Well-Shagged Dead End
Sep. 14th, 2006 09:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragoness_eAnother one that wouldn't fit in a comment.
The Rest of the Story
aka Well-Shagged Dead End
"Heading directly as I could for Faussesflammes, whose turrets were often lost behind the high and interlacing boughs, I entered the forest. There were no paths, and often I was compelled to brief detours and deviations by the thickness of the underbrush. In my feverous hurry to reach the ruins, it seemed hours before I came to the top of the hill which Faussesflammes surmounted, but probably it was little more than thirty minutes. Climbing the last declivity of the boulder-strewn slope, I came suddenly within view of the chateau, standing close at hand in the center of the level table which formed the summit." -- "The End of the Story", Clark Ashton Smith.
Dead End paused the e-book and looked up at the ancient stone ruins atop the brush-snarled hill. Only by the merest chance had he come this way through central France, ducking down back roads and forested wagon tracks to avoid the Aerialbots following Megatron's latest debacle. French nuclear power would continue to heat the homes of Averoigne uninterrupted by Decepticons, and Dead End had a slagged lifter unit--he wouldn't be flying anywhere until he did some time in the Constructicon workshop. He'd also gotten separated from the rest of the Stunticons in the frantic retreat when he'd fled over the ground while they flew away.
Dead End wasn't lost, exactly--praise the American GPS satellites!--but he was alone, and the choice of which road to take was almost random. Really, it didn't matter; sooner or later, the Autobots would find him, and that would be the end of his travels.
" 'Doubtless a monastery,' I thought, as I drew rein, and descending from my exhausted mount, lifted the heavy brazen knocker in the form of a dog's head and let it fall on the oaken door. " -- Ibid.
Dead End knew little of French history, or he might have been surprised that the ancient monastery had survived the French Revolution intact. In spite of the modernizations of real roads where once there were only footpaths, and electrical wires strung overhead, he recognized the old monastery from the story. It even had the brass dog's head knocker on the wooden door. From the monastery's summit, Dead End's radar mapped the mile-distant hill with the crumbling stone ruins atop it.
Smith had changed the names when he wrote the story, of course--but he described it all too well. So, the American author had traveled deep in France; were the rest of the details there as well? A faint curiosity piqued him past his existential despair; Dead End shifted to robot mode and plunged into the brush of the forest's edge, heading for the high hill surmounted by the ruins of Chateau des Faussesflammes.
"Trees had taken root in its broken-down walls, and the ruinous gateway that gave on the courtyard was half-choked by bushes, brambles and nettle-plants. Forcing my way through, not without difficulty, and with clothing that had suffered from the bramblethorns..." -- Ibid.
The ancient ruins were even more impassible than the author's account suggested. Dead End smashed and shot his way through deadfalls of long-dead trees that choked the ruins, covered with crawling long-thorned brambles that would have daunted any fleshly creatures. Pulpy weeds squished beneath his metal feet, leaving a trail of juice and sap across the moss-encrusted flagstones.
"...I went, like Gerard de Venteillon in the old manuscript, to the northern end of the court. Enormous evil-looking weeds were rooted between the flagstones, rearing their thick and fleshy leaves that had turned to dull sinister maroons and purples with the onset of autumn. But I soon found the triangular flagstone indicated in the tale, and without the slightest delay or hesitation I pressed upon it with my right foot." -- Ibid.
The triangular flagstone existed; it was slightly wider than Dead End's shoulders, huge by human standards. It tilted beneath his gentle tap--far too easily, for such an ancient, decayed ruin. As it slid away, revealing the flight of granite steps described in the story, Dead End knew that it had been deliberately maintained.
"All falls into decay, save that which lies underground? But why? Another entrance, better known to those below--or do they come by air, those who use this place?" The maroon Stunticon looked around the tree and bramble-choked courtyard. "Not an inviting entrance." He placed one foot on the stairs.
