Henric and Alex XVI (v1.2)

Tags: Villainous Male Knight / Virtuous Female Squire, Reverse Trap, Oral


Over the next few days Alex deteriorated very rapidly. She was in her soul intellectually and sensorially malnourished, and after a few days she had stopped eating as well. Starvation on every front. She felt alone, constantly.

Alex was nearly catatonic. She was disconnected from herself and the world. She didn't want to talk, and didn't want to have to think. Because when she thought, she felt sad. She didn't even want to fight Henric or mouth off to him. Once she wondered if this was what Kerran had meant when he had suggested she would be easier to handle, but she didn't think that was it because her strength and agility had faded as well. Grabbing anything was like trying to make a fist when just waking up.

Henric had grown bored of watching Kerran work his experiments and usually left him alone with Alex now. Alex had stopped talking to Kerran both out of exhaustion and bitterness, but he had continued to be chatty with her. She just wished, during more lucid times, that she was able to remember the things he chatted to her about. When Kerran finished his daily experiment, he would send Alex stumbling out and she would crawl to the tent to sleep while Henric would take her place and keep Kerran company.

Ssazra had been trying to get her to eat, but when she stopped responding to food smells and started making whining sounds when he tried to feed her, the lizardman cracked and decided to talk to Henric.

The knight returned to the tent and found Ssazra sitting motionless and watching Alex.

“Sir Knight,” he said with concern. “Your squire is very sick.”

Henric considered the seriousness in Ssazra’s tone. Henric had interpreted Alex’ impotence as a new form of passive defiance, but now questioned himself. “Sick how?”

“Not chemically sick,” Ssazra said. He didn’t want to burn a bridge, but he knew the cause. “Perhaps something else, if there is something that has been tampered with in his mind. You should see if he will talk to you. He won’t react to me.”

Ssazra left, and Henric felt cold. The lizardman wasn’t human, but Henric had never known him to give bad advice. He grabbed one of Alex’ upper arms and pulled her to her feet. She felt like a dead weight to him, her body too limp and cold to the touch.

"You’ve been quiet. It's somewhat unsettling," He said. Henric had grown accustomed to her constant back talk to the point where he expected it and now he almost longed for it.

"I hate talking," she said in a mumble. She didn't know if she meant the words, but she was angry enough that they were the first things on her mind. In a moment the anger faded away from her like a match that had been blown out, and she wished she still had it with her so that she could feel it inside of her again. “I just want to rest. I need to rest, Henric.”

For once, he let her do what she wanted, and she lay back down.

Henric was not up to the task of cheering her up, nor did he find her the least bit attractive when she wasn't the hard-working spitfire he was used to breaking in bed. He may have been fine with this turn of events were he the one to make her act this way, but he was not.

Kerran.

Henric snarled as the name crossed his mind this time--seeing his mentor now as competition--and he felt a resentment that was too difficult to process. Kerran broke her. Kerran did what Henric had been trying to do every night since he had acquired Alex. His mentor had done it in only a few days.

“What’s gotten into you?” he asked her again.

"I don't know," she said honestly. Her voice cracked, but she didn't cry. She couldn't make her emotions stay long enough to think about them and process them into tears. "I'm so tired. I want to go home."

When she spoke of home, she didn't think about The Barracks. She thought about the house her father owned, where she had been a child. In the last three days she had remembered more and more buried memories of being a toddler with her brother. She had been so small, she hadn't even realized that a person could remember such things. Maybe it was Kerran who had put them in her head. Maybe the boy she remembered playing with wasn't her brother at all.

"I'm Alex too," she muttered to herself as she tried to keep her own identity straight while a few memories played in her mind. "It's my name now as well."

Henric squatted down to her level and pulled her up again to a sitting position. She was ranting and it was disquieting at best.

"Pull yourself together." He reached and grabbed her by the shoulder, his hand falling directly atop her scar. "What would the other knights think if I brought you home barely able to carry a sword and spouting nonsense?"

When he touched her scar she gasped, eyes widening. She felt a jolt of sensation not only in her shoulder, but in the rest of her body as well, and a light came on in her eyes. It was there long enough for tears to appear in their corners as she looked at Henric. "I don't know. I don't know. I can't help it. It's not my fault, I swear."

