in line, to be released When It Is Done - Chapter 18 of the DragonRider Chronicles: Face Your Worst Fear! Only 3 more chapters to go...