The keyboard clattered under Em's fingers as he hunched over his latest project - a script to sync e-stim patterns with ambient music beats. His office smelled faintly of stale coffee and solder. Outside his window, a city sparrow pecked at crumbs on the fire escape. He paused mid-code, chewing his lip. "Huh. Could probably optimize these nested loops if I - "
Em shoved his chair back with a frustrated groan, fingertips pressing into his temples. The code wasn't making sense anymore - variables blurring together like static. "Fresh air. Need fresh air," he muttered, stumbling toward the apartment's narrow stairwell. His sock caught on the warped floorboard at the top step.
The world upended.
Instead of pain, his body fizzed like soda bubbles, limbs dissolving into pins-and-needles. Wind roared in ears that shouldn't exist anymore. Just as panic crested, his back thumped onto something yielding. Fragrant green hit his nostrils - grass, real grass, peppered with chamomile petals tickling his neck. Above him, canopy gaps showed a sky too blue for any city he'd ever known.
"where am I," Em cried out.
The quarterstaff's tip pressed into Em's sternum with the gentleness of a butterfly landing. Above him, freckles like scattered cinnamon resolved into a face - sharp-eared, gold-eyed, crowned with riotous ginger curls. A panther's breath warmed his left ankle.
"Where you shouldn't be," she murmured, nostrils flaring as she inhaled his scent. "Iron stink. Plastic. Fear-sweat." Her bare foot crushed a thistle beside his head, releasing tart green odor. "But no bloodlust. Odd."
She crouched, tattoos rippling. One hand remained on her staff; the other plucked a tick from Shadowmire's ear. "Speak your purpose before my patience petrifies."
Em's throat clicked dryly, words dissolving like sugar in hot tea. His gaze dragged upward - past bare thighs dusted with golden down, past the tiger-and-serpent tattoos twining around her waist where honeyed skin met -
He jerked his stare sideways to a beetle trundling through grass blades. His ears burned. Six centuries hadn't dulled her radiance; if anything, time had polished her like river stones, each curve worn smooth by winds he couldn't fathom. Shadowmire's low growl vibrated through his spine.
Em swallowed hard, fingers digging into the grass as if it might dissolve beneath him. His voice came out reed-thin, wavering between awe and terror. "I'm - Em. From...from Portland. The city, with the…" He gestured weakly toward nothing, realizing how absurd concrete and traffic lights must sound here.
A chamomile petal stuck to his sweaty temple. He didn't dare brush it away.
"Please," he whispered, gaze skittering from her nipple rings to the beetle now climbing his shoelace. "Where is this place? The colors... they're alive. I've never…" His breath hitched as Shadowmire's tail flicked against his calf. "…never seen anything real before."
Her nostrils flared again - this time catching the chamomile's sweetness mingling with his acrid terror. A laugh bubbled up her throat, rich as wildflower honey. "Portland," she repeated, rolling the foreign word like a berry on her tongue. The staff's pressure lifted, leaving a ghostly circle on his shirt.
Shadowmire's growl cut off abruptly when Valithra scratched behind his ears. "You've tumbled through the Veil, little iron-rat. This grove breathes between your world's heartbeat." She plucked the chamomile petal from his temple and pressed it into his palm - it pulsed faintly between his fingers. "Tell me, does your kind still build towers that scrape the sky while their roots strangle the earth?"
Her thumb brushed his wrist, testing his pulse. A wasp landed on her shoulder, antennae twitching toward his sweat.
Valithra exhaled through her nose, the sound like wind through willow branches. She lowered herself onto her haunches, knees spread wide enough that Em could see the shifting patterns of vine tattoos spiraling up her inner thighs. Shadowmire mirrored her posture beside her, tail twitching like a metronome.
Her gold-flecked eyes narrowed - not in anger, but the way a botanist examines a strange new sprout. "Six hundred years weaving the Veil’s threads," she mused, thumb rubbing a smudge of city soot from his collar, "and you blunder through like a drunk badger." The wasp on her shoulder took flight, buzzing a lazy circle around Em’s head before settling in his hair.
She leaned closer. Her breath smelled of crushed mint. "No blade. No malice. Just… codesmith stink." A slow smile revealed one slightly sharper canine. "Perhaps the trees let you through for a reason."