She was like a child now. "He pulled me out of me," she said, stammering and struggling even to put a sentence together. She wanted to lie down and sleep between phrases. "My soul. In pieces. Arms, legs, mouth, eyes, Different times. He says I'm not me."

"He had better have put that soul back where he got it," Henric muttered, thinking to himself. Shortly after the words left his mouth he felt cold panic sweeping back over him and leaving frost over his heart. He grabbed her tunic. "Tell me! Is your soul intact?"

"I don't know!" she said again, limp where he grabbed her shirt. She felt weak again when his hand left her shoulder, and a numbness crept back into her extremities and a greyness fogged up her vision. "I don't know anything about this, Henric. You're the one friends with him."

He let out something between a scoff and a growl as he released her, tossed her back to the furs. He turned away and brought a hand to his chin, contemplating. He was disturbed, and it was a very rare emotion for him.

Alex sat on the fur for a moment, and her tears dried up without stimulation. "I'm Alex too," she said softly to Henric, as if he needed reminding.

"I know you are." His head fell into his hands. "You're lucky enough to have two souls floating around in that pert little body of yours."

"I don’t know that I had two," she said, looking at him where he sat. These were the only times that she didn't feel afraid of him. "Maybe one and then some. Not now."

The thought frightened her deeply, but it was too much for her to contemplate fully. She told Henric, "I'm not Roxanne anymore."

"Kerran doesn't seem to think so." Henric heaved a sigh. "I'd rather have a strong squire than a timid girl."

He looked to her with an expectant gaze that she did not return. He sighed again. "And tonight, you're not the squire I've been training."

"Alex would have been a squire if he lived," she informed in a low tone almost under her breath. Alex spoke as if this were vital information. "He would have been a knight like father. I don't know what Roxanne would have done. She liked swords too, they both played with those."

"Alex did become a squire." Henric turned to his own squire, who failed to see that he was upset. Sad.

"He died when we were three," she told him, and hugged her knees to her chest thoughtfully and looked over Henric's shoulder. "I don't know what I remember and what is made up."

She looked around the room nervously.

"Kerran wouldn’t have damaged your soul, Alex.” Henric spoke to reassure himself more than the girl. “You're all there. You're intact, just the way you were when you entered that place. He left your soul in place."

Henric did not like what Kerran had done to his squire. He was not happy with the results, but his respect for Kerran was a different story--the necromancer had been the father, the mentor, the friend that Henric had always wanted as a young man. He had been the first person that Henric had ever felt had really cared about him as a person, the only person who knew everything about him and didn’t hate him completely.

"Please," she begged him. Alex had never asked Henric for much. She expected little more than food and training from him, and what frazzled memories she could look through, she couldn't remember ever asking him for anything other than that he treat her without cruelty. "Please. I want to leave."

When she finished speaking, he was already gone from the tent. She might have kept worrying, but when he was out of sight, her eyes shut and she slept.

Henric stormed through the brambles and into Kerran’s lair.

“Just what did you do to my squire?” His voice was so angry it almost cracked.

“Oh good, you’re here. Hold this.” Kerran shoved a flask into his hand then took off and went to his table to fish through several papers. Henric scowled and though Kerran didn’t see he seemed to acknowledge it. “Oh, c’mon you can multi-task. So, what’s this about your squire?”

“You’ve broken her, she’s lackluster, complacent, and overall she is not herself.”

“Oh, I’d say she’s more herself than she’s ever been.” Kerran cackled as he looked to a paper and nodded, grabbing a small vial.

“Just what do you mean by that?” Kerran made his way over to Henric, took the flask from his hands and poured a drop from the vial.

“It’s just a little experiment of mine.” He swirled the flask and eyed the liquid carefully.

“What did you do?” Henric grabbed his mentor’s robes and lifted him into the air as pulled his face closer to his.

“Twins have such a special bond, even after death. There’s like a little bit of Alex in Roxanne and, elsewhere where the rest of Alex’ soul is, there is a part of Roxanne with him as well. It's a simpler procedure than you'd think--I cut off young Roxanne’s soul from being touched by any other soul. Including that little bit of her brother that’s normally in there with her. It's actually very close to a lot of other work I've done in other fields, not too difficult.”

“So, explain to me why she is so… dead inside.”

