Memento Mori

There was no exotic greenery around the lake, no rainbow of colors living in the depths, no white shores to strut along after abandoning a drained sailor. The lake was surrounded by a sickle of forest that changed colors every few months, and a wide spread of fields on the other side. Specks of colorful cottages dotting the horizon there. 

Warmth came in months, then receded until an icy sheet covered the water. The first time he saw it, he nearly panicked. However, Ransom learned in time that his body didn’t react to the temperature, as well that people came over to the lake no matter the season. 

With time, he realized, he gained what he hoped for - being away from his toxic kin, as well finding joys that the lagoon never brought.

Yes, it was colorful and luxurious for a water spirit, but provided the same kind of people every time - dirty, dreamy sailors and stuffy aristocrats. It all turned so boring so fast.

His lake - because Ransom was the only water spirit here - provided variety and entertainment. And it changed as the seasons here did. 

Spring brought men who fished in the gray hours of the morning, women who came to wash clothes, kids playing along the shores. Merchants and knights spent short breaks there on their routes from town to town. Winters meant fishing through holes in the ice and youth laughing as they slid across the thick sheet. 

Summer was Ransom’s favorite, with all the laughter and splashing as people cooled off in his lake. He especially liked women who came before the sunset, stripped themselves completely, then dove into the heart of the lake. 

It was also in the summer that humans held their festivities - something he never experienced before moving to the lake. Ransom watched the tall bonfires on the horizon, listened to the music and chime of bells. Then unmarried women came to the shore and threw flower wreaths onto it. 

Ransom made the water ripple and push them gently across the lake. Humans believed that whichever man on the other side of the lake picked the wreath, would then marry the girl it belonged to. 

Sometimes Ransom made the wreaths get stuck in the cattails, or picked them for himself. Just to mess with the humans and listen to the girls scaring each other how the water demon stole the wreath and it meant he’d steal their virginity, too.

From what Ransom witnessed happening not far from the shores, not many of those women were virgins.

And some of them, though they kept it a sweet secret, laid with him willingly. 

Ransom used to be offended by the term demon, but he learned to use it to his advantage. A charming appearance, a smirk, an insinuation that they lured him because they wanted to sin. 

A few ran away terrified. Some spread for him with a mischievous giggle. 

When you came to the shore and padded along the short, wooden deck the villagers built a few years ago, Ransom poked his head out of the water. He was still far away, and with the way the setting sun was shattering its light on the surface, he was partially hidden in all the sparkling reflections. 

For the past months you’ve been visiting the lake more often than others. A few times a day even. Always curious. 

You scavenged the shores, peeking between the blades of the sweet flag and laughing when you saw ducklings chirping and splashing. You sat on the deck, staring at the lake and mapping each ripple of the water. You dove into it, eyes open and watching the fish scampering between the waterweeds.

At first, Ransom took you for someone drawn to the lake for its calming and joyous properties. However, he quickly realised you weren’t only admiring the life here, but actively searching. 

For him.

While many people from the villages believed him to be a myth, the stories were still whispered. Especially by those who got a first hand (and other limbs) experience of interacting with him. 

Your determination crossed beyond spontaneous carnal need. You didn’t step into the water with a sweet calling song on your lips, as the other maidens have done to lure him. Instead, you displayed genuine interest with everything that was a part of Ransom’s home, and thus, a part of him. 

With his face half hidden in the water, Ransom studied you. 

Mischief seemed to be a constant sparkle in your eyes, much as the light reflected in the water. He felt himself smile in response whenever you giggled at something when visiting the lake - be it a sudden quack of the duck, or a fish nipping your toe when you dipped your feet in the water. 

A flash of your grin pulled him forward, curiosity of what you’d do next feeding his eagerness to pounce. 

Suddenly, you were standing up and taking your clothes off. 

Naked people in his lake weren’t a novelty, but for some reason your nudity stirred a potent reaction. Primal arousal, as well a flare of hunger and possessiveness. 

