Nathaniel slept.

He had received the first cut of meat and had been celebrated for the great success of his first lone hunt. he had eaten with his family and neighbors, and then had fallen into a deep slumber. There he stayed for several days, and none close to him were worried or concerned.

The men knew the burden of what he’d done, and how far he had carried the carcass, but that was not the cause of their passive acceptance.

There was a whisper in the minds of all who shared in the feast, and who enjoyed the bounty in the days that followed, a calming sensation that denied them worries and cares, even for their sleeping hunter.

When he did awaken it was to the knowledge that he had brought a darkness into his own home, one that had infected a neighbor and two cousins, both roughly his own age. He knew, when he found that they were gone, that they would not be seen again and he understood that it was his fault.

More so, he knew it was her doing.

On that first day he was still too weak to do anything save eat and then rest more. He was drained of something from deep inside of him that he never knew, but he did know he didn’t have a taste for the meat that had cost him so dearly.

On the second day, when he rose, he felt his strength come again to him, full and certain. Yet, when he tried to speak of what had befallen him, his voice escaped him and his mind became clouded. It was just as much that he couldn’t speak as his thoughts would not let him form the words at all.

He tried and tried, even attempting to say the words aloud to himself in private, but sharing the truth was beyond his control now.

So, with all manner of fear, he came to know that he would have to act alone. She had preyed on his weakness, and Nathaniel would not let her ill deeds go unpunished.

Even as a part of himself was gripped with fear, a terror that he would again succumb to her, he felt also a longing to face her again.

It was, he told himself, a symbol of her power over him and not his true desire, but his loins still throbbed the same nonetheless. There too in this maelstrom entered his rage and his guilt, and both were simpler than fear or lust, and they inspired in him a cunning Nathaniel had yet to know he had.

She was a monster of the Elder Wood, and as was true of all monsters she was little more than an animal and lacked the cunning of his people. It was the lesson of all the stories of the land, only human cunning and ingenuity could be relied upon to unseat the supernatural strengths of beasts like her.

So, he thought long on her weapons and her advantages.

Her pollen and her fragrance had led him to her and left him near defenseless before their battle had begun. So, he knew that a wet cloth around the nose and mouth, one mixed with wine or another fragrant scent would keep him from breathing in her scent in all its forms.

Her body, the way she moved and the shape of her, had worked in tandem with the intoxicating aroma and had entranced him. He didn’t think this was a matter of chance, he knew that birds and bugs were drawn to the color and shape of flowers as well as their scent, and he knew that he had been drawn to her breasts like a moth to a flame.

It would be hard to kill her without looking at her, but fortune was with him.

If he came upon her, when he came upon her, he would loose as many arrows as it took to vanquish her and he would keep his eye disciplined. He would, he hoped, be aided by the snow visor one of his uncles had brought back after a modestly successful expedition in the far north.

The visor was a thin piece of wood worn across the eyes with a single narrow slit cut into it. It would block the glare of the sun, so his uncle had told him, both from the sky and from its reflection on the snow. It seemed in many ways like horse blinders and that was how Nathaniel planned to use them.

He sought out no armor and saw no need for weapons more malicious than his long hunting knife and his bow. A boar spear or a wood cutting axe which would be the best he could find, he felt, would serve him no better.

He had hoped to arm himself another way, to take some wisdom with him or find some weakness in the stories and lore of his people. But, as he could not speak of her, he could not ask his questions in any way.

Truthfully, this fed his fear and made him doubt if when the time came he would have the will to do the deed, or if she had en-spelled his hand as she had his tongue.

But his cunning told him the answer was no. Why could he arm himself against her, why could he guard himself from her wiles and her weapons if she had bound his hand in such a way?

Still, courage would have to serve above all in the face of such heavy fears, and as he stepped out into the woods once more he knew he was going not to hunt but to battle.