"No doubt there is but a dusty vault below, and the author imagined all the rest for his story. No doubt. But what if the story is, in some way, true? What if the lamia waits below? Shall I walk into her lair and be devoured?" Dead End stepped down again.
"Or perhaps something more mundane, yet sinister. A secret base, filled with soldiers and super-weapons? Plunder for Megatron! Or a fatal shot through the core for me, most likely." A third step he took.
"Or the hidden temple of some forbidden cult, where serpent-men worship the Great Devourer and sacrifice stray tourists upon their altar? Now that would be interesting--but highly unlikely!" Dead End descended a fourth step, and a fifth. The flagstone trembled against his back, but could not slide shut.
"More likely, it will be a dusty, empty hole and I shall be bored, and horribly depressed that my favorite story comes to such a mundane end." Sixth, seventh, all the rest of the steps down, to a narrow, dusty vault... but at the far end was a door. A narrow door, a narrow vault--for humans. Two shots of Dead End's concussion rifle, and the opening yawned wide...
As he stepped into golden sunlight where no sunlight should be, and looked upon the azure sea, though the ocean lay hundreds of miles away, Dead End laughed behind the mask. His radar scanned a great subterranean vault--larger, but not the miles of terrain his optics saw.
And as the thought occurred to him, his radar readouts changed, showing him the open leagues of ancient Arcadia. Again the Stunticon laughed darkly. "The illusion is complete! So the author wrote more truly than anyone knew. Did he add to the web? But of course--for it has drawn me in. I even know the doom to which I go, and yet I still go--such a curious end for one of Megatron's own!"
He studied the open path to the palace in the grove, of which the story spoke. "Now why should I wear my bearings out chasing across an illusion? Not to mention tearing up all your lovely grass with my tires and flattening a few trees. When if I were to, as it were, close my eyes and open them, I might find myself there?" As he spoke, Dead End shut down his optics, then reactivated them--and found himself on the portico of a marble palace in the laurel grove.
Two white femmebots of a graceful, ancient Cybertronian style nodded and greeted Dead End in an ancient language he knew not, yet still understood. "Our mistress, Nycea, awaits you," they said.
"So she does," Dead End answered, then followed the impossibly graceful femmebots. They led him through a hallway gleaming with onyx and polished porphyry to an opulently decorated chamber.
She knelt there, yellow helm and fins against shining green metal, silver serpentine tentacles sprouting from her sides, coiling and twisting to their mistress's will. She looked up at Dead End, with the handsome, cool gray face of a Seeker--though she had not a Seeker's wings--looked at him with lambent green optics and smirked in that arrogant way--so like a Seeker!-- that turned Dead End's will inside out into helpless, hopeless desire.
"I knew you would come," she murmured in the same ancient language he had heard from the lips of her servants. "I am Nycea, and I love you." Her tentacles coiled around him, drew Dead End into her arms, and he was lost.
"'Yes, my son, the beautiful Nycea who lay in your arms this night is a lamia, an ancient vampire, who maintains in these noisome vaults her palace of beatific illusions. How she came to take up her abode at Faussesflammes is not known, for her coming antedates the memory of men. She is old as paganism; the Greeks knew her; she was exorcised by Apollonius of Tyana; and if you could behold her as she really is, you would see, in lieu of her voluptuous body, the folds of a foul and monstrous serpent. All those whom she loves and admits to her hospitality, she devours in the end, after she has drained them of life and vigor with the diabolic delight of her kisses." -- Ibid.
# # #
"DEAD END, GET YOUR SLAGGIN' HEAD OUT OF YOUR SLAGGIN' E-BOOKS BEFORE I TRACK YOU DOWN AND RIP THEM OUT OF YOUR MEMORY BANKS WITH MY BARE HANDS!"
Hours or days or weeks later, Dead End lifted his head from where he lay upon a bier in a great domed vault. Ancient dust lay thick upon the stone floor; coiled about him was the metallic green and yellow form of Nycea, her tendrils still inserted deep into intimate circuits beneath his hood. He shook his head carefully to clear the languor from his mind, and toggled the Stunticon command channel.