You dove into the water and started swimming - graceful, unrushed, but stubbornly forward. Deeper, away from the safety of the nearby shore. For the first time, Ransom didn’t just watch. He swam towards you.

Your face lit up with another smile. A broad grin that made him eager to find out what mischief was brewing in your pretty head. 

“Finally!” You huffed, floating in the water with a bit more strain. “I’ve been waiting so long for you to show yourself.”

Ransom swam even closer, eyes glinting with amusement at your bold words. 

“Pining after me, pretty mussel?” He slowly swam around you, a shark circling its prey. 

“Not pining. Wanting.” You corrected. 

The water demon you glimpsed a few months before, at the summer solstice celebrations, up close was even more beautiful and intriguing. More alluring than what the few women from the village whispered in secret, both blushing and proud of themselves for laying with a creature. 

“Wanting…” Ransom hummed, stopping in front of you. He had no trouble simply not drowning without moving his muscles much. 

“Yet I didn’t see you use any human seduction tricks on me. Aside from getting naked just now and jumping into my waters.”

“Why should I be like the others?” You sounded almost offended, which Ransom found surprisingly cute. “I don’t want just a single adventure to keep in secret and remember on boring, cold days.”

Ransom tilted his head slightly, studying you. He had an inkling that you were after something more than a one time fuck, but he didn’t expect you to be so bold and forward about it. 

“What do you want then, pretty mussel?” He dipped neared, the warmth of his body a soft beacon in the cool water. 

“To be yours,” you declared daringly. 

That streak of possessiveness yanked on Ransom’s heart stronger, rushing blood through his limbs with giddy hunger. It was the first time that someone wanted him, not to use him or gain something. Purely out of deep curiosity of him and desire for all that he brought. 

“Oh, Mussel. Are you aware of what it means to be mine? What would I do to you?” He spread his power through the lake, reaching for roots that bent to his will.

You gasped at the unexpected brush of soft vines along your calves. They wrapped around your ankles, then further up - holding you in place, spreading you wider. Your eyes widened as your heart rate accelerated. 

You were bound in place, unable to swim away or to shield yourself from the water demon. 

It was a shock, at first. But it quickly burst into a fizzy thrill and arousal. 

“Keep the waterweeds from my arms, please?” You surprised Ransom with your ask. “I want to touch you.”

He wrapped an arm around you, squeezing your front to his chest. His free hand dipped under the water, splaying just under the curve of your ass. His blue eyes reflected something fiery. It matched the hunger you felt. 

“Then touch me.” Ransom’s lips inched close to yours. “Reach for what you dreamed of. Because it is what you yearned for, isn’t it?”

The tip of his tongue flicked against your bottom lip. Your mouth opened eagerly, a puff of warm breath in the shape of a tiny moan. 

It was exactly what you dreamed of. Not only to taste his lips - find out if they were as tickling soft and fresh as the lake water, or perhaps carrying a hint of dark, forbidden fruit. Not only to be touched by a mischievous demon, experiencing something more than a few tumbles in the hay with village boys.

You yearned for the life that being a creature’s companion could mean. Something other than the predictable boredom of picking the least drinking man in the village as your husband, working fields and minding animals all day, and producing babies. 

You wanted to sate your curiosity; to learn about the world in angles different than through the lens of material possessions. Even if your life was bound to the lake, it would include new discoveries, new kinds of tasks, so many carefree joys and mischief. 

“Yes.” You whispered. Then made the move yourself.

You kissed him. 

Ransom’s hold on you tightened. Another set of waterweeds tickled between your thighs. Then the pressure of his thigh was there, firm muscle, so surprisingly warm. For some reason, you thought he’d be colder to the touch. Cool, like the lake water. 

In spite of being bound in place, you tried rolling your hips down against his thigh. Your hands moved over Ransom’s back, his shoulders, squeezing his biceps. 