The sun was lower in the sky than on his first venture, but his feet followed the same trail. The Elder Wood felt different though, as though it was embracing him in a way he had never known. The sounds of the forest were more clear, his ears and eyes more keen to the subtle shifts of the branches and the leaves.

Animals seemed to have lost their natural fear of him as well, birds did not fly before his passing and often his eye rested on game he longed to bring down and bring home. It was as certain a temptation as anything else, but it served only to steel his heart and lend more resolve to his purpose.

Nathaniel found that he knew the way by heart, as though he were walking home down a well-trod path. When he caught her scent, when the fragrant touch of her will blossomed in the air, he found himself smiling.

It was not for any deep longing, though her fragrance did inspire a palpable lust in him, it was in defiance of his first test. He wore a full wineskin slung over his shoulder, heavily watered down but still potent when close to the nose.

As the air grew sweeter, as he felt his blood began to grow hot and his senses started to grow a touch softer, he damped a cloth and bound it around his mouth and nose.

The change was instant and his mind became cold and clear.

It was not long before he knew himself to be at the edge of the clearing, and there he pulled down his wooden visor and readied his first arrow. His step was slow and measured as he came to the edge of her domain.

The singularly large flower that surrounded her, that was also her lower half, was closed, and again he watched in disbelief as its petals began to unfold.

They had changed color in the handful of days since last he stood in her presence. They had gone from white to blue, pale as the clear sky in winter, and as the sun shone down, he looked up and saw that here the sun would always shine in its journey across the sky.

As she unfolded and exposed herself before him again, he shouted with every ounce of purpose and looked only to her face, pleased that the visor did blind him to her most delightful weapons.

“Where are they creature, what have you done with my people!” He did not wait for a response, instead his arrow past her head close enough to blow her violet tresses away from her cheek.

He saw her smile, and he loathed her for it. The curve of her full lips and the softness of her eyes were infuriating. Why was she so fetching, why was something so fair to look upon so foul to behold.

“They are gone Nathanial, they serve now in their own way just as you do. Be happy for them, they go on to do a far greater thing than many men shall ever do in their mortal lives. Even you slaying me and breaking my spell over you shall be a small thing to their greater deeds. Though what spell I’ve woven over you, you truly have little idea of.”

He watched her as she spoke, and saw a fine golden dust fill the air from her outstretched hands. He saw as well that she was concerned. She did stretch herself up towards the sun, her body moving with languid and sensual grace, but he did not break his gaze from her eyes.

There, in the depths of her eyes, bewitching as they seemed to glow with all the softest colors of autumn, then of the vibrant bloom of spring flowers, he saw her doubts. It was becoming a struggle to look away from them, but in his brief thrall he knew she did not have the hold on him she desired.

“So they are dead, or as good as dead aren’t they monster.” He blinked and drew a perfect bead on her forehead. At this distance his arrow would pierce her right between those ever shifting eyes.

“Are you dead Nathaniel or are you simply bound to a new life of greater service to me?”

Finally, he realized she saw him, and her eyes became as they were when first he saw her.

But, had he stepped out of cover or were hey eyes bound to different rules than his own? He cared not, and as she spoke he thought little of why he didn’t let loose and finish his task.

She was rooted to the spot, he was protected from her charms, he would have his words with the monster that had despoiled him.

“I am no thrall to you beast, I am your reckoning.” He felt the tension of his draw.

“Your heart’s desire is not in your shot Nathaniel, you desire to miss me and you will. You will not harm me Nathaniel, you haven’t the will, not truly.”

He knew the strength in his bow. He let loose his vengeance.

The arrow flew wide.

Again and again every shot missed the mark, again and again he tried until his quiver was spent. He had no memory of every shot, only and urge to let loose all that he had, and all the while her eyes sparkled with delight.

“You’re relieved now aren’t you my Nathaniel?” The sound of her voice, ever as soothing as a gentle breeze and musical as a slow running brook, was easy with laughter.

Despite himself, he was, and the guilt of his relief was near as overwhelming.

