When you're newly married, three months pregnant, and get to see your beloved maybe once a week if you're lucky, being stuck in a mansion in the middle of a forest can drive you a little stir-crazy. I really wasn't used to belonging to someone - I didn't mind it, indeed I liked it, but that someone kept vanishing on me, for days at a time. Usually after several hours of fantastic sex, so there was that, but still.
And I had plenty to read. Mostly obscure spellbooks. I always felt like Indiana Jones - or Lara Croft, maybe - going into the library, fighting through cobwebs and blowing the dust from the shelves. I felt almost like a ghost haunting that ancient house with its flickering electrics and rattling pipes, and although sometimes I kept Eric company in the kitchen or sat with Eloise before the fire, I missed hanging out with actual humans.
Not that I was a prisoner. I often followed the path down into the village, where I would charge my phone in the café while reading a book and having lunch. Sometimes I would chat with Fiona or my family over Skype, or I would catch up on world news, or I would watch Diana, the ever cheerful manager of the café as she served and cooked and chatted with her customers. Long, wavy red hair, and blue eyes, nice body too, and so painfully obviously in love with the lawyer from down the street. The married lawyer with the hot wife, two cars and three kids.
I'm definitely gayer than I used to be. If you'd told me ten years ago that I'd now be married to a woman and lusting after another... well, I'd've laughed. Not that I don't still like men as well, just that they don't often excite me the way they used to. A cheerful redhead bringing me coffee with a smile, on the other hand, could hardly fail to escape my notice.
One month into our marriage, Lady Catherine bought us a sex swing. The design was both sturdy and comfortable - thankfully, because I spent a lot of time suspended within its restraints - and was weirdly anachronistic in a house where everything else seemed stuck in the ancient past.
But I loved the way it would hold me open, my ass and pussy on permanent display, ready to be filled by wife's indefatigable futa cock, a true monster whose size I could never quite grow accustomed to. Sweet and tender her kisses might be, but the thrust of her cock was a fierce hammer.
And afterwards too, still suspended, her cum dripping from my sweetly ravished cunt and my too tender ass, pooling on the parquet floor beneath me as I quivered in post-orgasmic bliss.
It was at just such a moment that I asked her: "What if - hypothetically - I were to stray?"
Lady Catherine raised an arch eyebrow. "Hypothetically?" Laughing, she said, "Has some young beauty caught your eye already? Am I truly not enough for you?" She scooped up some cum from my pussy and licked the cream from her fingers. "Mmm... And do I not taste divine?"
"No one could satisfy me like you do," I said.
"And yet..." She smiled kindly. "Fate brought us together, my sweet insatiable love, and our hearts are bound by more than mere affection. Stray all you wish, but you will always be mine."
Her magnificent cock was hard again, and she thrust in hard, stretching the full length of my vagina and forcing a cry from my lips that was as much pain as pleasure. "Besides," she said, her hands resting on my belly, "you will be the mother of my child. Every day you slip further from the human world into the arcane."
She eased out, only to thrust in again, the head of her cock battering against the gate defending my womb. And again, again, again; her beautiful breasts bouncing rhythmically. Laughing, she cried, "No human male could compare to me!"
And she was right. None could. But as she drove herself - and me - to yet another powerful climax, her thick cum bursting joyfully from her pulsing cock, my thoughts strayed to the pretty café-owner who - no doubt sleeping and blissfully unaware that her fate was being decided - was only a mile away.
*
When the only thing standing between you and the love of a women is the frustrating accident of birth that is her being born straight, the temptation to use magic to circumvent Nature's caprice is a torment. I had the means too - a gold wedding ring whose magical power was pure seduction!
But what victory is there in such manipulation? There is only the corruption of one's own soul through the abuse of power. The
Rule of Three
is not to be dismissed lightly.
My gold ring weighed on my mind - not as heavily as Frodo's thankfully, but in its appeal to my mischievous nature and the seductive promise of magic, enchantments and craftsmanship. As a mere human, I lacked the power and understanding to do significant magic, but graced with my wedding ring a whole realm of possibility opened up.
For a few minutes, anyway. Such rings are not intended for the likes of me.
While perusing the spell books in the library, two books had caught my amateur eye:
Night Magic & Bindings
; and
Tarts
, which I mistook initially for a cookery book but discovered the recipes were not for food. No, the author of that book had dedicated his - I assume 'his' - life to the pernicious alchemy of moulding one human into the shape of another, with particular emphasis on maliciously "transforming the plainest of Janes into a bawdy wench fit only for the taverns of Covent Garden."
My initial contempt for the unnamed author of
Tarts
soon gave way to a fascination with his spellcraft, for there was an elegant logic to it and a simplicity that even I could follow, even if I could never see myself being so cruel as to rob a woman of her fundamental self. (Not that I wasn't tempted to turn the slut-shaming bitch in the newsagent's into the very thing she despised.)
