*For those who read my stories, my friend is running me ragged! Begging me to write these. Hi friend, you know who you are! Anyway, this is more quest-based then I ever expected to write, so I hope that you all enjoy it.
As a bit of a disclaimer, the sex in here is very rough, and a little extreme. If you do not like tentacles, this is not your story. If you do not know what I mean, look up 'tentacle hentai' and then decide if you want to read.
All characters are 18+*
THE CIRCLE DEMON
Helen had been a strange girl from the start. Raised by her mother, her mother's husband died before she was born. In the village, her father had been a respected huntsman, so no one openly spoke about the controversy around her birth.
Both Moll and her late husband Malthus had been hale and healthy, with sturdy bodies and reddish complexions. Moll's daughter was born six months after her husband died in a hunting accident, and her child had midnight-black hair and bright green eyes. Unsettling eyes.
In a small town like this, a low degree of inter-family relations was unavoidable. First cousins were frowned upon as marriage partners, but not forbidden. Second and third cousins were often married. Everyone in the town had the same basic coloration. Blonde and tawny hair, brown eyes, ruddy well-tanned skin and large bones.
Helen broke the mould already as a babe with black hair and green eyes, and as she grew older, more and more set her apart from the others. She was a tiny little thing, always smaller and slighter then the other girls her age. She was quick, and intelligent, and had clever long-fingered hands that could pick up sewing faster then any other girl her age.
Moll was terrified for her clever different little girl. The unnamed village was isolated except for the wool traders that came once a year. It had been twenty years since the last witch-scare. Moll didn't want her strange daughter to bear the brunt of the village's superstition. Especially since Helen had a birthmark on her thigh. The mark was shaped like a crescent moon, and it was just the sort of thing that would drive the superstitious village into a frenzy.
Moll forbade Helen to swim or bathe with the other children, and instilled into her at an early age that it was forbidden to take her clothes off.
Helen's mother needed to keep her safe, for she knew better then any suspicious villager how inhuman her daughter was.
---
Helen had grown into a young woman, but not a well-loved one. Helen knew what she was. She was an odd creature, and she had never seemed melancholy about not having friends, beyond a vague yearning. The boys didn't like her because her strangeness was threatening. The girls didn't like her because they remembered all of the 'incidents' when they were children.
No one had tried to trace these back to Helen, or even tell anyone. But the group of girls that were Helen's age avoided the strange petite girl with a wary watchfulness. Just her presence was enough to put them on edge.
It was spring, and the new strawberries had just been picked. Helen was bringing a basket to sell to the widow Hautzig, who made jelly, and was the strange girl's one friend and confidant.
Helen had always stayed short and slim. She was barely a hair above five feet tall. Her body was curvy, but still slight. She wore a dull green skirt that went to her ankles, but her feet were bare. Helen hated shoes. Her hair was twisted into a plain braid. On her upper body she wore a simple chemise (loose linen shirt with puffy sleeves and a low neckline) next to her skin and a plain brown vest over that. Some women liked to tighten the vest to make their breasts look bigger, and in some cases, spill over the edge of the vest, barely contained by the translucent chemise.
Helen however, kept her breasts tucked tightly and comfortably under the vest, with the chemise pulled up tight, barely a hint of cleavage showing. Boys hated her anyway, might as well not give them the show.
The widow Hautzig saw her and took the basket of strawberries without a word, giving the girl a few small copper coins. Helen went to her assigned spot next to the loom, where she wove beautiful wool shawls that sold for a high price when the traders came. The friends spent a comfortable minute in silence, until Hautzig broke it.
"I heard that the Richard's boy has been suffering from some terrible dreams lately. He hardly gets a wink of sleep."
It was quiet for a bit longer. Then Helen spoke. "I was bathing, and he was spying. I saw his manhood, he was playing with it."
She closed her eyes, feeling the faint pulse of warmth in her crotch, and the faint feel of slippery wetness. The Richard's boy was a filthy spying tom, why would his dirty gaze make her feel this way? Helen's mother had been hesitant about telling her daughter anything about what a man and woman do to each other, but the widow Hautzig had none of Moll's reservations.
Most of the village girls only knew what strict talks from their mothers and dirty jokes could tell them. Helen knew all about a man's urges, from nightly eruptions, to the soreness they felt if they didn't come. She knew all about her own body, including how to give herself pleasure, and why she became wet if she thought about a man in a sexual way. (In Hautzig's colorful language, "It's to grease yourself up for his pole, so you better be greasy, or it will hurt like hellfire...")
