Chapter 14 - Wager

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The only truth that matters is the one I create.

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Kuro seethed in silent fury as the glowing fibres constricted around her like living shackles. The witch's trap had been exquisitely devised—appearances wholly deceiving while the true snare lay in plain sight, a spider's elegant guile.

"You put on quite the performance," Kuro ground out, fighting to keep her voice level despite the searing pain. "Knitting a little string doll to coax me in while you prepared your real sorcery."

The witch chuckled, a low rich sound. "You give me too much credit. Disguising this unblemished skin and lithe body?" She waved a hand dismissively at her youthful appearance. "Pure glamour, my dear. The strings themselves are the true magic."

As if to demonstrate, the fibres pulsed with a faint emerald glow, eliciting a sharp intake of breath from their captive.

"Remarkable, aren't they?" the witch continued with a touch of scholarly pride. "Hand-spun from the wool of a grass-munching ewe, rendered under the light of the double-eclipse. Simplicity itself, yet deceptively potent."

She leaned closer, emerald eyes glittering with the thrill of academic dissection. "But enough about my craftsmanship. You are the true object of fascination here, little kitty."

Kuro tensed at the diminutive, a low growl building in her throat. "I admit the intrusion was unwise," Kuro bit out. "But I have brought upon you no harm. Release me, nya."

The witch regarded her captive with an arched brow. "Your kind are creatures of instinct, beholden to your basest urges. Yet there is something else as well. What compels you, I wonder? There is a spark of intelligence that burns within you, one thirsty for more than a demihuman's rationed existence."

She reached out, ivory fingers trailing down one fibrous strand to where it dug mercilessly into Kuro's shoulder. A slight flex of magic caused the threads to sear like slivers of molten iron, extracting a muffled cry despite Kuro's best attempts at stoicism.

"Feel free to scream in earnest," the witch murmured. "We are quite alone. Just us... and what secrets your flesh may yet divulge."

Kuro's eyes met the other woman's unflinchingly, twin rubies burning with defiance. 

Another vicious pulse travelled the conduits binding her, raw agony blossoming in its wake. It took every fibre of restraint to keep from vocalising her torment once more.

"Perhaps… we could dispense with these games," Kuro said evenly, meeting the witch's gaze. "I came here seeking clarification, not torture. If you truly wish to understand my purpose, then let us have a civilised discussion, nya."

The witch reared back slightly, wariness creasing her brow. That seemingly innocuous glance told her all she needed—this creature was scanning for vulnerabilities even as it lay helpless before her. Tactically sizing her up. Calculating odds in a way no true demihuman would comprehend.

"Let's parlay in earnest, shall we? Though, I know full well you have no intention of disclosing your genuine affiliations." Her eyes glinted with cunning challenge. "But indulge me—what vested interest could a demihuman maid possibly have in the affairs of a minor noble's daughter?"

Their eyes met and held, a silent duel of wills as immovable as the primordial strata itself.

"Nya, I am Juliana von Wickten's servant, bound by oath to ensure her wellbeing," she stated, each word carrying the weight of conviction. "My interest extends no further beyond her security and the fulfilment of whatever menial tasks she requires."

Silence stretched between them, alive and thrumming. The witch regarded her captive with an arched brow, her scrutinising stare chipping away at the veneer of Kuro's half-truth. After a prolonged moment where the tension thrummed like a taught cord, she voiced her patent disbelief. "You play a dangerous game with your falsehoods. Though I'll concede your lies bear a touch of plausibility."

Kuro, for her part, remained utterly motionless outwardly. But deep within, a war raged—the former corporate raider's instincts screamed to clamp down, to reveal nothing that could threaten her true identity. Yet an inexplicable counterpoint, infinitesimal yet insistent, pushed in the opposite direction.

Lay the barest threads before this intriguing weaver. See what opportunities might birth between them…

Human versus inhuman, the debate raged on as the witch looked on impassively, awaiting her rebuttal.

Human won… barely. When Kuro finally spoke, it was with an even timbre that revealed nothing overt, her words crafted to convey just enough hooks to snare curiosity.

"You sought to discern my intentions. Very well—they did not encompass harming you, unless you posed a threat to my master." She let the barest hint of disdain tint the word. "My allegiance for now aligns with the girl, Juliana. The rest is extraneous, nya."

Kuro considered leaving it at that, simply shuttering the conversation, but her core impulse urged otherwise. "Even so… for one with talents such as yours, I question your station as mere innkeeper out in this abandoned land."

She punctuated the statement by ever so slightly relaxing the taut rigidity of her form within the searing cage of wool. 

'People love talking about themselves.'

