Intimancer

Rick emerged from their borrowed house early the next morning only to find Sade and Tyr already packing up the wagon for the ride home.  Noticing there wasn’t anyone else around, he motioned behind him for Lilie to follow.

“Well now!  How did you two slee-'' Tyr said as she noticed them walking outside.  She froze mid question when Lilie’s form stepped out from the shadows.  She was wearing her gambeson and chainmail, which wasn’t too out of place, but the hood pulled up to cover as much of her head and face as possible was a bit odd.

Rick could see that the elf’s sharp instincts were telling her something was off about their new companion.  He headed off her questions with a sharp gesture and said “We’ll talk on the road.”

Tyr said nothing, but then nodded her agreement and went back to sorting their limited gear.

Thankfully the village was still recovering from the party the night before, and all four of them slipped out without any preamble.  Even without the need for privacy, Rick would have preferred it this way regardless.  Doing a good deed is one thing, dealing with all the people afterwards was something else altogether.

“We’re alone now.  Spill it.”  Tyr said after half an hour had passed since they left.

Rick nodded to Lilie and she lowered her hood so the other women could see her face.  In the light of day, the larger horns and softer facial features were quite prominent.  Lilie shifted in her seat.  “Ouch!  Stupid tail.  Sitting down was never this awkward before.”

“I take it that has grown too?”  Sade guessed.

“Yea.  The horns and tail are different, but the rest of me just looks…”  Lilie struggled to find the right words to describe her transformation.

“Like ya finally had a few good sandwiches?”  Tyr quipped from the driver's seat.  It was Rick’s turn to slap the rude elf upside the head.  Not that it would change her behavior in the slightest.

“Now that you mention it.  I feel like I have finally eaten a proper meal for the first time in my life.”  Lilie admitted, not showing the least bit of concern for the elf’s lack of tact.

“Could you elaborate?”  Sade asked with clinical curiosity.

“Of course.”  Lilie said and started to explain.  “All my life I’ve had this hunger, this need, that would never go away.  No matter what I did, what I ate, I would never feel ‘full’ so to speak.  Even when I stuffed myself silly.  Sure my stomach was full, but it was like my body didn’t even register the food.  It was almost like it was craving something I could never give it.”  She looked at Rick and blushed.  “And then last night, after we…”

She trailed off at the last sentence.  Rick could only sigh and gave a full account of what he experienced when the two started to get more intimate.  He left nothing out, from the way Lilie seductively roleplayed the concerned healer, to his mana being drained as though she sucked it right out of his dick like it was just a large fleshy straw.  Which, he supposed, was basically what happened.

“Fascinating”  Sade said once he was done explaining.  Lilie was beet red at his completely unfiltered recollection of events.  He felt sorry for dragging something private out into the open, but answers were more important than privacy at the moment.  And he wouldn’t have hid the truth from Tyr and Sade to begin with.

“Do you have any idea why your body reacted the way it did?”  Sade asked the shaytoni.

“No.  No one in my family has ever had to deal with this, not even my sister.  But she also never had to deal with the same hunger or weight issues I did growing up.”

“Tyr?”  Sade asked and the elf just shrugged.

Rick let out a great sigh.  He had some inkling about what was going on, but he really didn’t want to bring it up.  If he was right, then poor Lilie would be very, very uncomfortable.  But he also felt she needed to know.  They all did.

“I think I have an idea.”  He said reluctantly  “Try to take my words with a pinch of salt, nothing is confirmed until we look into this more.  But I may have heard something about this.”

He waited for anyone to say anything else.  But after a few seconds Sade just bade him to continue.  He sighed once more.  “Okay… so I’ve heard of a creature who is known to suck the energy out of men through sexual acts.”  He turned to Lilie.  “Have you ever heard of a succubus?”

Lilie hissed at his question.  The expression was full of anger at the implication.  “A demon?!”

“Yes.”  Rick sighed.  He held up his hands in a warding gesture to forestall any more anger from the woman.  “Hear me out first.  As I said, big ’ol grain of salt.”  When he saw that he wasn’t going to be attacked by an angry healer, he continued.  “Now, before I came to this kingdom I never heard of the shaytoni, but I had heard of ‘tieflings’.  Like the blue paladin, tieflings were just stories, and so were demons.  So I have to reiterate a third time;  What I’m about to say is pure conjecture based on stories and myth.”

He held up three fingers.  “I have three ideas about what happened, some far more likely than others, or maybe the truth is some type of combination of all the possibilities.  First, is that shaytoni exhibit more than just physical demonic traits, and that poor Lilie was blessed with something akin to a succubus constitution.”  He lowered the first finger after he was done with that hypothesis.

“Second, like their name suggests, shaytoni are actually descended from demons and you just so happen to have gained recessive traits from your distant ancestor.”

“What do you mean by ‘like our name suggests’?”  Lilie said with a grunt, her arms crossed over her considerably fuller chest.

“I have recently been given a text to translate the old elven language.”  Sade said.  Her voice was calm, even, diplomatic.  “Shaytoni in old elvish means ‘born of demons’.”

Lilie looked crushed at Sade’s words.  Thankfully Sade swiftly continued to further explain.  “The first two hypotheses are only a matter of framing.  Either the name is literal, or your tribe took the word people used to demean you and made it your own.”  She turned to face Rick.  “But I believe we should all hear your final thoughts before we discuss further.”

“Oh that’s simple.  The final thought is that it's all my fault.”

“The fuck?!”  Lilie cursed.  “How is any of this your fault?”

Rick could only shrug at her question.  “First, were you a virgin before last night?”

The sudden change of direction caught Lilie off guard.  Then she recovered and gave a sultry smirk.  “Would I have sucked your dick so well if I was?”

