"
... see how she dissolved when you talked about her hair?
"
"
Oh my gosh!
" A girlish giggle. "
I thought I was gonna
die
.
"
Hellebore shifted in his bed. Those voices...
"
And how she swooned at the end~
"
That was... Vesyka. The voluptuous goblin boilermaid. And the other squeaky giggly voice... Eneko?
Hellebore managed to open his eyes. He was under thick, weighty covers. His limbs felt completely asleep, and the air under the blankets was hot and heavy.
The blankets were also
very
... pink.
"
She's so ready for this.
"
He went still. A shiver passed through his heart and stuttered his breath.
That was Catanya's voice.
Why did it... do that to him?
He still felt foggy, blurry, numb, but his mind was starting to recover. He was remembering--vaguely--what had happened earlier. They had... tricked him. Drugged him. Drugged their prince.
And they'd said things. Horrible, forbidden things.
As his cheeks went red, shameful insecurities rose wild and unbidden, and he blurted out, "
What in the Path
is going on here?"
The words burst out of him without thinking. And as the goblins went silent, he instantly felt a deep, foreboding regret.
A shadow passed over the pink-tinted light of the blankets over his head. Then a second. Then a third.
"My, my," Catanya purred. Her voice was suddenly very, very close. "It looks like our little
princess
is awake~"
Hellebore's breath caught.
The blankets flew off him, and he found himself staring up at three catgoblins who looked like they'd caught themselves their very own canary.
Especially Catanya. Catanya's smile was radiant as she towered over him--she was so short, but he was pinned to the goblin's bed, tucked into his blankets as tight as a caterpillar in its chrysalis.
"I--" Hellebore squirmed. The air in the boiler room was hot and muggy, even with his upper body bared, and he felt like a sweaty mess.
His spirit quailing inside him as he recognized that he was naked from the waist up.
Hellebore never looked at himself in the mirror naked. He couldn't stand the sight of his bare chest--even though his father had expressed deep relief when he'd started growing chest hair, it still felt mortifying, exposing, wrong.
That hair was gone now. He saw a straight razor left on the counter to dry, and his motions were too muddy to make out, but
shame
was everywhere,
shame
was enough.
Especially with these... these impudent girls smirking down at him, nakedly,
shamelessly
admiring his royal form.
He sputtered and squirmed. His limbs were still waking up, and fear wasn't piercing through that sleep like it should have been. It felt lopsided, uneven, an arrow split in two before firing.
Their covetous gazes, the smooth softness, the delicate feelings stirring inside him...
No. No, no, no, this was wrong, this was--Scattered Gods, this was
humiliating
--
"H-How dare you," he cried. "I am the
Prince!
How dare you restrain--how dare you
undress
a member of the Royal Family~!"
Why did his voice sound so wispy and hesitant? What was
wrong
with him?
The goblins blinked wide and innocent eyes.
"Why, my Prince!" Catanya exclaimed, leaning in close, and he trembled in dread as her lips approached his ear and her soft, sonorous voice started to infiltrate his head yet again, "You're free to leave at any time! We would never keep you here."
As Hellebore struggled to process this, he heard Eneko murmur to Vesyka, "Plus, like, King Eldon's claim to royalty has always been kinda specious."
Vesyka giggled.
Hellebore's brain was still playing catch-up. He stared up at Catanya in shocked confusion. "W-What?"
"Well, yeah," Eneko chirped, mistaking his target. Pale blue eyes sparkled over a feline smile. "Maybe Alton the First had some place making the claim a few generations ago, but, like, in the Valley's modern political landscape--"
"Of course you can leave, silly!" Catanya cut in, reaching over to pat Eneko's head and not-so-subtly push her out of his field of vision. She winked down at him. "You just...
don't want to
, do you~?"
"I--I don't?" Hellebore felt so disoriented. Eneko's and Catanya's scents were mixing together again, piercing peppermint and sweet rose petals, and he'd come to associate those scents so much with drifting off to sleep in his bathtub, and everything felt so...
warm...
"I mean, of--of course I do!"
"No, you don't," Catanya said more firmly, as if this settled the matter. And then she leaned in to purr right in his ear, and Hellebore's attempted objections melted into dribbling nonsense on his tongue. "You're too
hypnotized
, Princess~"
Vesyka leaned over him, her breasts squeezed into a tight tank top, and gave her chest an indulgent
squeeze
.
"I--" Hellebore's words weakened again, briefly faltering completely as he got caught up watching Vesyka's unspeakably soft, fat tits jiggle together. "N-No, I--"
"My breasts are just too nice to stare at," Vesyka murmured, "aren't they, Princess? Just relax and watch them
squish~
"
"I-I'm not a--a--"
Squish.
"A what?" Catanya purred. His whole world softened a little with every rumble fuzzy downpour of kittenish static over his weakening mind. "Say the word, sweetie~"
"I'm not--I'm not a..."
Hellebore stopped. Fear had begun to trickle in to slow his tongue. Fear, because the word suddenly felt... bigger. More important. Like if he said it, if he felt the prin pop his lips and the cess slither along his tongue like a sibilant sigh, something would change.
Something he couldn't take back.
"I'm--"
Eneko leaned in, licking her luscious black lips with a wicked smirk, and planted a kiss just under his ear.
At the soft, sensuous touch, he found himself letting out a high-pitched, liquid moan.
Eneko peppered him with kisses between her words, the sounds filling his ears with wetness and sloppy indulgence. "See, a claim to royalty--"
*mwah~*
"-- is more a tool of, like--"
*mmmwah~*
"--political rhetoric," she mewed sweetly in his ear.
