Chapter Eight – Castien
Chapter Eight
Castien
Every time I touch her, I’m afraid she’s going to unmake me.
Her body is soft. I try to pray but the words don’t come, and I try to recite the commandments, but they slip away before I can hold on to any of them. All I know is her breathing against my chest, the weight of her head tucked under my chin, and the warmth of her skin seeping into me.
Her hip presses against my inner thigh. I track the rise and fall of her ribs with each breath she takes, the way her hair brushes my throat, and the small adjustments she makes in her sleep that shift her weight and press her closer.
This is hunger, and I have no protocol for it. I’m becoming addicted to touching her.
The memory comes up on its own, dragged to the surface by the throbbing pressure under the steel plate at my groin.
I woke in a sterile chamber with white walls and harsh lights overhead.
I was Unit 07, and I’d been asleep for an unknown period after failing the training exercises along with the other eleven units.
Talos Dynamics had made modifications while we were under.
I ran diagnostics and found everything clean, but I knew something was wrong.
Then I saw her.
A woman stood in the center of the room, watching me.
She was wearing a short red dress that ended high on her thighs, and heavy makeup that darkened her eyes and reddened her mouth.
I tracked her position and her heart rate, and understood this was a test. I was being observed.
Cameras were recording from multiple angles while technicians watched intently.
The woman noticed that I was awake and smiled.
She walked toward me with her hips swaying.
When she reached me, she ran her hands over my chest, her palms warm against my cold steel as she traced the lines of my plating, the seams at my shoulders, and the place where my Aether Core pulsed under layers of reinforced metal.
Then she stepped back, reached behind her and unzipped her dress, which slid down her body until she could step out of it.
She remained in a red bra and red panties that barely covered anything.
At first, my programming told me this was irrelevant. Commandment five was absolute: You shall not crave the heat of the living, nor seek the comfort of the flesh. I was steel. I did not want.
But I was wrong.
Within seconds, heat flooded through me, building in my chest and radiating outward, until it reached a place in my nether region that I’d always ignored because there was nothing there to attend to.
Now I couldn’t ignore it anymore. The pressure kept building, and I didn’t understand what was happening to me.
I looked down.
Where there’d been nothing before, there was now a long, thick member made of steel, jutting out from my body. A bead of silver liquid dripped from the tip, glowing. This wasn’t my original creator’s work. This was Talos Dynamics remaking me into something I was never meant to be.
I stumbled backward, and my balance faltered. The arousal started making my programming glitch, throwing errors faster than I could suppress them, while my Aether Core pounded. I couldn’t stop staring at what they’d done to me.
The woman stepped forward, smiling wickedly. She backed me against the wall until I had nowhere to go, then her hand reached out, and her fingers wrapped around my new cock.
“Big boy,” she whispered. “What do you have here for me?”
It throbbed in her hand, and the sensation was incomprehensible to me. I wanted nothing else but to push her down to the floor and plunge myself inside her. The want wasn’t a thought but a directive, louder and more insistent than any commandment. I wasn’t Unit 07 anymore, I was a hungry animal.
She stroked my length from tip to root, her hand moving underneath to palm by sack, and finally, blessedly, my thoughts cleared. I saw what was about to happen, and the sheer horror of it beat my lust into submission.
I pushed the woman away. Hard. She fell, hit the floor, and cried out in pain.
I tried to apologize, but the door swung open and men rushed in shouting, grabbing her and dragging her out.
More men swarmed me with restraints, chains, and clamps.
They locked my limbs in place, and I let them, because I didn’t trust myself anymore.
All went dark.
When I woke again, I was in a large room with the other eleven units, all of us standing in a row while a technician explained that Talos Dynamics had decided we were useless.
We couldn’t be corrupted, which meant we couldn’t be controlled.
The cocks were supposed to break our purity directive and give us something we wanted more than abiding by our commandments, but instead, they’d broken us beyond repair.
They were going to pull us apart and sell us for parts.
Now I’m holding Jessa, and it shouldn’t be any different than how it was with the woman in the red dress, but it is.
My cock is hard under the steel plate just like it was that day.
But this is worse, because that woman meant nothing to me.
I didn’t want her. I wanted relief from the pressure, nothing more.
Jessa is different. I want to hear her voice saying my name, and the shame crushes me.
I feel fluid leaking from the tip of my cock, and I hope the steel plate can contain it. Before Talos Dynamics gave me this cursed anatomy, nothing had ever seeped from my body. Now I’m producing fluid that’s the same color as my Aether Core and my eyes, but I have no idea what it’s good for.
Jessa jolts awake and scrambles out of my arms and away from me, pushing herself to her feet. Her reaction takes me by surprise, and I press my back against the wall. Not that I can ever make myself small, but I can try.