She wondered what it would feel like if it ever happened. Would if feel as good as her hand made her feel every night? Would it hurt? Hautzig's voice woke her up from her rambling thoughts.
"It's been at least five years since you've used your illusions on anyone. You'd best be careful, not that the little inbred brat didn't deserve it anyway, but no more dreams. No more visions, and for heavens sake, don't do that bit where you change yourself. It's downright unsettling, even for me."
"Yes Hautzig." Helen whispered, her hands flying over the loom.
---
Moll was a laundress now that her husband was dead, and she knew that her frail-bodied daughter would never be able to handle the heavy work, slinging wet bundles of bedding and clothes through boiling water with a pole, beating filthy garments on rocks, half-blind from the lye in the cleaning fluid.
Helen had her weaving, and she made baskets and mats out of willow branches that she gathered herself. They brought in good money, but only one day a year when the traders came. Helen spent a part of her day weaving shawls at Hautzig's house, but she spent the rest of the day in the forest.
That was another reason the village thought her odd. Only the huntsmen went into the forest, and everyone else was too clumsy and unexperienced to get through the underbrush, and terrified of the grey mountain wolves that roamed the forest. Helen went deep into it almost every day.
---
Helen went home to the little hut in the scrublands near the edge of the village. Steam normally billowed up from the large cauldron in front of the house, but today it lay there empty and brooding. Helen shivered, feeling a tingling sensation in her spine. She felt uneasy. Something was wrong.
She ran into the hut, dropping the basket that she had used to bring Hautzig her strawberries. She ran into her hut to see her mother lying peacefully on the bed they shared. But when Helen ran to her, her callused hand was ice cold, and her eyes did not open.
Helen took in the half-full cup of boiled hemlock on the table, and the way her mother had dressed in her finest clothing and combed her hair. The effect was somewhat ruined in how Moll had voided herself after death.
Helen very calmly walked outside, and into the woods with tears streaming down her face. She was walking when she entered the woods, then she started jogging, and then she started to run.
The girl was running as fast as she could, sobbing, screaming, blind. Thorns and branches tore at her arms and skirt, rocks and twigs tore at the hard soles of her feet. Her hair tore free of it's braid and filled with leaves and twigs as branches raked at it. Helen had gone mad.
---
Helen's frantic run had slowed to a limping shuffle. She sobbed as she limped over ridges of rock and a carpet of needles. When she came to a trickle of water from a small spring-fed pool, she dropped to her hands and knees and dunked her face in the water, slurping like a horse. The water was like ice, and it shocked her out of her confusion and grief enough to finally realize the danger she was in.
She had no idea where she was. To get to the pool she had crossed a rocky plain, and she had no idea where she had come from, or where to find her trail. The sun was setting, and all she had was a sewing kit, a four-inch knife, what she was wearing and a shawl.
Helen collapsed by the pool and cried, this time with frustration at herself as well as her grief.
Helen was not entirely unprepared. The tears slowly stopped as an deep reserve of steel began to show itself. She would make a fire, find some berries, catch a squirrel maybe. She would survive the night, and then go about finding her trail. She must have left some kind of trail, tramping through the woods like a wounded deer.
She slowly got up where she had collapsed in the stones by the edge of the pool. She took assessment of her situation. Her skirt and the sleeves of her chemise were badly torn. She cut away the hindering tatters of cloth with her knife. The sleeves of her dress now only went to her elbow, and the dress to just a bit below her knees. She wrapped the rags around her sore feet. Her foot-soles were rock-hard from always being barefoot, but even her feet had taken the toll of the long crazed run.
She was beginning to feel how sore she was. She stood to stay limber, and walked into the woods, looking for materials to start a fire.
---
She had a length of springy strong wood about three feet long. She used the cord belt for her skirt to make a rough bow-shape. A resiny halved log was the base, and she had whittled a spindle from a bone-dry piece of cedar. A palm-sized rock was her socket.
She steadied the halved-log base with her feet and placed the tip of the spindle in a small v-shaped groove surrounded by dry shredded birch bark. She wrapped the string of the fire-bow twice around the spindle and then applied pressure on the spindle with the socket-rock in her hand.