“Well, I assume she is so used to having that little part of her brother with her that it’s disturbing her to be without it.”  Kerran shrugged and Henric released his grip on the necromancer’s robe. "She's used to having her hand held all the time, Henric, whether she knows it or not. She's spoiled, really, that's the problem with twin souls."

Kerran wiped a hand on the front of his cloak and his brown eyes glared to the knight. "You wouldn't be able to relate to her position. Growing up without something is very different than growing up with something, then losing it."

“You will return her to the state that you found her in, then we are going to leave.”

“Are you certain about that?” Kerran set the flask on the table. His voice instantly became steely. “That seal is not just protecting her from her brother’s soul, but anyone else who may wish to harm it… or take it away from her entirely.”

Henric didn’t like the direction of the conversation, and he glowered at the necromancer.

Kerran prodded a finger into Henric’s sternum. “You wouldn’t wish such a feeling on anyone, would you?” The single finger felt so warm to Henric, so calming to the touch.

But he swatted the hand from his chest. “I’m going to bring her back in here. Return her to normal.” The knight then took off, leaving the disgruntled necromancer to his private experimentation.

Kerran didn’t bother to finish what he had been working on. When Henric was out of sight, his lip curled up furiously like some rabid creature, and he hurled his concoctions into the fireplace so they exploded in a burst of blue green flames that, only briefly, cast light on him as he truly was under his magic, tail and all, until it flickered back to orange light.

By then Henric dragged Alex in. Kerran looked at the listless husk of a squire. “You don’t prefer her like this? It certainly makes her easier to handle.”

Henric didn’t want to reply directly. “Just undo whatever you did.”

Both men sighed this time, and Kerran pulled Alex’ tunic off and let her slip into a kneeling position on the floor. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t see or feel much until she felt Kerran’s fingtertip retracing the lines he’d left on her skin. He used a fingernail to scratch at her. Not hard, but hard enough to be uncomfortable and get her attention.

With every scratch, she felt reassured. Of her own existence, of the existence of the world around her, and of her identity.

“I’m Alex too,” she muttered. This time the words came as a bold declaration with no hint of pleading.

Henric didn’t smile, but he kind of wanted to. He saw some of Alex’ muscles tensing in her back and he was glad to see her start coming back. When she looked up at him, he ruffled her hair and she scowled. “That’s my girl,” he said.


Alex was next aware of being carried. Henric had tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes rather than carry her like a bride, and her first drowsy thoughts found her considering which of the two she preferred.

Then: “Henric, Henric I’m awake.”

“About time,” he said, and swung her around to her feet. She dizzily stumbled back into Ian, who snorted viciously and pulled his lips back to threaten a bite. The knight shoved his stallion’s head away from Alex as a reprimand. Henric said, “I was just about to toss you on his back. We’re getting out of here.”

“I can walk,” Alex lied.

“You’ll ride. You look drunk.”

“I do not.”

“Get on the horse.”

She couldn’t. Henric boosted her up and  was already leading Ian out of the woods by his bridle when Alex righted herself and sat up.

“What day is it?” she asked.

“Moonday,” he answered.

Alex was silent. Her birthday was tomorrow. She had almost missed it. She took a deep breath, and listened when Henric told her briefly of the last few, blurry days. He was clearly hurt that he’d decided to leave Kerran--she only wished she had been intelligent and cunning enough to split them up intentionally.

Ian and Henric walked quietly for an hour, Alex riding, before time stood still and the squire’s forward momentum made her bump her head against Ian’s neck as she fell forward. When she righted herself and looked around at the forest, she was afraid that there was something wrong with her again.

“Henric?” she asked, and dismounted. She grabbed at Henric’s tunic, but the man was as solid and immobile as if he were a statue.

“That’s not going to do anything.”

She swiveled to look at Kerran. He stood in the middle of the road ahead of him. “How did you do that? Make it normal.”

“Time is just as easily manipulated as anything. Every aspect of reality easy to my control. Magic can accomplish so much.” He approached Alex with a cold gaze. “But I don’t need spells to get what I want from you, Roxanne.”

Alex knew this tone of voice and she looked at him with understanding eyes. She turned back around to Henric and drew the sword from his back, spun to face Kerran again. “You might.”

Yes, she thought. Yes, standing with a sword in my hands is how I am meant to be.

The sword was much heavier than she was used to, but she didn’t think that a fight with this sword would have to last very long at all, one way or another.

