Fantastical Creatures

Bluraeg was hungry. He sniffed the air hoping to scent a meal, but he smelled only inedible things. He crouched in the underbrush that lined the road to the city. He hadn't eaten in months, not since the old man had died.

When the old man lived, Bluraeg had been fat. Bluraeg remembered feeling the call. He wished he could feel the call again, some other person finding the old records of the spell the old man had found. He had been a much younger man then. Not a youth, certainly, at thirtysix summers or so, but not yet old either. He was not a sage or a wizard or a wiseman, just a man who had been taught letters by a kindly priest as a boy and had a curious mind.

He was an unwise man. He was also selfish and cared little for the wellbeing of others. These qualities had led him into a dilemma. His eldest daughter was with child. Her name was Thora. He was quite angry at her for getting pregnant. He already had six girls and his wife had died. He didn't need another useless mouth to feed, nor a baby's squalling interrupting his peace. She shouldn't have been so alluring, looking at him with her damnably beautiful eyes. She shouldn't have stood so close to him, taunting him with her young and shapely body. She should have fought him harder, instead of just crying and saying "No Papa! What are you doing, Papa? No!" over and over again, until after the third or fourth time he came to her she just sniffled. She didn't even fight him off anymore. The slut! If it weren't him it would have been some other village man or boy. He was sure of it.

And he was certain people would be asking questions about who the baby's father was. He didn't want that, either. All of this was why on that afternoon so long ago he had looked up the spell in the book he had bought from the bookseller at the market years before. He was no mage. He had only attempted one of the spells before, a small one that should have made the firewood inexhaustible. Instead, it had made the firewood he cast it upon unignitable. He had tossed the book to the back of the woodpile in anger at that time, but on this day he was desperate enough to try again. He found the spell and set about collecting the necessary materials.

As the spell book instructed, he laid out the specified herbs: henbane and hellbore and monkshood. He inscribed the sigil on the table and placed the candles in their places along those lines. He placed an ember from the fire into the censer and called for Thora to come join him. He concealed a small knife in his right hand and sprinkled the herbs on the ember with his left  as his daughter entered the room. The smoke was foul. "Give me your hand," he commanded her. An obedient girl she offered her hand without hesitation to her father. He grabbed her forearm firmly, pulled her wrist over the censer and knicked it with the knife. She cried out and tried to withdraw her arm, but he held her too tightly. The blood dripped down and hissed as it hit the glowing ember. After several drops of blood had fallen on herbs and ember he let go of her arm. She pulled back and as she nursed the cut she heard him say, "Womb feeder, child eater, come and claim your meal. For you here waits tonight a life that you may steal."

Thora's eyes grew wide as she heard these words. She'd never heard of such a thing, something that might eat the child inside her. She'd been afraid already, of course. Unmarried, pregnant. No girl she'd known had had such a thing happen to her, but she'd heard stories of girls forced into prostitution, or babes given to deserving married women and girls forced to live the rest of their lives alone and disgraced. But she'd never heard of anything that fit the discription her father had just intoned. Her fear turned into terror. For a moment she thought to run, but she had no where she could run. She held her breath, waiting for something to appear.

Nothing happened.

"Blasted piece of dung. I should have never wasted a single coin on this wretched, useless book," her father growled. He flung the book back behind the woodpile, doused the ember and blew out the candles. He stomped out of the room in a fury.

Thora let out her breath and went to the barn to do the evening chores.

Many miles away Bluraeg smelled the pregnant girl's blood. Food! He heard the call and listened carefully so he could follow it to its source. Then he began to run.

It was the quietest part of the night, hours before dawn, when he arrived at the little farm outside the village. He'd been able to smell the pregnant girl for some time now, and he followed her scent to her father's room. He slipped into the room silently.

Father and daughter both woke at nearly the same time, sensing the unexpected presence that shared the room with them. Thora screamed at the frightful creature. Instantly Bluraeg slipped an image into her father's mind along with a physical sensation of grabbing her wrists, his knees on her shoulders, squatting with his nether parts pressed into her face so as to muffle her screams. Her father required no more prompting to hold her down and cover her face, his balls falling over her chin.

Bluraeg grabbed her ankles and spread them apart. He shoved his face into her cunt and moved his hands to her hips for the best leverage. She kicked and squirmed, but his kind was designed for this sort of abuse. He barely felt her bare heels striking his back. He slipped his hollow tongue up her birth canal and found the opening of her cervix. Her screams turned to wails of pain as he forced his toungue into her womb. Chemicals in his saliva mimicked the hormones her own body would have produced in labor and her womb began contracting. They came on unnaturally quickly, with no time between each pain. She moaned and cried as these terrible parodies of labor pains racked her body. Bluraeg scraped his toungue hard against the walls of her womb, setting off more screams. He loosened and detached the blood filled tissues, sucking them up like horde'vours. Then he pierced the water sac with his toungue and sucked the tiny developing babe out through his anteater like toungue. He savored the taste. He washed it down with the amniotic fluid and blood. For dessert he sucked down the sac itself. There was no more delicious taste in the world than this, he thought.

Finally, satiated, he withdrew his toungue. Her father looked up then and saw his third daughter in the doorway, staring in shock at the threesome.

"You be good or this is what will happen to you, too," he warned sternly, "Now get back to your bed!" He got up off of Thora as the younger girl left, terrified. Thora curled up in shock and pain, unable to think or understand what had just happened.

Bluraeg had other ideas about his third daughter and (as he read the man's mind) Thora's other sisters as well. He sent these to the man, images of him raping and impregnating each of his daughters, the feeding, and then doing it again and again and again.

And so it came to pass. For many years Bluraeg ate well and grew fat. But unlike Bluraeg's kind, men are mortal. The old man eventually died. Bluraeg left the old man's daughters then. They were now nearing the point where they could no longer provide him with food and Bluraeg could not impregnate them. Without a man to do so they were useless to him. He left the traumatized women to the rest of their lives, whatever they might be.

And he crouched in the dark, listening, smelling, hoping he would scent his next meal soon.