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Full Moon Madness

You've fallen in love with a shape-changing witch who only wants to love you to DEATH. Ah, but you have a plan to escape her embrace. Only?

By Frank TalaberPublished 4 years ago 11 min read
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Full Moon Madness

Drumbeats, hearts melting. Your memory haunts the corridors of my sequestered dreams, where silhouettes of mountains fill the horizon and tinkles of orchestrated mewlings shatter the chill of a full moon night in northern British Columbia. A land I swore I’d never caress again, especially on All Hallows Eve, the only night these mystical doorways can be traversed. A dimension where nothing is real and everything revolves around dreamtime perception. The realm of the witch called Ximena.

I shiver in anticipation and fall to your arms as I have fallen in eternity. Stars skim by with dizzying velocity as cackles of entrapment seduce me and pull me in. You are there, everywhere and nowhere. Your voice, a breath like spirit things that steals across abandoned graveyards at the stroke of midnight, races along the ends of my hairs. Clouds pulse with vibrancy, and even the dirt stirs beneath each tentative step I take, unsettling me with the undulation of something sentient as I walk. Where does it begin? Where does it end and where are you?

A kiss from sanities edges rests suddenly, on my lips. I wait. A thrumming like chants of Arcadian monks breaks the silence. Razor-edged talons sing across my back, stealing at my soul. Sweat pierces my skin and your finger, born of unearthly matter, appears to whisk blood and perspiration away to your lips. I fall to my knees, the breath of my eagerness mingling with the night air as skitters like ten thousand crabs on echoing porcelain are tugging at the void. Where are you? I question the foggy veils.

Your face parts the clouds with the same ease as the moon that slides behind them. Dawn’s light will banish me from this place and return me to my reality, but only if – I pause in whispered prayer – if I live through this night. The twisted reality of loving a witch.

Melodic laughter, I look up, you are sauntering across the glade wrapped only in layers of diaphanous silk, full breasts swaying with each step, awaiting the taste of my lips. Air incensed with the cloying enticements of sandalwood swirls at your approach and I remind myself that this was my idea to open the doorway back into this region of sybaritic pleasures. A domain so arcane and bizarre, I can only weep in sorrow at your plight and feed you even more, an environment where the hiss of a breath bears more actuality than sun-sustained vitality, where my fear fuels your sustenance and my sweat feeds your soul’s growth in ways I’ll not comprehend. Nor care to, when the taste of your lips is sweeter than honey drizzled down my throat from ten thousand bees fed the purest of nectar and just as intoxicating.

You stand before me now, naked, wonderfully naked beneath the silk, a smile spreads across your face and draws me in with the entrapment of a spider’s web. Will my plan succeed?

“You return.” Disembodied whispers lick at me with the severity of an icicle thrust against my neck as light races from your eyes into enveloping pools of darkness. Seduction unparalleled. I’d forgotten the exquisite carnality you wreck as the sheer lust of my response becomes a throbbing, aching hunger, to have you, to be possessed by you.

“Help,” I cry to the fraying threads of rationality binding my barely clinging sanity. Sanity’s stolid gaze answers back, “this is what you truly crave. This will be your reward.” Reassuring arms vanish, threads snap and instead of anchoring me from this lunacy, my sub consciousness kicks me from the cliffs of reason. I scream in the delirium and fling myself instead into the depths of your passions.

It began as my father lay on his deathbed. He told me of the unbearable ecstasy of loving you, and died making me swear I’d never visit you. I agreed, but I think he feared otherwise.

Rapturous insanity begins as appendages melt away and rough scales begin to cover my body. Warm rocks scrape beneath me and my tongue slithers between unhinged jaws. Tasting the air, sensing for you. A rattler’s warning disturbs the hush and you uncoil from the darkness. I slide towards you, rattles buzzing in excitement as you lunge and wrap around me. We twist, tumbling between the rocks, reveling in the flexibility as scales scrape where hands once used to. Touching, fondling, arousing, each seeking to twine about the other, lost in the power of long muscles coiling and uncoiling in a macabre hypnotic waltz.

Who are you? This past year I’ve studied my father’s papers trying to decipher or understand your existence, and more importantly, how to stop you. Dad was a professor of anthropology and native studies at UBC, how he discovered you I’ll never know, but he paid a heavy price for loving a witch. I know you’ll return every year to bleed away at my life essence like you did his. Last year’s encounter left me in hospital for months, hovering between life and derangement. I have other designs on my fate this time and press a shaman’s soul catcher underneath my tongue, praying it will work.

I grasp you tight and squeeze. Your skin splits and feathers sprout, wings burst free, a phoenix reborn. Your new body shakes free from the snake’s shell and flies away, cackling that age-old cackle that creaks like ancient bones on sacred rocks. Splitting this form I take flight, relishing the strength of this avian species, comfortable with each beat of my raptor’s wings. Two warriors, predators on the hunt as we dip and soar in Valhalla’s pillowy canyons until losing you in veils of vapor, I panic.

A screech. Claws scour my back and in the blink of a hawk’s eye you’re gone. Reminding me this is your world and your territory. I know I cannot play this game long and hope to survive. Blood flows free from jagged wounds. My life force, your meal, leaves me in a red spray as I plummet, feigning death. You cleave through the clouds again, talons extended, that killer’s stare centered in the core of those black eyes. At the last possible moment, I twist and let you hurtle by.