Em's vision tunneled despite himself - the vine tattoos spiraling up her thighs seemed to pulse with their own verdant heartbeat. Between them, dew-slick folds glistened in the dappled light, her clit swollen like a ripe berry. The musky aroma hit his sinuses - earthy, primal - making his dry mouth flood with saliva.
His own pulse hammered where her thumb still rested against his wrist. The wasp in his hair buzzed louder, or maybe that was the blood rushing past his eardrums. He tried to form words, but his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth.
Shadowmire sneezed. The sudden sound jerked Em's gaze upward - straight into Valithra's knowing smirk. His face burned hotter than the sun filtering through the leaves.
A chuckle rumbled low in her chest - the sound of a stream finding its way around stubborn rocks. Her fingertip traced the strained fabric of Em's trousers with deliberate slowness, nails scritching lightly like a cat kneading. The damp heat radiating through the cloth made her nostrils flare.
"Ah," she purred, watching his adam's apple bob. "Still the same fragile flesh cages after all these centuries." Her finger pressed just hard enough to make him gasp, then retreated to pluck a blackberry from a nearby vine. Juice stained her thumb purple as she sucked it clean.
Shadowmire yawned, exposing teeth longer than Em's fingers. Valithra flicked the berry into the panther's maw without looking. "Tell me, codesmith - does your trembling stem from fear," she leaned down until her curls brushed his cheek, "or the ache between your legs?"
The wasp in his hair stung him suddenly, sharply, on the earlobe.
Em's shriek shattered the grove's stillness - high, panicked, utterly human. His hand flew to his ear, fingers encountering hot, throbbing flesh already ballooning outward. The wasp venom burned like liquid fire in his veins, every nerve alight with cruel clarity.
The grass beneath him prickled like needles. Chamomile scent cloyed thick as syrup. Valithra's musk invaded his nostrils until he could taste her on his tongue - honeyed sweat and something darker, like rain on fertile soil.
"Both," he gasped, hips jerking involuntarily against the ground. Tears blurred his vision as the pain-pleasure feedback loop tightened around his spine. "Fuck - both, always both with you - " His words dissolved into a whimper as Shadowmire's wet nose bumped his swollen cheek, whiskers tickling the inflamed sting.
The panther's breath smelled of fresh blood.
Valithra's laughter unfurled like fern fronds uncurling at dawn. She straightened, stretching her spine until it popped in three places, then offered Em a hand still sticky with blackberry juice. "Up, little spark. The Veil's teeth sharpen after sunset."
Shadowmire's wet nose traced Em's jawline, sniffing deeply at his pulse points before sneezing again - this time coating his chin in warm panther snot. Valithra flicked the beast's ear. "He tastes like burnt capacitors and unwashed desires. Perfect." Her grin widened as she tugged Em upright with surprising gentleness, steadying him when his knees wobbled.
"You'll bunk with me tonight," she continued, already leading him toward a gap in the hawthorns. "Moss for your mattress, spider-silk for blankets, and - " She glanced back at his tented trousers, golden eyes glinting. " - plenty of ways to... ease that ache before dawn."
The path ahead smelled of loam and something electric - like ozone after a summer storm.
The hawthorn branches parted with a whisper of leaves, revealing a bower woven from living vines and silver birch saplings bent into graceful arches. Fireflies pulsed lazily in the deepening twilight, their light catching on the spider-silk drapes billowing in the evening breeze. Valithra's fingers trailed along Em's inflamed earlobe - her touch sent tingles radiating down his neck.
"First lesson," she murmured, plucking the wasp's stinger free with her teeth before spitting it into the undergrowth. "Pain's just the world's way of saying hello." Her tongue swiped over the swollen flesh, leaving behind a cooling numbness that smelled of crushed eucalyptus. Shadowmire butted between them, knocking Em into a bed of moss that yielded like memory foam.
She knelt over him, thighs framing his hips, and plucked a glowing mushroom from behind his ear. "Second lesson is that" The fungus pulsed between her fingers, casting eerie blue light across her collarbones. "magic tastes like burnt sugar and bad decisions."
Her teeth sank into the mushroom's cap. Juice dribbled down her chin.
Em's fingers trembled as they clutched at the moss beneath him, the fungal glow painting his face in shifting cobalt hues. He swallowed hard, throat working around words that tasted like chamomile and panic. "Your... your lessons are generous," he managed, voice cracking like dry kindling. His gaze flickered from her juice-stained lips to the starlight filtering through the bower's canopy.