“Never has a man come to me and been so cleaver. I see your eyes are guarded, you nose is blocked, an even your mouth is shielded from me. But tell me, do you know what a seed is?” She was playing with her hair, her head was all he could see of her and he was thankful for that.

She sucked on her pointer finger then traced it down her lip to her throat, but his eyes did not follow the bait.

“A seed must be planted and then it grows. Once a seed takes root it remains where it is buried, and for every enchantment I can weave over you there is none more powerful than planting a seed within the mind of a man, a seed to be watered by my voice, and warmed by my sight, a seed undetectable and not bound by the laws of magic. One that is simply oh his own desires.”

“What are you speaking of, what have you done to me?” His thirst for blood had faded, so too had his guilt, and though his body felt a fine desire for her, as anyone who looked upon her would, it was still tempered by all that had befallen him and still stuck to his purpose.

“I planted a seed in your mind with my words, a desire buried within you to do a simple thing, and when you saw me, when you heard me speak, the seed bloomed.” She smiled, and he remembered her voice, hearing again the way it touched on a greater sea of wisdom, the way it offered council and patience, and he loathed her as much as he longed to listen to her speak forever.

“This seed, this thing inside me, is that why I cannot speak of you, is that why I could not warn my people, or ask of you?” Though he no longer felt his deeds borne of fiery hate, he still knew he would have to put her down. He didn’t desire it, but that was the way of things, or so he reasoned.

“Oh, “ she laughed a rich and beautiful laugh full of the song of birds and melodic beyond human grasp, “no that is not so. You could not name me, because I took your name and gave you nothing. I bound you by the laws of magic in the only way I could. As I took your name with my essence I could only take myself from your lips. There is no magic in the seed inside you, no greater of my kind, but it was made easier to plant with all I had done to you and all I had taken from you. And were you stronger, you could break its hold on you. Alas, just as you did not desire to hurt me, you do not desire to be free of me, not truly.”

He had heard enough, and stepped forward with his knife drawn, “At first I thought there would be pleasure in this, at first I hated you, but I see now that you simply are as you are, and for the sake of myself and my people you can no longer be.” He kept his eyes trained on hers, and in a few short strides he was ready to strike.

Whips of ivy bound his wrists and pulled his arms wide.

As he struggled with her, looking deep into her eyes, she reached out and with more care than he would have imagined, with a sympathetic touch undeserving of her would be killer, took the visor from his eyes then pulled the cloth from his face.

She touched his cheeks and held his head still. “I told you that you would return to me to serve me and give me all that I desire.”

Her kiss came warm and sweet, as though it were every kiss he’d every dreamed of having, and for a moment he fought it, but slowly his shoulders sagged and the knife once again fell from his hands.

“We would begin again my sweet Nathaniel, as I know you secretly long to serve my every need, but your mind and your body would deny you these pleasures and ruin your taste for me.”

Her kiss had been potent, too potent almost, and his world spun about.

Yet despite his strength failing in a sudden wave of intoxicated elation, he still held true to his purpose, clouded as it had become.

“When I say your name, you can feel my voice inside your mind can’t you my Nathaniel? A soothing touch that reminds you of all those delights and pleasures you felt at my hand, and that is the seed I have planted. To hear your name on my lips is like the loosing of an arrow of lust, and no man is greater than his lust, not when I have tempered it so. Not when it is a lust so profound it comes to love, and you would deny it but I have buried love deep inside your mind and this love will guide you, “ she still held his face in her hands and now tilted his head down towards her breasts, “down into obedience for me now.”

“Look at them, so full and so round. Try my brave hero, try not to remember their taste, try not to recall their warmth in your hands as you sucked them and drank form me. Instead watch them now, see the way they rise and fall, so swollen and so beguiling. My breasts are beautiful and calming, let them sooth you as you stare, watching them as they rise and fall, yes, rise and fall. No woman can match my beauty, no human woman’s chest will ever be as full and soft as mine.”