Darkness again. I blink my eyes open and hear the crunch of snow beneath my ursine paws. The moribund whiteness of the Arctic ice cap spreads as far as I can see. You’ve taken control again.

A glance. Snow, mountains of bluish white and jagged ridges of ice everywhere. Thick padded paws thump down. Ursine breath grates in the thin air as I lumber over snow and ice blending into the moribund hell of the northern wasteland. Breath condenses in the chilly arctic air, with only the brittle crunch of ice dried of any moisture, ringing in my ears. I sniff, knowing in this form my vision is useless, but I can smell a rotting carcass ten kilometers away.

I sniff again and begin to pick up my pace. The hunt is on, she’s near, the musk of her hunger gives her away and this time it will be me that takes her.

I roar, clearing a mound of snow. Ximena turns, not expecting me. She closes her eyes as I lung for her throat and all goes black.

On it goes through the evening, becoming creature after creature. Changing, reveling in the sensual pleasures of the myriad forms, but finally the night nears to a tiring end and it is time for my plan.

Feline eyes wink from the shadows and you spring on a cougar’s padded paws. Snarling, I fling aside passivity’s covers and leap first, my jaws sinking into your throat’s softness, enough to hold you and not crush your windpipe. You resist in rage, spitting, snarling.

Fear sinks into your eyes and as you struggle to escape. I have you. We shift into a madness of forms: eagle, lizard, orca, grizzly bear, lion, and finally back to our true forms, but never does my grasp let you go.

“How dare you! This is my game.” Your voice pounds inside my head. My grip doesn’t relinquish. The soul catcher has done its job. You are mine.

The witch, the mistress, caught at her own game.

The fevered contact of your body, its sinewy suppleness sends cravings to my loins, resonating desires as old as creation. I thrust forward, not caring if you’re ready, because I know you are: you’re always ready. You cry out as I enter and for a moment become lost in ecstasies throes, flinging yourself towards freedom from the damning ache inside. The same ache I suffer for you.

As we make love, shudders ripple the surface of this land. The dawn, the harbinger of the night’s end, is here. I’ve timed this precisely. Desperation mirrors in your gaze as you struggle with renewed effort. The need to release from within wanes beneath the more basic need of survival. The one who thrilled to the adrenalin of the hunt, and lived off the fear in the eyes of the helpless knows she must now escape with the coming collapse of her world. Our forms blur, the landscape a maelstrom, driving you on, your eyes noiselessly screaming for mercy as you sense your demise.

Everything wavers as cracks streak the sky, revealing another view behind the one plane we stand on. Reality for some, the other side of the magical looking glass, for others. A spidery multitude of ever-smaller splinters of realism fissures this realm until all that’s left is the vision of me still clenching your throat, fragmented over a million slivers of silver. “How can you do this?” You plead in terror. “I loved you.”

You’re lying, I know it. You have to be.

But I cannot doubt myself now; this has to end. I couldn’t survive another year. As did I, I tell myself and that is why I must continue this to the very end. As did I.

Everything falls away like a blanket pulled from a painting, uncovering my reality. You attempt to melt away but can’t, this is my world now. I pull the shaman’s soul catcher from my mouth and fling it into the ice waters of a mountain stream. You wail like a dozen gypsies burning at the stake at the realization of what I’ve done, but it is too late. Whatever remains of your world is sucked into a cavernous void. Drained beyond belief, I sink into blackness, knowing I’ve won.

I cling to the boughs of life, fading in and out of consciousness. Haunting my every moment she is constantly there, pulling at those spirit threads of love and desire that I’ve tried to sever. So hard to believe these are mere dreams, I fight to wean myself from the cradle of her arms, the voracity of her lips. Finally I stare out at the snow fluttering over the Northern BC terrain and sit up in my hospital bed. A nurse enters.

“How’s it going?” she asks. “I see you’ve finally decided to join us.”

“Where am I and how long have I been here?”

“Prince George Hospital and today is the twenty-fifth of November.”

I’ve been out nearly a month.

“The doctors, as you can imagine, have a few questions to ask you. Especially why you’d get lost in the woods a second time.”

“Who said I got lost in the woods?” I hadn’t told anyone.

“Your wife. She found you. Apparently you’d been wandering in the wilderness for a couple of weeks.”

“My wife? I don’t have a –”

With the flowing grace of a loon gliding over serene midnight waters, a native woman enters the room. Cascading moonlight dances from her soul in the flood of raven-colored hair down her back. Elegant, yet fierce lines her earthy face that I’ve never seen her before, yet I’ve known her forever.

“Hi, darling,” she purrs with a familiar feline growl. Around her neck, dangling on a leather necklace, rests the soul catcher. How? “I’m glad you’re feeling better. I was so worried about you.”

Her touch is electric. I already know the feel of her softness pressed naked up against me, and the throb of my want calls from deep within.

An eerie question haunts my realization as my head falls back into the security of the pillow. Who caught who?

Often on full moon nights I catch the soul catcher nestled between her full breasts, glowing with an ethereal brilliance and smile knowing I’ve brought home the witch of my heart.

fantasy
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About the Creator

Frank Talaber

I believe in whacking a reader upside the head, toss them screaming into the book, and just when they think they are starting to figure things out toss a curveball. they say that you don't have to be mad to be a writer, but it sure helps.

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