The witch regarded her pensively, picking apart the statement with the same scrutiny she applied to her weavings. Could truth and calculation co-exist so flawlessly in one being? It was not unheard of, yet Kuro's physical aspect seemed unduly bestial for such cerebral machinations.

Then again, as the conduits spiraling around Kuro pulsed in lazy reminder, this was no common demihuman. 

Eventually, she spoke, each word carefully measured. "I have been on many expeditions in my time. You walk like a cat, growl like a cat, possess the essence of a mundane demihuman… yet there is something else as well. What compels you, I wonder?"

The witch pursed her full lips, rolling her next question upon her tongue with relish. "Tell me, little beastie—what exactly are you?"

For several heartbeats, quiet stretched between them once more, distended and ready to rupture at any moment. When Kuro's reply finally came, it carried the weight of a reckoning.

"Hah," she scoffed flatly, "what I choose to reveal shall be the bounty you earn through understanding, not demand."

Again, that involuntary relaxation overtook her muscles, the rigidity of her defiance flowing away like vapour. A subtle shift, an overture—answer my words in kind and perhaps we both may gain.

The witch smiled, weighing this unexpected rejoinder. Her captive did not struggle fruitlessly against her bonds; she was reserving her finite efforts for more opportune circumstances. Was this animal truly such a potent existence, or merely a deft deceiver spitting arrogance in place of swallowed fear?

'Only one way to ascertain the truth.'

Smiling thinly, the witch lifted one hand. Her fingers traced idle shapes in the air, depicting symbols and formulae too intricate for any untrained eye to decipher. Beneath her direction, the woolen tendrils coiled tighter, searing Kuro's flesh with molten promise.

"I see you are a little confused. Allow me to reframe it for you," she purred in kind. "If you desire to be understood so fervently, then I shall simply seize it: a portion of your memories. A token sampling of your so-called 'greater existence'. I hope you don't mind~"

She lowered her hand, brushing against Kuro's bound form. "And in exchange, I shall endeavour to return that bounty in full with understanding. Consider it a harmless wager between peers. What say you?"

In that endless moment, Kuro's eyes widened. The partition between host and inhabitant dissolved away. When it finally spoke, its voice was a resonant chord vibrating through multiple harmonics.

"Seal of Mnemosyne!"

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...The wager was struck, and reality itself bent to inviolable terms neither party fully comprehended.

Cordelia raised her hands, slender fingers weaving new patterns through the lustrous emerald ether. Complex runes and indistinct glyphs began taking shape, forming an intricate latticework that pulsed in time with her murmured incantations.

As the working built towards its inexorable crescendo, the witch's eyes slipped shut, shuttering away the physical realm. Her mind's eye blossomed open like a visceral blume, consciousness expanding along the gossamer pathways of the ritual matrix…

…and lancing outwards to entwine with the foreign essence bound within her strings.

For an eternity compressed into a single stuttering heartbeat, Cordelia existed simultaneously across endless memories—each one a fleeting glimpse, a tantalising vista of existence both bizarre and terribly, terribly familiar.

Disjointed imagery flooded her expanded perception, a deluge of sensory impressions crashing over the bulwarks of rational interpretation:

…the pungent musk of a predator's territory marking…

…hot arterial spray across a muzzle lined with curved fangs…

…the leathery aftertaste of a fresh kill's still-quivering flesh…

…the electrifying charge in the air just before the storm breaks…

Over and over, memory upon memory, the experiences of the host cascaded through her invasive trance. Kuro's primal Id writ large across the infinitesimal frames of her unremembered former life.

Through it all, one motif echoed with searing, inescapable resonance—the perpetual hunger of the wild. Hunger for sustenance, hunger for freedom. Hunger to slake the howling ache of instinctual solitude in the only way these bestial slivers knew how.

Hunt. Feed. Survive. Endure. Ad infinitum.

The vast, untamed landscapes of the demihuman continent sprawled out before Cordelia's mind's eye—the jagged mountain peaks, the endless swaying grasses of the steppe, the impenetrable emerald vault of the ancient forests. And bounding through them all, a lithe, tawny form—claws curving into loam, muscles bunching and releasing in explosive bursts of predatory grace. Pursuing, stalking, reveling in the inexorable flow of life into death, and death into new life.

Within the tightly-wound cage of glowing wool, Kuro arched like a live wire, tendons standing out in harsh relief as Cordelia's consciousness infiltrated the deepest recesses of her subsumed host. A choked, inhuman keen slipped through gritted fangs, yet the indignity of such visceral invasion paled compared to the true rapture being unleashed by the witch's unholy weavings.

