Written for Promptober 2024 Day 3: Tentacles / ritual sacrifice
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: monsters, tentacle fucking, eldritch horror, tentacle rape, coercion, body horror, drugs
***
“Ohhhhh, no,” Ira says to Wheels when Wheels asks him. He throws in hand-waving and repeated shaking of his head for good measure. “No, no, I don’t even belong to the Spirit, why don’t you ask one of your guys if you need to talk to this thing so bad?”
“Because you’re the one who’ll survive it,” Wheels tells him. He lets the QED hang unspoken: that if Ira turns him down, someone’s going to die. Instead he just holds Ira’s eyes, like he’s waiting to watch the dominoes fall.
Of course they fall.
As is his way, Wheels blithely rolls on with his plans, pretending like Ira has made a free choice to help and isn’t acting under threat to someone else’s life.
And as is his way, Ira swallows down his protests and anger and disgust, and tries not to let his reluctant whining get too annoying. People like Wheels—like Zion—don’t appreciate that much.
The table in the middle of Wheels’ ritual room has hooks. Because of course it does. They’re thick metal hoops the size of half-dollars and discreetly placed, not because Wheels is worried about alarming anyone but rather to keep them from being hazards to the elbows of anybody who plays poker with devils.
He guides Ira to lay down on top, naked, and stretches him out, lashed to the hooks at wrists and ankles.
“Do I have to take my clothes off?” Ira had asked plaintively.
“No,” Wheels had answered teasingly. “If you don’t care about keeping them, then you can have them ripped off you later.” Fucker.
“I don’t like this,” Ira mumbles now, again, squirming with discomfort both outside and in. Zion did things like this with him. To him. With him. There is no way in which this is comforting.
Wheels sits at the edge of the table with a pot of ink that smells like herbs, and begins painting lines down Ira’s chest with a steady hand. “You’ll be all right,” he soothes. “I’ll be right here. I won’t let anything dangerous happen to you.”
Ira laughs. It’s bitter, or maybe a little hysterical.
Wheels plants a hand by Ira’s head and leans over to look straight down at him. “I need you to do this,” he reminds him. There’s honey in his tone, like the sugar to cover the vicious taste of cough medicine. “You’re made for this. You will be safe. Any of my other men who tried to channel forces like this would die of it. Or worse, they might not die.”
Yes, Ira knows. And why, he wants to ask, does that mean it’s okay what’ll happen to him? He won’t die, he won’t have his mind turned inside out; he’ll just have to live through the pain and the horror and the memory of it. What about that?
He’s sure if he asked, Wheels would find some kind of answer for him. But he knows it wouldn’t change anything, so he says nothing.
Wheels settles in somewhere out of Ira’s sight for the ritual. On edge, every other sense straining, Ira hears the match strike and flare. The sharp scent of sulfur hits his nose a breath or so after, and shortly the smoke begins to drift over him, smelling of the heavy warm-cool evening scent of Night’s special lavender being burned. It’s followed soon after by the godawful stench of burning blood, and then—oh he fucking hates this part—satiny blue-violet curls with the drugged, sickly floral incense smell of burning opium. The thick scent rolls acridly over the back of his tongue and down into his lungs. The clouds begin to gather in his head.
Wheels chants, that bare-metal voice of his clogged and growling in a language Ira has heard before but doesn’t know.
Ira’s good and high by the time the space around them begins to change shape. He snickers to himself when he notices it, because it’s so easy to tell himself it’s just the drugs, it’s all in his head. Oh but he knows better, doesn’t he? Is it easier, he wonders muzzily, as he has before, for this to happen when the humans observing it are high? Does something about the flexibility of a drugged mind let reality melt more easily? The uncertainty between what’s real and what isn’t—is that just in his head? Maybe the room is drugged too.
“Maybe so,” Wheels murmurs from behind him. “Shhhh.”
The room’s walls seem to shrink to the edges of the summoning circle. The summoning circle seems to stretch wide, rolling out away from them until it’s stretching for worlds, and rolling in from those vast horizons are a different-feeling air, damp and hot and heavy, like a storm front moving in. Or maybe like something huge breathing on him.