When you combed your fingers through his hair, he growled against your mouth. Whatever surged through him at the sensation, seeped out and jolted through your body like a pleasant shockwave. 

Suddenly, you were tipping backwards. Instead of submerging in the lake, your back met the wet shore. Some waterweeds were still wrapped around your ankles, though no longer holding you bound in place. Your heels dug into the wet sand as you bent your knees and spread your legs wider. Ransom settled between them fully.

You broke away from kissing him - less to catch air, and more to take a look at him. Fair skin, perhaps slightly paler than that of a human. A few spots on his body bore delicate crescent marks that shimmered silver. Not scars. Their layering reminded you of scales, but when you brushed your fingertips over it they didn’t change texture from the smoothness of skin. 

“Ransom,” he framed your jaw with his hand, forcing you to look at him. “You call me Ransom, pretty Mussel.”

You touched his cheek gently, your lips curving in a smile. Slowly, you traced the chiseled line of his jaw, up over his plush, glistening lips, again over the cut of his cheek. 

“Ransom,” you murmured his name. 

He never gave his name to any other human. Sometimes, when they pushed for it, he told them to call him Hugh. But he needed you to know his real name. To use his real name. 

He didn’t plan for it at first, only to indulge in some of your cute curious chase. But when you leaned into him without fear, still wanting him despite his powers showing you his wicked side, a puzzle that was missing fell into place. 

Ransom had his happy freedom here in the lake, his peace and joy, as well connections with beings living in the woods around the lake. It never felt like anything was missing from his existence, but now that you were here it gained additional flavor. 

You resolutely gave him your own name in return, then grinned.

“Does it mean we own each other now?” You tilted your face slightly to capture his thumb with your teeth and nip it playfully, before sucking on the tip. 

Ransom chuckled, a pleased, low sound. 

“You’re a possessive creature,” he noticed, with unhidden delight. 

“I am.” You gave a sharp nod. “So if I’m to be yours, you don’t get to fuck anyone else. I’ll chase them away with a stick!” 

“I believe you’ll be an endless source of intrigue, I won’t be interested in anyone else.” And he meant it. 

The smile that lit up your face, combined with the sparks in your eyes, switched something inside him. A surge of protectiveness that viciously readied its claws and teeth to rip apart anyone who’d dim your light. And an immediate flare of consuming desire. 

He captured your mouth again. More demanding, greedier than before. He slid his hand down your side, mapping out your curves and squeezing the softness. 

Ransom rolled his hips against you, groaning at the pleasure of your heat right against his hard cock. Your plush thighs clenched around him, urging him on. You weren’t shy, or patient - kissing him back, touching wherever you could reach, gripping his hair with one hand and his ass with the other. 

You moaned so sweetly when his mouth descended down your neck and onto your breasts. Then made amusing, tiny whines when he didn’t slide right into you as you rocked your hips invitingly.

Your needy touch, both reverent and possessive, only heightened Ransom’s determination to prolong this exploration. It was the moment you fisted his hair tighter and called out his name, that made him snap. 

He pushed inside you in a smooth, firm stroke. You arched beneath him, your whole body tensing then melting in a shiver as it adjusted to the fullness.  

“Never getting enough of this,” Ransom grunted against your skin. 

His hand splayed on your hip, fingers pressing into your flesh so hard he might leave bruises. You wouldn’t mind it. You wanted all of it - the heaviness of his body, the silk of his hair between your fingers, the slide of his skin against yours, the stretch of his cock inside of you. 

“More!” You demanded breathlessly, wrapping your legs around him and crossing your ankles. 

Ransom slowed. Then stilled. His eyes darker and glinting wickedness. He waited for that fussy whine, for the prickle of your fingernails against his back, for the pout on your sweet lips. 

Only then he complied with your wish. Snapping his hips faster, filling you harder. 