He was trying not to breathe too deep, trying not to become enthralled in the steady sway of her breasts as she continued to breathe deep herself as she spoke, but the perfume of her skin, the fragrance of her flower was swirling around him, and the more she asked him not to, almost pleaded with him, concern dripping in her voice asking him not to try and remember, he licked his lips at the memory of her sweetness.

His breathing became deeper and started to mirror her own. Every breath in was dispelling the tangle of emotions that had bound him, and now his eyes were resting on her chest. Her breasts looked so full, so ripe, and as he stared it was as though the chaos inside his mind and body was fading into a deep and soothing calm.

He wanted to keep watching, to be complacent in his desire for her.

“Breathe me in and breathe out your cares. You have so much to learn, you humans are so young and so innocent of so many things. Breathe me in and breathe with me just as you are.”

His eyes were filled with her naked swollen breasts, and her hands were on his neck, massing him and flooding him with more of her pheromones. “Your simple human feelings have been so hard to face, so hard to hold inside of you, only when you’re close to me, only when your eyes rest on my breasts watching them, so full and ripe for you, ready for your lips, for your touch, does the world make sense. Only I make sense to you, this is where your love comes from, this is where your deepest desires lie.”

Nathaniel felt his body becoming slow and heavy again as she pulled his head to her breast and stroked his neck. The embrace was so soft it felt nurturing, he felt so weak and helpless in her arms, and he needed her voice, he needed her touch.

Yet…

He pulled himself away as best he could.

“No, none of this is real.” His words were slurred, but his eyes were sharp. He looked away, over his shoulder, towards his knife. “You’re… you’re making me feel this way…”

The ivy around his wrists kept his arms taut and his body upright, and she turned his head back to her breasts, the muscles in his neck were too soft and pliable to resist her tender ministrations, “But my sweet Nathaniel, my sweet delicious love, that cannot be all there is.”

She grabbed him by the hair and held him still, “These breasts are so full, these breasts are so beautiful and round that surely your own desires bring your eyes to them, surely their size and their softness entice you, are you not enthralled by my beauty?”

His own voice inside his head, his own thoughts, his own mind, felt so small and so helpless, smothered in her cleavage, lost between her breasts.

The first time he found himself here falling into her embrace it all simply swept over him. The sensations were new then, but now Nathaniel had something like perspective, something akin to a real awareness of what was befalling him.

Even in his altered state, he had showed himself that he was aware of what she was doing, and that was an anchor, albeit a small one in the storm of lust and weakness that was cascading over him and around him.

“No, ” she asked as she once more brought his head to her chest, “no you’re not drawn to these? Drawn to me? Perhaps, when you come to me again I will show you just how powerless your human lust leaves you, but for now you’re already soaking me in, and you’re so thirsty aren’t you?

She turned him slightly and his bones felt like saplings, springy and pliant, not strong and sturdy, “Look at my breasts, stare at them as they rise and fall, yes, rise and fall, and when your mind is full of me, full of your hunger for me, you will need to suck, you will need to kiss them and drink me in.”

She pinched her nipples and Nathaniel smelled the intoxicating sticky sweetness of her juices, and as she started to trance her nipples he could see the slightest drops of fluid on her fingertips. His legs were shaking, it was hard to stay standing even with her ivy tangles holding him up.

“Weakness for love is the greatest of strengths Nathaniel. We all have purpose, and we must be brave to serve. You were so brave to come to me again, misguided and confused though you were, yet still in need of me, “ she cupped her breasts and started to roll them in her hands, “in need of these.”

“You’re not good, you’re a monster, you’re corrupting me.“ He said the words and he believed them only enough for them to escape his lips.

She laughed and ran a sticky finger across his lips, “My poor sweet boy, you know not of what you speak, and you know that you know not, for it is not what I have taught you.”