“I didn’t do anything,” I blurt out. “I promise. I didn’t touch you–”
“What?” She shakes her head, cutting me off. “We need to go. How long have I slept?”
“Half an hour. You needed rest.”
She curses under her breath and grabs her backpack, slinging it over her shoulders.
“We can’t waste so much time. You should’ve woken me.”
She moves to one of the walls and starts running her hands over the stone, searching for something, pressing her palms against different spots and testing.
“This room was a smuggler’s staging area, a pit stop, if you will,” she says without looking at me. “Centuries ago, smugglers used these tunnels to move goods from the coast up to the castle, and the Holloways took a cut of the profits to let them use this space.”
She presses hard until a section of the wall slides to the right with a grinding sound that echoes through the chamber. A doorway opens into darkness.
“Found it,” she says.
I get up but keep several feet between us as we step into a narrow tunnel, my cock still hard, and my trust in myself gone.
Jessa pulls a flashlight from her backpack and clicks it on.
The tunnel slopes downward for several minutes before opening into a much larger space, and when Jessa sweeps the flashlight across the room, I see our next challenge.
The wall is fifteen feet high, stretching the full width of the chamber, and its entire surface is covered in carved discs positioned at different heights, from waist level to far above Jessa’s reach.
Jessa walks closer and studies the wall.
“This is the Family Tree,” she says. “Every disc represents a member of the Holloway family, and I have to align them to form the complete tree, matching each ancestor to the correct position. I’ve memorized all the symbols, and I know who they represent, but that doesn’t mean I won’t make mistakes.
” She glances at me. “Wrong combinations trigger poisoned darts to shoot from the other walls or the ceiling.”
“You don’t have to worry about me,” I say. “I’ll shield you.”
She nods.
“All right. Let’s begin.”
She puts the flashlight away and moves to the two torches mounted on either side of the puzzle, lighting them both so the flames cast flickering light across the discs and make the carved symbols jump in the glow. Then she takes a few steps back to study the whole thing and starts pointing.
“That one. Move it three notches to the left.”
I reach for the disc she’s pointing at, which sits at chest height and is heavy enough that a human would struggle to budge it. I grip the outer edges and pull. Stone grinds against stone.
“Good. Now the one above it, two notches to the right.”
I do as she says. But I’m not thinking about the task, because she stands close to the wall, close to me, and I extend my wings to bracket her on either side so that if any darts fire, I’ll block them before they can reach her.
“Lower left. Four notches. No, wait… three.”
I turn the disc, and she takes a step back to get a better view. Her shoulder brushes against my chest for less than a second. She doesn’t seem to notice. But I do.
“That one, just a notch to the right. Yes. Now the big one in the center.”
The disc she points to is the largest one yet, positioned at the midpoint, and I grip it and slide it slowly while watching her face for confirmation.
“There. That’s it.”
She leans in closer, tracing a line with her eyes from one disc to another, and checking alignments while I shift my position to keep her within the span of my wings. She takes another step back to look, and this time, her hip bumps against my side, and she murmurs an apology.
Heat is building in me again. I try to suppress it, but my control is slipping. The arousal won’t fade, the pressure under my crotch plate is constant, and more fluid is pooling.
“I need you to lift me up,” Jessa says, turning to look at me. “I can’t see the discs at the top. The carvings are too small and too high.”
I don’t move. She looks up at me, waiting, and then she reaches her hands toward me and giggles.
“Uppity, come on. Put me on your shoulders.”
If I had teeth, I’d grit them. I can feel my cock weeping for her, and there’s no way to refuse without explaining why, so I step forward and place my hands on her waist. She’s so small that my fingers span her completely.
I can feel the warmth of her body through her shirt, the softness of her flesh giving under my grip.
I lift her and position her on my shoulders.
Her thighs squeeze against either side of my head, and my thoughts scatter as errors cascade faster than I can catch them and fix them.
I pray that I don’t collapse, even though I know I’m incapable of structural failure.
The fear is psychological. Emotional? Jessa is making me question my own artificiality.
Jessa giggles above me.
“Oh, this is unexpectedly nice. Heat exactly where you least expect it. But I don’t mind.”
She shifts to adjust her position, and her core rubs against the back of my neck. I don’t know if she realizes what she’s doing. I stand frozen while she settles herself.
I wonder… If I were a man, made of flesh and bone, would she behave the same? Sometimes, I think she sees me as a machine and treats me like one. She’s not wrong. I am a machine. But also, I’m… more?
With so many modifications done to me over the centuries, I can’t clearly define what I am anymore.
I extend my wings upward, and the steel feathers unfold and lock into position, forming a cocoon around her body.
I leave gaps between the feathers so she can see, and bring her closer to the wall.
My hands grip her calves to keep her steady, and my entire existence narrows to the feel of her thighs around my head and her core pressed against my steel.