With movement almost too fast for Alex’ eyes to follow, he neared her and grabbed the blade. Blood seeped from between his knuckles. “No, I don’t think I will.” His voice was calm despite the blood.

She thought to herself: Dead men aren’t supposed to bleed.

Alex pulled the sword back and it slid from his hand as if from a sheathe and took red streaks with it. Kerran showed no sign of pain, but a scowl started to dip at his brow. She stepped sideways and swung at him.

He pulled up his opposite hand and caught the blade. His knee lifted up, hitting Alex in the chest as he wrenched the blade from her grip. Alex stumbled back, winded, into Ian, and she ducked under him to put space between herself and Kerran. The necromancer dropped the sword in the dirt and looked at his palms with distaste. They were gouged open and deformed by the sword’s acid.

“I don’t need to control you to take what I want from you,” he said, and looked up at Alex again. His hands were bloody, but good as new.

“Oh yeah?” she challenged with her voice starting to get ragged as she got louder. Alex knew this was her weakness. She could never control her tongue. She knew it was stupid. But she loved to talk back. “What do you and your limp dick want?”

He walked around Ian, and now he was glaring at her. The resemblance to Henric was utterly unmistakable now. He moved briskly, his arms pumping at his sides as he walked to Alex and she tried to run backwards.

“I’m not doing this because of you. I’m doing this because you’re the one thing precious enough to Henric that he would jeopardize his friendship with me to keep you in one piece.” He lurched forward, snatching her jaw in his sticky hand. “You’re the closest thing he has to a lover.”

She slugged him and pulled her face from his sticky hand, then bounced back on the balls of her feet like a boxer. She wanted to circle around to get the sword again--because she only felt good about fighting when she had a sword in her hand--but that wouldn’t work. She had one trick up her sleeve left, thanks to Yorick.

“I’m getting a better idea of what he means about that your fiery behavior now,” Kerran ran a hand back through his short hair. “As you know, I am really not a fan of it.”

“What the fuck do you want?” Alex snapped.

“Well I don’t really want any one thing,” he said, emphasizing the final word. “Mostly, I just want to be spiteful.”

“By killing me?” she ventured.

“My options are open,” Kerran growled. “I haven’t really made up my mind. I’m looking to come up with something just big enough to piss Henric off without making him run away completely.”

“And what’s that? Maiming? Taking out a chunk of my soul?”

“Well I was thinking I’d have you suck me off.”

“How?” Alex asked, and in her moment of puzzlement, Kerran caught one of her wrists and yanked her forward, off balance.

“I’m a much better liar than you are, Roxanne,” he said. She really did irritate him, and his temper was climbing. He boxed her ears to dizzy her, forced her to her knees, and snatched up her hands in his. “You’re pretending to be a boy. I’m pretending to be a dead human. You shouldn't be surprised that everyone lies as much as you do. And I am not so impotent as I say.”

That was a thinker for the girl, but her mouth moved faster than her mind. “Well it figures that Henric’s closest friend would be a rapist too.”

“I’m a lot more than that,” he said. “But you are nothing Roxanne. You are nothing but a means to an end, and I mean to teach my dear Sir Henric a lesson. I would have thought you’d want to help me cause him some grief. Do you want to play along?”

“Fine,” she lied before she finished coming up with a plan. “But make him watch.”

Kerran was taken aback, but intrigued. He let go of one of Alex’ hands and reached into his pocket to pull out his well-loved wooden puzzle. Unlike with the squire, Kerran needed no threads of soulstring to control the knight. Henric’s soul was already in the palm of his hand, and with barely a thought, Kerran compelled him to return to motion.

Stiffly, Henric failed to resist. He failed to speak. He failed to assume control. It gave Alex no pleasure to see him like this, even though she had believed moments before that nothing would make her happier than Henric’s suffering. Henric was only confused.

Kerran let go of Alex’ other hand, and the knight fell to his knees with a thud a few feet from them. “Suck me off, Roxanne,” Kerran demanded.

Alex didn’t strike yet. He would have seen it coming. She glanced at Henric and saw him seizing and trying to fight with his jaw clenched and his eyes wild, then tried to focus on her work. Her soft hands felt the bulge at the front of Kerran’s pants the moment she started to open them, but she was still surprised when a human cock bounced out.