From Rick’s limited experience, she probably would not have.  Lilie most definitely had some experience behind her belt.  She could probably teach Sade a thing or two on the subject.

“Fair point.  And I assume your partners never experienced extreme mana drain on climax?”

She paused to consider.  “Not that I know of.  And I certainly didn’t transform into… this afterwards.”  She said while gesturing to indicate all of her.

“Then this might be a classic case of ‘It’s not you, it’s me’.”  Rick chuckled.  “Can you check your status and see if you find anything related to ‘coital energy’?”  He quickly checked his own and saw that it was unchanged since he last checked before the battle.  “Oh, and odd question;  Did you orgasm last night?”

Lilie’s face flushed with a mix of anger and embarrassment at his considerably rude, and very public, question.  “Yes, I did.”  She said after a few moments.  “And my status has nothing about ‘coital energy’ or whatever.  What the fuck does any of this have to do with what happened?”

The fact that neither of them gained any coital energy after they each climaxed was interesting.  But ultimately didn’t really matter in the long run.  “I ask because my vocation is an intimancer.”

“The fuck does that mean?”

“Sex magic.”  Tyr said while turning around and grinning.

“What?  That's a thing!?”  Lilie asked.  “No, seriously.   What the fuck are you talking about?”

“It is as Tyr said, ‘sex magic’.”  Sade responded simply.  “When an intimancer is… well, intimate, coital energy is exchanged.  This energy can be used for pleasure,”  She leaned in close to Lilie, her expansive cleavage on full display.  “And enhancement of the body's various attributes”

“I, ah, wha?”  Lilie said with absolute eloquence.  Rick couldn’t blame her, Sade’s body almost always left him tongue-tied, even after months of acclimation.  She wielded her assets like a veteran warrior did with a sword.

“I was a lot like you.  Not quite as tall, but small, skinny, flat.  Most people in my village compared me to a child.”  Sade admitted.  “But after being with Rick, I was able to improve myself.  To mold my body into the form it was always meant to be.”

“And I grew a massive cock!”

All three of them turned to the elf, who was grinning like she just told the greatest joke anyone had ever heard.  It was just so stupid that Rick couldn’t help but belt out his own laughter.  Sade was next to crack, her chuckles sending her chest bouncing in all the right ways.  Lilie eventually joined in and all four were enjoying the moment.

Bless that goofy elf and her ability to keep things from getting too heavy.

They all eventually calmed down and Rick spoke again.  “Getting back on topic.  I asked those questions earlier because neither of us gained any coital energy, despite clearing the major conditions to earn some.”

“Hrm…”  Sade hummed in thought.  “I propose the inherent magic of Lilie’s tribe somehow commandeered Rick’s magic and used it for sustenance.”

“And why do you think that?”  Lilie asked.

Sade looked up.  “Because you told us that a part of you was always hungry.  Perhaps even starving.  And today you said that for the first time, that feeling went away.  Like that starving part of you was finally able to feed itself.”  She gestured to the shaytoni’s face and body.  “You look, for lack of a better phrase, well fed.  Due to the growth of your horns and tail, I also believe being unable to feed this aspect of yourself stunted your growth somewhat.”

Sade put her hand to her chin as several ideas popped into her head.  “In fact, since coital energy is often used to change the body, perhaps that’s what resuscitated this aspect of yourself and sex with other people didn’t trigger anything before.  Hrm… the problem is there is too much we don’t know.  I think more testing is needed before we can find some answers.”

“Testing?  What, as in have me do that again?”  Lilie looked on the verge of panicking.  “No, no!  What I did was horrible.  I hurt him!  I’m a-”

“That is enough of that!”

Rick was not an angry person by nature.  Anger rarely solved the problems he faced on a day to day basis.  But he would not tolerate anyone thinking they were a monster, especially if there was no actual reason to believe so.

“I want you to drop that last thought and throw it away this instant!”  He said, trying to channel as much command into his voice as possible.  He leaned close, held her shaking hands in his, and looked her straight into those beautiful ruby eyes.  “All I lost was some spare mana in my body.  You did not intend to cause me harm.  You did not actually hurt me.”  He softened his voice.  “You had no idea about my magic, and I am still trying to find answers about it myself.  This was all an accident.  Nobody got hurt, and no one should blame you, least of all yourself.”

Tears were forming in her eyes.  “But I… If what you said about the shaytoni-”

“‘Born of Circumstance’.”

Lilie looked at Sade, confused.  Sade merely stared at the distraught woman and repeated herself.  “‘Born of Circumstance’.”

“What is that?”  Rick asked.

Sade didn’t look away from Lilie when she answered Rick’s question.  “It is the title of a blue paladin story.  The first blue paladin story if I remember correctly.  I will not bore you with the details, but I do believe our resident fan of the stories should understand the themes found in the tale and understand my point well enough.”

The fan in question nodded her head.  Tyr gave a mild scoff.  “What, that’s it?  Just drop a title of a book and everything’s fine?”  She gave a mild chuckle to let them know she wasn’t being too serious.  She reached a great paw over and patted Lilie’s shoulder.  “Hey, yer not alone.  If ya want the help, we’ll be there for ya.”

Of course, Tyr being Tyr, the calm and serious demeanor did not last long.  “If ya want, we could pull over and kickstart the testing right now.”

“Tyr!  Stop teasing the poor woman!”  Sade said as she slapped the elf upside the head.

“But I wanna show off the surprise!”  The elf whined playfully.

Sade sighed.  “Then most certainly not.  We should wait and see if Lilie’s changes are temporary and if her other hunger returns at all after a bit of time.”  She held up a warning finger.  “Then we can start the orgy, got it?”

“Yes ma'am!”  Tyr said with a salute.