Simultaneity. Convergence. All of Kuro's meticulously segregated selves, the masterfully partitioned personas that allowed her to retain tattered scraps of blessed individuality—they were all simultaneously ablaze.

Human and inhuman catalysed within the same frail vessel, perspectives unified, universes colliding in an infinitely dense singularity of transcendent Being. The barrier between inhabitant and inhabited collapsed inward upon itself, bleeding away into nothingness.

In that instant of intertwinement, barriers melted away to reveal territory vast and uncompromised, where fangs could mesh seamlessly with enterprise and glorious freedom found harmonious purchase in the scream of an apex hunter.

Senses subsumed to a shared continuum, neither human nor inhuman, yet somehow quintessentially both—

—and yet, for all its shattering grandeur, the culminating transcendence felt… incomplete. Flawed.

There was no true intelligence in this beast, this creature of fang and claw that prowled the expanses of its untamed domain. No higher reasoning, no glimmer of anything beyond pure animal instinct honed to a razor's edge.

As if a crucial element remained resolutely locked away, beyond even the ability of this potent spell to discern. The humanity that now peered out from behind those blazing ruby eyes was utterly absent, an abyss yawning wide where a soul should reside.

The dissonance was staggering, almost physically painful for Cordelia to process. The urbane, calculating individual bound helpless before her could not possibly share psychic real estate with this untamed thing of blood and brutality...could it?  What eldritch blasphemy could fuse such disparate essences into a single, impossible whole?

As if in response to the thought, Kuro's eyes flew open, locking instantly with the witch's own gaze. Twin pools of liquid flame boring into emerald, the intruder and intruded upon linked in an infinite feedback loop of horrified revelation.

With a shuddering gasp, Cordelia wrenched her psyche free of the invasive spell matrix, the glyphs and runes evaporating into nothingness as the working collapsed in upon itself. She staggered back, one trembling hand rising to her throat as if to hold back a scream.

Kuro sagged limply in her restraints, the wounds of astral trespass bleeding sluggishly across her physical form. A low, guttural moan forced itself past her lips—a sound poised somewhere between agony and dark ecstasy.

For a moment, the only sound in the chamber was the ragged counterpoint of their laboured breathing. Then, with a percussive CRACK, the woolen conduits ruptured one by one, exploding into gossamer tatters as the monstrous energy they'd contained hemorrhaged out into the aether.

Kuro crumpled to the flagstones, sides heaving, fur matted with cold sweat and cruor. Yet when she finally lifted her head to regard her captor, her eyes blazed with an unquantifiable intensity—a dark jubilation entirely at odds with her ravaged state.

"Nya… Just… what the did you do to me? What were those visions?"

Her voice was a ruined thing, rasping and multitonal, as if multiple throats were attempting speech through a single torn gullet.

Cordelia could only shake her head mutely, instinctively drawing away as Kuro pulled herself upright with trembling arms. The witch's face was a mask of reeling distress, the existential dread of brushing against something far vaster and more terrible than she had ever dared to contemplate.

"What... ARE you?" the witch whispered.

A sudden, chilling realisation lanced through her like a shard of ice. The demihuman saw it. Her memories. Just as she had seen the demihuman's memories, the demihuman had peered into her own. Those secrets, hidden away in the deepest recesses of her psyche, laid bare before this impossible creature.

Kuro regarded her silently, sides heaving in tandem with the thrumming of her heart. After several protracted beats, she answered in a voice that braided together the bestial and the distinctly Other:

"I surmise you didn't like whatever you saw, nya~"

Her tongue darted out to delicately lap at the trickle of blood matting the tawny fur of her tail. A smile lent itself to her features—one that contained neither mirth nor threat. Only the transcendent arrogance of inevitability.

"Suffice to say, I am that which this paltry existence has simply failed to account for, witch."

Kuro inclined her head in acknowledgement, a knowing glint in her ruby eyes. "I have to admit, however, the thoughts and memories contained within your head have certainly sparked my interest… Cordelia."

The use of her name, spoken so casually by this entity, sent a jolt of primal fear down the witch's spine. It was confirmation of her darkest suspicion—her mental sanctuary had been violated, its most intimate contents perused by this outsider.

Kuro's smile widened fractionally at Cordelia's obvious discomfort.

The beast turned to leave, tail swishing languidly behind her. At the threshold, she paused and glanced back over her shoulder.

"If future wagers are as fruitful as this one, I look forward to them, nya."

Kuro slipped out into the darkened corridor, leaving a visibly shaken Cordelia alone with the shattered remnants of her hubris… and the gnawing certainty that she had stumbled into a game far beyond her ken.