A moth landed on his knee - its wings shimmered with colors that didn't exist in Portland. The realization punched the air from his lungs. "But I - I can't stay. My world has... dependencies. Processes that'll fail without me." His laugh edged into hysteria as he imagined his apartment's wifi blinking into oblivion. "How do I…"
Shadowmire's tail thumped against his ankle. Em flinched.
"…how do I crawl back through the Veil?"
Valithra's grin widened, fang-like canines catching the mushroom's blue glow. She leaned down until her curls brushed Em's forehead - close enough that he could count the freckles dusting her nose like cinnamon on cream. "Dependencies," she echoed, rolling the word like a marble across her tongue.
Her thumb pressed into his lower lip, smearing blackberry juice that tasted of summer and secrets. "Little iron-rat, the Veil doesn't care about your wi-fi passwords." Shadowmire's purr vibrated through the moss beneath them. "But..." Her hand slid lower, nails scraping lightly over his Adam's apple. "Perhaps we could strike a bargain. Your codes for my... guidance."
The mushroom's bioluminescence pulsed in time with her pupils dilating. Somewhere beyond the bower, an owl hooted twice.
Em's breath hitched as her thumb lingered on his throat. His fingers twitched toward his missing keyboard, phantom muscle memory typing desperate queries into empty air. "Which codes?" The words tumbled out too fast. "I - I have authentication scripts, Discord bot frameworks, stim pattern algorithms..." His voice cracked like overclocked hardware.
A firefly landed on his wrist - its glow synced perfectly with his racing pulse. Em stared at it, struck dumb by the impossibility. "Listen, I'll... I'll give you everything," he whispered, watching the insect's light refract through his sweat. "Git repositories, API keys, even my damn AWS credentials - " His laugh bordered on hysterical as Shadowmire sniffed his armpit. "Just tell me what you want from this... this walking dumpster fire of JavaScript."
The moth on his knee took flight, wings painting neon fractals in the dark.
Valithra's grin turned sharp as she reached behind her, pulling a weathered leather satchel from the shadows where it hadn't been a moment before. The buckles unfastened with a sound like knuckles cracking, revealing a vial of iridescent ink that swirled like oil on water, a raven's quill still flecked with dried blood at its tip, and a book bound in what looked like living bark - its pages thick vellum that pulsed faintly, as if breathing.
"Every algorithm," she murmured, pressing the quill into Em's shaking hand. Her fingertips lingered on his knuckles, warm as sunbaked stone. "Every stim pattern that makes mortals writhe. The Discord bot's... hungers." Shadowmire chuffed approval as she uncorked the ink, releasing a scent like lightning-struck oak. "Write until your hand cramps and your mind empties. Then..."
Her thigh brushed against his erection through the fabric, deliberate as a cat rubbing against furniture. "...we'll see what else needs documenting.*
The quill moved with unnatural fluidity across the vellum, its bloody tip weaving Em's knowledge into glowing runes that pulsed like server LEDs. His wrist should've ached after the third page - after the twentieth - but some enchantment kept his tendons supple as fresh honeycomb. Between paragraphs, he glimpsed equations rearranging themselves mid-sentence, variables dancing into optimal configurations.
Then the leather creaked.
Em blinked down at himself - where had his jeans gone? The supple brown hide hugging his thighs smelled of cedar and something muskier, moving with him like a second skin. His erection strained against the laces, each subtle shift sending delicious friction vibrating up his spine.
"Fuck," he breathed, the quill never pausing as it transcribed his stim pattern algorithms with terrifying precision. The ink shimmered where it touched the page, tendrils of code rewriting themselves into something... hungrier.
Shadowmire's tail thumped against his bare foot.
The quill flickered like a failing cursor, yet the pages beneath remained stubbornly blank - no, not blank. Em squinted. The first page swallowed his algorithms whole, runes dissolving into the vellum's grain like rainwater into parched earth. Each equation he penned vanished the moment ink touched parchment, leaving only the faintest afterimage shimmering at the edges of his vision.
A cold realization dripped down his spine. He glanced up at Valithra through sweat-damp lashes. "Wait. This isn't documentation - " His voice cracked as another synaptic pathway unraveled - the memory of debugging his first stim script evaporated like morning mist. "You're eating my memories."
Shadowmire licked his knee with a sandpaper tongue. The panther's breath smelled suspiciously of JavaScript.