She looked up and down his length. Being with only Henric so often, so long--the only penis she knew was her knight’s, and she was going to spend a few wide-eyed moments taking in the differences between it and this new one, but Kerran grabbed her by her hair and pulled her head in.

It was easy to fall into habit. She was automatic, an animal well-trained.

Outside of his confusion, Henric felt a physical pain in his chest to watch Alex lick another man’s cock and show it the same attention that he had trained her to show him. It was not the pain of a lover, but it was born from jealousy. He was more upset to see his squire’s lips engulf the head of Kerran’s cock than he was that Kerran had turned him into an enormous puppet.

He tried continuously to lunge forward to stop them, but failed constantly. Attempts at speaking and making any sound were just as successful. Even the speed at which he blinked was regulated through Kerran.

So he had to watch Alex. It was surreal from this angle, surreal to see her lips closing around and sliding along Kerran’s shaft. She was rough, as rough as she could be without using her teeth significantly. She moved her head rapidly, licked forcefully, and sucked as hard as she could. Henric saw her lips turning purple as Kerran’s head tilted back towards the sky in pleasure.

Alex blue eyes looked skyward to keep tabs on Kerran’s reactions. He was steadily leaking precum onto her tongue and she felt him throbbing every few moments. She took him more deeply into her mouth, grinding the head against the warm roof of her mouth in the back and waited for him to cum.

She heard Kerran’s groan just a moment before he choked her with his seed, but her focus was elsewhere. With him distracted by his orgasm, looking up and away from her, off balance, she reached for her boot where she knelt to retrieve the dagger that Yorick had given her ages ago.

Henric had never been more proud of Alex than he was when she plunged the blade--its origin a mystery to him--into Kerran’s chest and raked it down to his hip and thigh. She spat his cum back at him and got up as he stumbled back and transformed.

Many things happened at once. Kerran dropped the wooden puzzle and it fell apart into pieces. Henric recovered his ability to move of his own accord and got to his feet. Ian ceased being trapped in time and struggled with horse thoughts. Alex attacked again with the small knife and slashed at Kerran's face.

He was dark blue, almost grey, and growing larger. A prodigious hump was pushing at the back of his tunic until it tore open from the slices Alex was making and a pair of wings--delicate and eclipsing--exploded from his back. The moment that Henric saw a long tail swinging in the air, Kerran dropped to his hands--talons--and shoved Alex down and out of the way to begin collecting the pieces of the puzzle.

Henric looked for his sword and felt like an idiot when he couldn’t locate it until he looked behind him and found it already covered in blood. He reclaimed it and charged back to where Kerran was frantically trying to find the pieces of wood as his ears and fangs elongated and horns like a sheep pushed out of his skull. Alex had cut through the membranous wings like they were paper, but now Kerran’s whip-like tail was keeping her at bay.

But Henric couldn't attack, even with the sword held high at the ready. It was the first time the knight had faltered this way. He hated Kerran now, but he needed him.

So Kerran vanished.

“Motherfucker,” Alex swore, gasping for breath. She leaned back against a tree, and pointed at Henric with her blood-covered dagger to get his attention. “Henric. Henric. Was that a fucking demon?”

“I think maybe he was,” he said. He was lost.

Alex told him what happened, pacing back and forth and gesticulating, still holding the dagger. Henric never interrupted, and instead spent the time recuperating from his shock while he listened. If he could have loved her, he would have. But he was a man without his own soul, and even if he’d had his soul, he would still have been an evil man with a heart of coal.

The squire stopped talking when her story brought them to the present, and opened the hand that didn’t hold the knife. Henric looked at what was in her palm, and recognized it after a moment as a piece of the wooden puzzle. “This is yours, isn’t it?” She asked.

He looked at his squire and wondered why she was giving it to him. “I guess so,” he said, and took it miserably. Kerran had played with that toy for as long as Henric had known him. Kerran had promised Henric that he would help him find his soul for as long as he had known him. Kerran had been a liar for as long as Henric had known him.

A sickly white wisp moved from the wooden chunk to Henric’s chest. He almost swatted it away like a pest as it crawled into the unfamiliar cavity of his body.

“How do you feel?” Alex asked. She seemed hopeful.

Henric shook his head. “No different. I didn't grow up spoiled with a soul and a half.”