Chapter 11
Blinking in the gloom, Kore lay still. Wrapped in a heavy blanket of silence. The only signs of life the rise and fall of her chest. A faint flutter beneath the corner of her jaw.
She was alone. It was there in the quiet.
The hush.
Her every muscle aching and sore, her sex still fluttering with the unspeakable things that had been done to it… but… she was alone.
Breath shallow, each inhale a struggle against some immense pressure she couldn’t fathom as she was. Lying prone in a pool of slime and shame. A grotesque echo she refused to acknowledge.
Instead, she squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe through the shame.
Outside, beyond the cave, the tide splashed against the shore. Calling for her. A beckoning. For her surrender.
It was an offer of oblivion, if only she might slip beneath the waves and let go.
But it was a lie.
A cruel temptation, for she knew better now. The sea was a hunting ground, and she… she was nothing but prey.
The cave pressed in around her. At once too small, too damp, too close, and yet…
cavernous. Pulsing with a sinister heat not her own.
Her skin scraped raw—nipples, knees, elbows, and cheek—from the unforgiving kiss of the stone floor, and a grip of prickling, unrelenting cruelty.
Her ears fuzzing with the scream of silence that echoed with obscene memory.
And her lips. They tasted of salt. Blood. The particular flavor of her pleas where they still lingered on her palate, the way she’d begged for relief—from torment or for more, she couldn’t bring herself to say.
But her belly.
She didn’t want to look.
So her hand moved instead. Trembling, sliding across feverish skin, until she encountered the swell.
Still there.
Still achingly full.
Proof that the impossible was real. That she’d begged a god—her god—to save her, but another had answered. A darker one.
A leviathan.
From the deep.
A beast with a single thought, driven by primal instinct to breed female flesh. Willing or not.
Her hand slid lower, toward the slick throb pounding between her legs.
A gasp shattered the oppressive silence, then.
Swollen, slippery skin came alive at the slightest touch. Her mound was raw, gooey with something that slipped but couldn’t be wiped away. Gelatinous ropes hardened where they’d been left to dry.
But her clit?
It screamed.
Her core clenching around a plug of something solid, she couldn’t help but trace that sensitive bundle of bulbous nerves.
A tiny climax shuddered through her. Hardly provoked, a thing she’d never experienced before the beast—not even in the divine chambers of Apollo’s consecrated holy men. Those chosen to spill virgin blood across the altar in the heart of Delphi.
It was the venom.
She knew.
Even through the haze of climax, her fingers a fumbling blur of desperation, she knew—how unnatural this fog really was. That if she’d been meant to climb such a delirious peak for any, it should have been the holy men who served Apollo.
And yet…
Kore could feel it moving through her blood, whispering the secrets of the sea through her veins. Throbbing in time with the pulse pounding in her sex.
Too depleted to cry, she squeezed her eyes shut and saw a flash in the sparkling dark. A canvas on which to paint her torment, where she couldn’t escape. Fragments of something sinister danced just beyond her grasp. The weight of that impossible body atop hers, scales grating against her skin.
And the relentless thrust of an inhuman cock filling her.
“Gods,” she whispered. Had he returned to her? Taking advantage of helpless flesh while she’d been enthralled in the grip of unconsciousness? “No,” she rasped, denying it. It was the venom playing tricks. Nothing more.
Gritting her teeth, she tried to push herself up. Tried to flee, and only managed to stagger and slip. She collapsed, the impact sending a ripple of movement sloshing through her. It was as if the very sea itself had been pumped inside her, churning with the fury of the tides.
“No,” she said again, teeth bared. Determination scrawled across her brow. She would not give in—a priestess of Apollo was trained to resist the dark, and so she would fight it to her very last breath.
A gull cried. Drawing her slitted gaze to the world outside these desecrated walls.
Night. It had begun to blanket all her eyes could see. Everything they couldn’t.
And she was alone.
Baring her teeth, ears popping as she clenched her jaw, Kore fought to stand. Despite the throbbing, tender flesh begging for relief, the bruises and chaffed skin, and the belly full of poisonous cum. Sweating, breath coming in great, heaving gulps, she claimed her feet and wobbled in the dusk.
“Just one step,” she whispered to no one, because there was only the dark. “Just take one, single step.”
It was a challenge that nearly toppled her. Her center of balance sent her heaving too far forward. Hands flying out, she clung to the cave wall, fingers hooked into claws. Protecting her belly, where it protruded before her.
Sweat ran in tacky rivulets down her temples, soaking her hair. But she persisted as she’d been taught. Clawing her way out, she left the cave where she’d been fucked by a beast, and collapsed in the sand with a cry of triumph.
The tide splashed against the shore. Mocking her. Each lapping wave pushed a little higher as the sea encroached. Foamy peaks capped with the dying sun, stained purple and crimson.
She stayed until the sweat cooled and dried on her skin, replaced by the kiss of seafoam and dew. Stayed until the sun slipped beneath the waves and drowned in the distant sea.
Motionless. Her limbs aching with the burden of the beast’s venom, his sperm and cruel grip… but most of all, it was the weight of her own complicity.
Her shame.
“I’m sorr—”
Choking, she couldn’t bring herself to say it. Couldn’t muster the apology because she had no idea where she could even begin to atone for what she’d done.
So she sat in the surf. Staring as the tide rose to lave at her toes, kissing her shins… suckling at her knees. She stayed until her thighs prickled with foam splashing across the shore.
Only then did she scramble back. Shocked back into herself by the knowledge that he was still out there. Lurking where she could not see.
That he was not finished with her.
Not yet.
“I am a priestess of Delphi,” she whispered. Forcing steel into her blood, Kore stood and scowled at the surf. “And I will not be taken.”
