The Town at the edge of Thankan'dar was, for all of the violence and cruelty that reigned there, essentially a human place. The Great Lord's human followers ruled its streets, Samma N'Sei and Darkfriends and the rest. They preyed upon one another. Ate the weak.
Still, they lived, in a fashion. It would be in poor taste for the rest of the Great Lord's servants to devour them. Or to...enjoy them.
The Myrddraal watching from the shadows let out a low, frustrated hiss and withdrew, leaving that grimy town and its dispirited inhabitants behind. They were still vital, still infinitely more succulent than the trollocs the Myddraal was forced to spend its days with, but they were untouchable.
The trollocs were not. The Myddraal sidestepped, trading the shadows between two Town buildings for the shadow outside a sprawling, ramshackle building the trollocs had assembled deep within their own camp. On the march, trollocs made do with filthy scraps of blanket or shallow pits scraped in the soil. Here, deep within the Blight, they could build more permanent structures.
Not that any trolloc handiwork would stand for long. This building was shabby in the extreme, little more than scavenged boards lashed together with lengths of rope and rawhide or crudely nailed in places. The Myrddraal slipped through the open doorway, seething. It felt beneath him. All of this felt beneath him.
Until they reclaimed the human lands below the Blight, this was all he had.
His mood dark, the Myrddraal drifted over to a table. It was as crude as the rest of the building, consisting of some boards laid over a propped-up wagon wheel, but it was enough. Three of his Myrddraal brothers already sat there, nursing foul drinks in a mismatched selection of chipped mugs.
Nursing drinks was all they could do, of course. Myrddraal did not eat, after all. They sustained themselves in other ways. The Myrddraal didn't know what the mugs contained. Trolloc piss, perhaps. Curdled blood. Who could say?
A trolloc barmaid set a mug down before it. It raised it, fixing its eyeless stare on the greasy swirling liquid within, and took a deep sniff.
Yes. Definitely trolloc piss. The stench of unwashed animal and ammonia was sharp enough to sting. It set the mug back down.
"You look upset, Gaargl," one of the Myrddraal hissed, speaking in the trolloc tongue.
Gaargl. An ugly name. Not a name the Myrddraal would have used for himself. He ought to be something glorious, something dark, something in the Old Tongue. Instead, like most Myrddraal, he'd been named in the bestial trolloc tongue.
And why not? He'd slithered wetly from a trolloc's hairy, misshapen cunt along with a half-formed litter of trolloc pups. He'd absorbed them as a fetus. It was only proper.
"I'm not, Aaaarg," Gaargl hissed.
"You are. I can tell," hissed another Myrddraal. Fsst, Gaargl thought. It was difficult to be sure; all of them looked very much the same.
"Gaargl was looking at the humans again. Weren't you, Gaargl," said Aaaarg.
Gaargl raised his mug of trolloc piss for a strengthening sniff and moved too quickly, spilling some down the front of his dead black robe. Fortunately, he was saved from their hissing laughter by the arrival of the main attraction.
On the crude stage set up not far from their table, the ladies had arrived.
There were perhaps two dozen Myrddraal in the club. They hissed their appreciation together as the female trollocs mounted the stage, sputtering and spitting as vigorously as a garter snake mating ball. Gaargl hissed himself, caught up in the moment. An uncomfortable pressure built in his crotch.
The female trollocs were ravishing in their hideous, unnatural disfigurement. Myrddraal were drawn to order and beauty, yes, but only for the chance to defile it. Here was the human form perverted and defiled beyond anything a Myrddraal might accomplish.
As tall as male trollocs, the females sported the same dreadful blend of human and animal. The nearest trolloc's face bulged out in a boar-like snout. The snout was lopsided, receding too sharply on one side as the jaw became more human. Sharp teeth hung out, crooked and broken. The Myrddraal could smell its swampy breath even from here. Its eyes—one human and pale blue, framed by long lashes, the other small and round and dark as pitch—fixed on Gaargl's eyesockets.
Ah, great dark. The pressure in his groin was painful now.
The hulking trolloc stripped off her breastplate, tossing it aside. The clanking thump of metal and leather hitting the ground was echoed by the hissing cheers of her admirers. Her tits, glorious in their unsightliness, were as lopsided as her face. On the left side of her chest, bowed and buckled by broad, misshapen ribs, hung a single pendulous, blue-veined human tit. Long, wiry brown hairs ringed the nipple. The nipple itself looked like cracked brown leather, aged and ill cared-for. It had given suck to dozens of pups, the Myrddraal supposed. Female trollocs enjoyed their lot.
Beside that single human teat, swaying in time to the trolloc's grunting, effortful twerking, a row of swollen sow's teats flopped and jiggled. Up and down. Every time they smacked against the shit-crusted fur of her warped and drooping belly, dribbles and jets of creamy grey-and-yellow trolloc milk were forced forth.
Dark help him. Gaargl's hiss became a groan. The pressure between his legs felt like a knot now, barbed and horrible, digging cruelly into his flesh. He could take no more. His slender white hand, as pale and slippery as a squirming grub beneath a rock, dropped his mug of trolloc piss and shot beneath his robes.
He squeezed his own thighs, pale and clammy, and pressed his knuckles into the flat expanse of dimpled white skin between them. No cock grew there. He'd never had a cock, just as he'd never possessed an asshole. Still, if only he pressed his knuckles in the right way...if only he found that knot, somewhere beneath the skin…
The trolloc dancer stepped down from the stage. Her legs ended in hooves, broken and pitted and encrusted with the trolloc dung that paved the streets of this encampment, but her bulbous ass was nearly human beneath the hair. It was a tremendous ass, nearly head-high to an ordinary man, pockmarked and scabrous beneath patches of tattered fur. She backed up to the Myrddraal and lowered herself over his lap, twerking violently in his face.
This close, he could see every pitted acne scar and ruptured boil that cratered the trolloc's plump bottomcheeks. Her cheeks clapped like thunder and gaped wide again, exposing the ridges and seams of her gnarled brown knothole.
Gaargl panted, desperate. He wanted to ram his wormy white hand into her asshole up to the elbow, but both of his hands were buried in his lap now, fists grinding frantically at the slack, wan flesh there. The trolloc knew it, too, the sly bitch. Her hairy pussy, the flesh as black and wrinkled as a horse pussy, gaped with the force of her twerking and squeezed shut once more, discharging a quick cannonade of fishy queefs.
He could take no more. As the rancid scent boiled up, invading his nostrils, the painful knot buried somewhere beneath the smooth skin of his crotch seemed to burst, flooding his lower abdomen with searing pain. If Gaargl had ever envied humankind, he did then. Why should they be able to fuck properly, when he and his kind could only experience this pain? Some swollen abscess within his innards, forever unsatisfied and overflowing with the shadow's taint until it burst?
Gaargl groaned again, slumping over the table. The trolloc huffed a brutish, piggy laugh and moved on to the Myrddraal beside him. Aaaarg and Fsst waited her attentions, wheezing softly as they grappled uselessly beneath their robes. At the end of the table, the nameless Myrddraal slumped, apparently rendered unconscious by its own swift, shameful ipop/i of pleasure and horror.
After a time Gaargl roused himself enough to limp from the table and into the shadows, dispirited and defeated. These periods were the only clumsy interludes in the Fade's life. He should stay away, he knew...but he would be back.
He couldn't help himself.