It comes into view as if surfacing from deep water. As if the ice of reality is melting away and revealing it, rather than it approaching them. Maybe it was always there and he just didn’t notice.
Ira starts hyperventilating, in a distant way.
“Shhhhh,” Wheels murmurs again. Something brushes his hair. “Shhh, it’s all right. It’s here to talk.”
Its mouth gapes as wide as he is tall. That’s the first thing he notices. The forests of needle teeth lining its maw, going all the way down its throat.
Next are the great blank eyes, lambent in the room’s low light as if they radiate a light of their own. Something about them seems almost more like windows than eyes. They’re so vacant, as if they don’t see…
Hypnotized by their shimmer, Ira doesn’t notice the third thing until it begins to force his ass wide around the slippery lump at its tip.
It’s a long tendril that emerges from a place above the thing’s eyes. It must be thick as his wrist, the part he can see. He can’t understand what that would mean for what he feels inside him. He screams as it plunges into him, drug-addled mind spinning in pain that stretches his flesh into helpless ecstasy, driving deeper till he feels run through.
With each thrust it begins to ejaculate rumbles into him. Thrusts them like little earthquakes into his floating, opium-buoyed body. Hard, thick lumps of speech that shudder up through him into his lungs, twisting his body up around them with pain and pleasure and the force of their wanting out.
He feels them bubble up out of his mouth in sounds he knows he’s making but barely hears. The eyes hold him submerged.
Through him, fucking its words into a human body that can translate them, the abomination speaks with Wheels.
Fear crashes over Ira like breaking waves, but the drugs and those eyes hold him under, beneath the level of the storm-tossed surface of his own mind. He thinks he might die. He thinks he’s cored. Run through and hollowed out from ass to throat. Each word shakes up through him in an orgasm of fleshly possession and he moans it out, whatever sound it’s pushing through him, moans it with the pain and fear and pleasure it rakes through him.
Wheels speaks back, Ira knows that. His voice is such a fucking relief, such a human sound in this drifting twilit nightmare he’s sunk into, even if Ira can’t tell what he’s saying. Familiar long wiry fingers work through his hair, stroking and grounding, reminding him of what he is and what world he belongs to—and that’s good. It’s good because it’s hard to remember those things. Ira wishes he could tell Wheels so, but more words in an alien voice burble out from his throat and spill over the rim of his lips instead.
He rocks and arches on the table, head lolling beneath the monstrosity’s thrusts, beneath its voice, while it and Wheels pact.
It’s not a short time. It’s eternity. It’s timeless. When the thing pulls out of him, he thinks he’ll fall in on himself like a collapsing overstretched balloon. His skin is too big for him. His skin isn’t his. Is it?
Those shining sightless eyes fade. They don’t withdraw, or go away. They simply fade until they aren’t there anymore. Until he isn’t where they are anymore, as the walls of place and time shrink and grow back to where they usually live.
Ira groans. He can’t remember how to speak in human.
Wheels leans over him, poison green eyes glinting with pride and pleasure. “There, now. There now, Ira, you’ll be okay.” His hands take either side of Ira’s face, and then stroke downward—over his neck, curving softly around his throat till Ira can find the edges of it again. Down over his collar bones and over his chest.
Ira groans again. “Uhhh‘n.” He’s proud of himself. It was almost a sound. Maybe he can learn to do this again.
Wheels begins to untie his red-raw wrists and gather him up. Oh. Oh he can find the pieces of his body when Wheels moves them. They’re still there. He pats at the other man with one floppy hand, to let him know, and Wheels takes it, weaves their fingers together.
“Yes. Yes, you see? I told you that you could do it. You did well, Ira. So well. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you now.”
His tone sounds reassuring, and threaded with greed. His hand feels warm. Muscle and bone and human and comfort. Normal.
Wheels takes a warm damp cloth and begins to wipe him down with it. He curls in welcomingly over Ira when Ira cuddles in against the meat and bone and human of him to remember this is what he’s made of.