Valithra's fingers slowed their lazy stroking against Em's leather-clad erection, nails scritching just enough pressure to make him gasp. She tilted her head - not in denial, but like a panther considering a wounded gazelle. "Mm. Not eating, little iron-rat." Her thumb circled the head through the laces, smearing precum that smelled of ozone and overclocked processors. "Just... translating."
Shadowmire chuffed as she plucked the quill from Em's trembling hand. The ink dripped onto his bare thigh - it burned cold, etching glowing runes into his skin before sinking beneath the surface. "Your codesmith memories taste like burnt silicon and midnight oil," she mused, licking the quill's tip clean. "But the Veil craves sweeter things."
Her free hand untied his laces with practiced ease. The leather fell away, releasing his cock into the humid air. A firefly landed on the tip - its bioluminescence pulsed in time with his frantic heartbeat.
Valithra's fingers traced the glowing runes fading into Em's thigh with something akin to reverence. "Finish etching your knowledge, little iron-rat," she murmured, pressing the quill back into his hand. Her thumb brushed the hollow behind his knee - the touch sent tremors up his spine.
Shadowmire butted his massive head against Em's shoulder, nearly toppling him into the vellum pages. "The Veil hungers for your last algorithms," she continued, voice moss-soft but edged with urgency. "Then..."
Her lips brushed his temple where the wasp had stung. The pain dissolved instantly, replaced by a cool numbness that smelled of crushed mint. "...you'll walk these woods with me. No more concrete cages. No more dying screens."
The quill pulsed in his grip like a living thing. Beyond the bower, the trees sighed in unison - a sound like a thousand mothers rocking their children to sleep. Em's fingers spasmed around the quill as another neural pathway unraveled - the memory of his first GitHub commit dissolving like sugar in tea. His cock twitched against his stomach, the firefly's wings tickling his slit with every frantic pulse of its light. "Wait - " His throat clicked around the word, dry as a dead motherboard. "What happens when - hnng - when the last line vanishes?"
Shadowmire's purr vibrated through his ribs. The code flowing from his hand was changing - less JavaScript, more something primal that tasted of copper and clover when it hit the page. His toes curled in the moss as the quill transcribed his deepest stim pattern archives directly from his synapses, bypassing conscious thought entirely.
The leather pants shifted against him, seams whispering promises against hypersensitive skin. He barely recognized his own voice: "Valithra, I think your book's overwriting my... my firmware - "
The firefly plunged into his urethra. Its light turned his cock translucent for one excruciating second before the feeling exploded outward in fractal ecstasy.
The quill clattered onto the moss as Em's fingers spasmed open - empty. His last algorithm dissolved into the vellum with a sound like a sighing API endpoint going dormant forever. Valithra watched the change ripple through him: the way his shoulders lost their programmer's hunch, how his breath deepened into something unfettered by caffeine and cortisol.
Her hand wrapped around his cock, slick with sap and spider-silk oil, pumping in time with Shadowmire's purr. The firefly's glow pulsed beneath his skin now, migrating down his shaft like a loading bar reaching 100%. "There we are," she murmured against his ear, catching the exact moment his last memory of semicolons evaporated. His hips jerked, chasing her fist with desperate, animal grace.
His release hit the floating pages in thick ropes - not white, but iridescent as dragonfly wings. The liquid hardened instantly, sealing away the last remnants of his old life beneath a lustrous shell. Valithra licked a stray droplet from his trembling belly. "Welcome home."
Shadowmire sneezed again. This time, the sound didn't smell like JavaScript.
Em's eyelids fluttered open - really open - for the first time. No more screen glare. No more contact lens dryness. Just crisp morning air filling lungs that didn't wheeze from city smog.
He sat up slowly, moss cool beneath his bare ass. A black cat - no, it must be Shadowmire - rubbed against his thigh, purring like a diesel engine. The little panther's fur smelled of crushed juniper and last night's rain.
His nose wrinkled. The park bench to his left reeked of iron and stale beer. But beyond it... oh. A woman in running shorts stretched near the tree-line, her ponytail bouncing with each calf raise. The scent of her arousal hit him like a thrown brick - musky, salty, alive.
Em was moving before he realized it. Hands and knees sinking into dew-wet grass. Hips rolling with a feline grace that shouldn't feel so natural. The black cat matched his pace, a dark mirror to his stalking advance.
The runner turned. Her gasp tasted like peppermint gum and adrenaline. Em's tongue lolled in a pant he didn't remember learning.
…