His mouth closed around her finger, hungry, thick with a hunger that was a rebellion against the last of his sense of self.

“Look at my breasts, see only my breasts now, there is nothing else in this world for you, no other place. Lose yourself in me, surrender your doubts, and have the courage to serve your purpose, embrace your purpose and place in my embrace.”

He watched her chest for a time as her breast rose and fell. She did not speak, she simply bounced her swollen breasts from time to time, and as she watched the last lights of his human defiance dull, she brought his lips to her nipple.

His hands wrapped round her wait, free from her ivy clutches, and she guided him to the ground once more entangled in her arms.

Exuding this much pheromone had drained her, she had dosed him over and over with enough of her fragrance to subdue and en-spell a small army, and her appetite had grown shaper than she could recall. Her little Nathaniel had found a strength in himself she could not have imagined and had not detected even as she took his essence and drank the taste of his soul on their first meeting.

It had been a whim to burry her seed in his mind, a trick she had learned from a carnival mystic who had fallen into her trap.

The mystic had been a beautiful woman, skilled in the ways of the human mind, and it had been a joy to learn from her. That mystic had left the clearing in a daze and wandered until she found a place where the sun always shone in its journey across the sky. There, the mystic’s legs took root, and there she became an Alraune, one of the two ways the species reproduced.

Still, in the moment and as hungry as she was, the taste of fear, or anger, of hate, all were bitter, and the sweetness of love and lust were the most delicious of all human tastes. So, she held him, and had him drink until lust and need were throbbing from deep within and all else was forgotten.

As her petal gloved fingertips undressed him, a deep part of Nathaniel laughed when he realized he hadn’t noticed the gloves this time.

So silky soft, so warm was the touch of the white petals that adorned her up to the elbow, that it felt like skin could only ever dream of being as delicate.

It was a flash of awareness, the last one, before he heard her giggle with joy when her fingers rubbed the leaking head of his cock, once, then twice before a body shaking climax brought him wholly under her spell again.

This time, as she stroked him, she whispered in his ear a single word every time he came. Over and over she said this as she drained him.

The word only sweetened the taste, and every ropey strand of himself that splattered against her breasts and her face, every drop that sunk through her flower petal gloves, satisfied her as she’d never been pleased before.

It was the mystic’s trick and the rules of magic brought together as one, it was her natural powers and influence over the flesh of men and the sweetness of her juices made into one whole and complete seduction.

When her petals rose up and covered her again, Nathaniel opened his eyes, lost in a waking dream. He dressed himself, gathered his spent arrows and his knife, then started to walk down the trail. There was a heat inside of him, a strength that propelled him and drowned out whatever purpose had brought him to this clearing, or any memory of her at all for that matter.

He wondered why he had his uncle’s snow visor, and why his scarf smelled of wine, these didn’t seem to be necessary for the hunt. But, one by one he found targets for his arrows, large birds, small beasts, and when he returned he brought another tremendous bounty.

Only when he closed his eyes and slept did his day return to him.

Only when he woke the next morning did the word she spoke ring in his mind. He smiled, in her arrogance she had given him all he needed to rid the world of her. He had her name, and she had given it to him over and over, as though she expected him to worship it and cherish her.

He smiled.

Man’s only weapon was his cunning, and even she had said he was the most cunning man she had met.

True, she had bested him again, but he woke to fight anew.

She was all he could think about, her breasts, her body, her touch, her scent, her hair, her taste, her power, it was all that filled his mind from waking to sleep, and then in his dreams she was there. Sometimes he awoke a sticky mess and his pleasure ebbed only when he though of her. Other times he dreamed only of her breasts rising and falling, to wake before his lips found her nipple again.

Yet, in his waking mind, in his days of preparation there was only one desire, and though it was bound to her body it was not a pleasure of her flesh.

And far away, in her sun-lit glade she smiled, to be wholly hers all of Nathaniel’s walls would need to be wholly broken down so his love and his essence could flow freely into her forever.