She needed a weapon. Some method to defend herself against a god.
Food. Water.
Resources that would enable her defiance—anything and everything she might use as a means to resist.
Trembling, Kore shook off the daze. Hands cupping the swell of her inflated belly, swaying in the dark, she paused.
Took a breath. And turned her back on the sea.
Tugging the scraps of her robes around her nudity, she concealed puffy nipples from the bite of chilly wind and trudged through the sea foam, determined to master the haunting dark.
It was a slog.
A brutal trek through wet sand, limping to avoid overusing her wounded leg still throbbing with venom, she set her eyes to the eastern end of the island and began to march.
Pacing the water’s edge, she hauled her swollen belly.
Her eyes flicking through the dark as she explored her prison.
This lonely spit of land in the heart of some unknown sea.
But there was nothing. Nothing but a limestone hill, a beach, and a cave sliced into stone from aeons of crashing tidal waves.
It took her less than two hundred paces to find the edge of the beach—she counted. Encountering crumbling boulders vanishing beneath the waves. Treacherous in full daylight, but at night? Without so much as a sliver of moon to guide her way?
She whimpered.
Hugging her rags around herself, she took a trembling breath and turned back.
But the Western limit was much the same, only here, the wind slapped her face and mocked her tears, sending her stumbling back to the beach.
There was only the cave itself. Cut into stone, a sheer face of rock. A hysterical laugh bubbled from her lips, for she stumbled toward the only whisper of freedom with a single thought in her foggy head.
The beast was enormous.
A master of his element, yes, utterly uncontested. But here? On land? Such a creature could not climb.
Kore rushed toward the rock wall. Where gulls had gathered sticks to hold their eggs, where they might watch the trials below from lofty perches. Bleary-eyed in the night.
She scrambled atop a boulder, standing on the balls of her feet. Fingers outstretched, she grasped the biting edge of a handhold and tried to heft herself up.
But she was ungainly.
Weak from drowning and fucking.
Heavy from… everything else.
She fell. Crashing back to the unforgiving earth in a puddle of bruised and swollen flesh. A pathetic heap of limbs splashing into frigid wet.
The impact sent a new pain shooting through her, then. Bright and distracting, a new bruise to add to the rest. One she hardly bothered to notice, for the ache in her cum-crusted seam…
… and the water.
It had risen while she'd fumbled through the night.
The tide sloshed at her knees, almost flooding the cave.
“Gods,” she whispered. Horrified by the realization. “No…”
It was right there.
Rising.
Already.
A hint of how this cave had come to be in the first place, the water was surging higher with every pulse of the sea. Chasing her back inside, she scrambled free of the surf and headed for higher ground.
Clambering into the dark, screeching as the water chased her, she went for higher ground. Reduced to little more than a primitive animal fleeing for whatever meager scrap of safety might be claimed.
Panic lent her agility, despite her injuries and her girth, for she was a girl born of the mountains, once. Bred to serve in the temple that reached for the sky, where jagged rock baked in the everlasting sun.
Knees crashing into stone, Kore collapsed in the same place she’d begun. Where she could still smell the scent of seed and brine. And she knew…
… the beast would return with the tide.
Curling around her toes, her belly rolling with sloshing cum, she hiccuped. “Nooo,” she breathed. Cringing. Trying to keep her skin free of the encroaching sea. “Please… Please, I can’t…”
But it was too late.
Already, the water swirled around her ankles, making her flinch at the touch that was both icy and searing hot. Skin prickling with a shower of gooseflesh, a keening wail assaulted her vocal cords.
And then, “Not again,” she murmured, eyes glazed by a fog of panic.
Seeing what wasn’t there, but would come again.
“Not again. Please. B-By Ap-Apollo,” she stammered, fingers trying to twist into patterns already fading from memory, instead, daring to speak her Lord’s name for the first time since she’d drowned and summoned another. “I beg you. Let me be.”
It was futile.
A plea drowned by the crash of lapping waves.
Mocking her, the surf lapped at her calves, soaking her ragged robes to lick at blotchy, water-logged skin.
She didn’t notice.
Rigid with fear, Kore could only stare into the dark. Flinching at every tiny sound. Seeing the glint of scales in the peak of every wave. The glimmer of the moon sent her cowering deeper in the dark.
Heart hammering in her chest, trying to break through rib and tear muscle from the bone.
There was nowhere to run. No place he couldn’t reach her.
The beach was gone.
She was trapped.
“My Lord,” she rasped, and let any remaining scraps of pride float away in the surf. “Please. I’ll do any-anything. Anything.”
Her offer went unanswered.
Because she was nothing.
Once a consecrated priestess of Apollo, and now… merely a vessel. One claimed for a monstrous ritual. Passed from god to god, a plaything for divine whims.
Hot tears tracked down her cheeks, only to be lapped up by the sea.
The tide had risen. Swallowed her hips and teased her navel.
“I can’t do it again,” she murmured, shivering in the gloom. “I can’t take any more.”
But she could.
Icy liquid fingers slipped inside her, the water invasive in a way nothing else could possibly be. Scouring the monster’s cum from inside her, it dissolved the plug keeping her bloated with sperm.
With a gush, the dam burst.
Seed surged from her cunt in a torrent of shame and profound relief.
“Ahhh—” Kore screamed, back arching, clumsy fingers flying to cup her bruised pussy as the monster’s cream gushed from deep inside.
Climax rippled through her flesh. And with eyes bulging in the dark, Kore watched an oil slick shimmer atop the surface before it was swallowed by churning waves.
Leaving her empty.
Ready…
… for…
… more…