Night Magic & Bindings
was a far more difficult book to read, the author assuming her readers to be schooled already in the basics of night magic, and I found myself returning again and again to passages that I'd thought I'd understood before. Without the insight my gold wedding ring provided, I would have abandoned it as an impossible fancy.
"Are you a witch?" Diana asked me in the café one day.
"Excuse me?"
"It's just I saw your book. Night magic and stuff, like my nan was into."
"I'm not a witch," I said. "At least not a very good one."
She laughed. "Who is. My name's Diana, by the way." She pointed redundantly at her name badge. "Mind if I join you for a while?"
I glanced around. The café was empty of other customers. "Sure," I said. "I'm Ali."
Diana slid into the chair opposite me. "I see you around a lot."
"My friend Sasha lives here," I explained, though in truth Sasha and I rarely saw each other.
Diana nodded, but her attention was on the book. "Can I see?"
I didn't think it was wise to start passing real books of magic around, but didn't want to be unnecessarily rude. Shrugging, I handed it over. "It's very old. Be gentle with it."
She nodded absently, and leafed through the pages with obvious reverence - and a frown that gradually deepened. "I've read this before, I think. It feels incredibly familiar."
Maybe she had. For all I knew, her grandmother had written the book. "I think I've figured out parts of it, but I've yet to cast a spell that worked. I feel I'm missing some basic ingredient, something so obvious that it never needed to be mentioned. Something as simple, perhaps, as where and when to do the casting."
Diana nodded. "I only know it has something to do with the elements and Nature..." She looked up at me suddenly. "Do you have a cauldron? You know, like witches in stories?"
I shook my head.
"My nan had one, I remember. She said she used it for all her magic. She showed it to me once. I wonder if it's still there..."
"Where?"
"The forest." She shivered, though the day was warm. "My nan always said there were monsters living there."
"Still are," I said. I should know - I'm married to one of them.
"It's no joking matter," Diana said sharply.
"No," I agreed. "Do you think you could find it?"
"What?"
"Your grandmother's cauldron."
"What about the monsters?" She blushed, no doubt expecting me to make fun of her fears.
"As long as you run faster than me, you'll be fine."
She frowned at me for so long I almost apologised, but then she burst into laughter. "We'd best leave a trail of breadcrumbs..."
Not that that did Hansel and Gretel much good.
*
"It was definitely around here somewhere," Diana said, for maybe the twentieth time. Like Dorothy in
The Wizard of Oz
, we'd wandered off from the yellow brick road into the deeper forest with its enchanted ways. Even I who had grown familiar with its trickery found it difficult to maintain a sense of direction.
We'd started early in the morning, warmly dressed and well provisioned, having waited for Monday, which was Diana's one day off from the café. It was a crisp late-autumn day, and the colours in the forest were past their fiery glory. We'd hoped to find what we'd been looking for and be home before dark, not least because it was the winter solstice and the day would be short and the night long, but time and fortune were against us.
"It's getting late," she said, peering anxiously up through the branches. There was a deepening chill in the air too, and the sounds of the forest were subdued. Her enthusiasm for this adventure had worn off rapidly after lunch.
"Okay," I said, reluctant to give up, but not wanting to push Diana any further. "Let's go back."
Her look of relief was profound - matched only by her astonishment two minutes later as we practically walked into the very thing we'd been looking for. A witch's hut. Sadly neither made of sweets nor walking on hen's legs, but imbued nevertheless with a sense of ancient knowledge shrouded in secrecy.
"I wonder if magic kept us from seeing it until now," I said, tracing the runes etched into the moss-free, unrotting wood of the structure. The foliage around the hut was thick with holly and hawthorn, and it sat in the shadow of an ancient oak overlooking a narrow stream, but the door, once reached, opened without too much effort.
Though dark inside, our eyes adjusted, and there was light enough to see the narrow cot against the wall and the cauldron still suspended by chains from the rafters above a central hearth. It wasn't the heavy iron tripod cauldron I'd imagined, the sort you could boil a hero of Greek myth in if you were peckish, but it would certainly make a decent stew. There was even a mesh over the cauldron, perhaps for steaming vegetables.
"Did you bring beans?" I asked wistfully.
"No."
"Matches?"
"No. A torch, though."
I sighed. My instincts told me the sun was setting even as we stood there, seduced by this discovery. "We should stay here tonight," I said. "Here be monsters, and we may not make it home in time."
Diana nodded, clearly no more eager than I to dare the dark woods. Her torch was a bright LED one that would keep us well lit for hours, and we had food left over still. We even had each other for warmth. "Go fill the bottles from the stream," I said, handing her mine. "And fill the cauldron too, just in case."
"In case what?"
"Magic - elements, you said. Also, add some earth from the riverbank to the cauldron." I had an idea now how it might work. "Oh, and eye of newt and toe of frog, while you're at it." I grinned at her as I headed out to gather kindling. There was a stack of decades-old wood against the wall inside the hut, but I needed something lighter.