"Acknowledged, Motormaster. Dead End here--wherever 'here' is. What are your orders? I've been... out of it since we retreated." He reached down and picked up his battle mask from the floor, giving Nycea one last kiss before he snapped the mask back onto his face.
"Is that your term for being AWOL for the last fragging MONTH? Why in the PIT haven't you answered your comm?" Dead End thought he could detect the slightest trace of concern beneath Motormaster's rage; then he shook his head. He had to be imagining that! Dead End was still muzzy from the unending, wanton pleasure of the last... month?
...perhaps Motormaster did have some cause for concern.
"I didn't receive your signal," Dead End finally answered. Knowing Motormaster, he wisely did not add "because the lamia of Faussesflammes hadn't finished devouring my life and soul yet..."
"WELL YOU'RE RECEIVING IT NOW! Get your useless aft out of whatever hole you've crawled into and report to base!" It occurred to Dead End that he felt quite healthy for someone who'd been a lamia's feast for the last month. He was a bit low on fuel, but thirty or so days of physical activity without halt or recharge would do that.
Dead End gently pulled the hooked silver tendrils loose from his chassis. "I must go, Nycea," he murmured to the yellow and green mech.
Glowing green optics flickered on. "Were you mortal man, Dead End," she husked in that ancient language that Dead End suspected to be Greek, "I would bid you seek me again, and leave your tale behind where youths flush with green desire might find it--but for all the pleasure I take in you, I take naught else. Your flesh is as bronze, and your blood the hot blood of Talos. Indeed, you are his kin. My hungers you cannot slake as the soft, yielding flesh of mortal man can." Her tentacles retracted and she uncoiled her supple, adamantine body from his limbs. "So fare you well, Dead End, and bring not your kin to visit me, for neither you nor they shall find me again."
"But Nycea, alas! has escaped, and I fear she will still survive, to build again her palace of demoniacal enchantments, to commit again and again the unspeakable abomination of her sins.' " -- Ibid.
-- FIN --
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Date: 2006-09-15 03:47 am (UTC)re
Date: 2006-09-15 05:44 am (UTC)Dun.
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Date: 2006-09-15 09:01 am (UTC)Hot damn. Now I'm more glad than ever that I didn't get lazy and just check my e-mail on the station computer... This would have definitely gotten me into trouble if it had popped up in the cache... *gryn*
I likes *very* *very* *very* much.
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Date: 2006-09-15 01:26 pm (UTC)Mass kudos for the way this winds around the CAS story! That's really, really classy. I like the way you've written Dead End. You've gone beyond the standard things are that are done with him [angst, apathy and polish]. You've taken the "Well-Shagged" challenge and, instead of writing a drabble about, sex, written a story that stands on its own and just pleasantly happens to include a good shagging. Nycea's funky [at last, a female robotesque character who takes a 'con as a lover and ISN'T a flaming Sue!]. This is a really, really good story.
:: stamps story with Fish Seal of Approval::
More please? :D
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Date: 2006-09-15 05:53 pm (UTC)Angsty and Well-Shagged are the two I most consider fully developed stories.
And Nycea is very funky. 10 pts to anyone who recognizes the form she took...
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Date: 2006-09-15 06:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-16 03:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-16 07:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-16 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-15 09:46 pm (UTC)Nycea is the monster of the tale, and Dead End is very, very lucky that he fell into a certain category of beings. I would be very confused if she were a Sue. ;-)
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Date: 2006-09-16 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-22 06:42 am (UTC)Just a teensy nitpick - His radar scanned great subterranean vault
Should be, "His radar scanned the great subterranean vault."
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Date: 2006-09-25 07:03 pm (UTC)I'd fixed it in the FF.net version, just forgot to come back here and fix same typo. Thank you for the reminder.