He didn’t slow when you crested. Groaning at the sensation of your hot cunt clenching around him, he tried to hold off his own peak just to give you more. The little, soft sounds you made with each thrust were threatening to cut his control. 

When he came, you welcomed it with another moan of his name. Quieter, more intimate, but no less obscene. 

You stared at Ransom, all big eyes and mouth opened in awe as his cock throbbed inside of you, filling you with his seed. He didn’t withdraw right away. Just stayed locked deep, even when your legs dropped down bonelessly. 

“How long can you be outside of the water?” You asked quietly, gently running your fingers up and down Ransom’s shoulders. 

“Quite some time. Why?” Ransom frowned, surprised how comfortable you were remaining entangled with him on the wet sand, dirty and filled with him.

“I don’t know if anyone from the village will help me build a cottage so close to the lake,” you sighed in resignation. 

Something in Ransom’s chest tightened. You wanted to live with him. 

By the way you voiced your worry, it was something you gave a serious thought, not just a spontaneous idea. Which meant he was going to make it happen. Ransom had no building skills of his own, but there was someone he could ask for help with that. He’d have to promise the guy to not annoy him anymore when he was fishing, damnit. But it would get you a house by the lake. 

“Cottage by the lake? What else do you want, Mussel?” He smirked, leaning his forehead against yours. 

You had been collecting in the forest since you were old enough to walk, trailing after your mother and grandmother, learning the difference between the bluebells that gave you headaches and the white wood sorrel that soothed them, the shapes of roots that would clot blood, and the berries that would stop a heart. But as you gathered elements into the basket on your arm, the familiar paths felt different. The knife tucked in the fold of your skirt was less for harvesting and more for caution after the fear that had taken root since the maiden from your village went missing.

You yourself sensed a difference in the forest—a heaviness to the air, the moss a little gray, the birds silent in the middle of the day, a wariness that seemed to rise from the soil itself, urging you back. But you were determined. You and your mother and your mother’s mother before her supplied the village with many medicines and balms that were not commonplace, not trusted by everyone, but were integral to many.

The lake at the edge of the trees was swollen with rain and the melting snow, the water so high that it had eaten half the lower meadow. You would have to cross damp ground and pick your way over drowned logs. And you did, pressing on until you reached the stunted willow on the northernmost part of the shore, where you knew the wild violets would bloom first. You were the only moving thing in the marsh, a fact that landed with an unnerving weight. Your own breath seemed to fog the air, as if you had walked into a story from before time.

You were kneeling, fingers plucking and gathering the papery layer of new leaves from a cluster of green, when you heard a splash. Not a fish jumping, but something large breaking through the skin of the water. Your hands went still against the leaves and you stood, knife steady in your hand, and you forced yourself not to imagine the threat.

You scanned the underbrush and waited as your mother had taught you, letting your breath go thin and quiet. That was when you spotted the man, tall with broad shoulders, a deep chest, and limbs that were unquestionably strong and formidable.

As if sensing your gaze, his head turned your way, and he locked eyes with you. He didn’t move right away. You watched how his hands hung at his sides, open, the fingers stained with earth and perhaps something darker, though at this distance you could not be sure. His hair was a mix of golden chestnut and birch, and his face was clean-shaven. There was something unusual in the way he stood, something not-quite-human in the perfect symmetry of his features, the strong jawline, his shockingly blue eyes.

You did not call out. There was no one for miles and if this shape was a threat, it wasn’t the kind that would be cowed by a girl’s bluff. Instead you held your position and waited, the knife a cold certainty in your grip.

He moved toward you, nothing hesitant in his approach. The sodden earth gave under his feet, the water lapping at his calves. As he drew closer, he seemed to grow, revealing a height you hadn’t realized, solid muscle beneath the strange patchwork of clothes, brambles clinging to the rough fabric of his jacket. His eyes didn’t blink, glass-bright and inhumanly clear and blue, and they looked you over with curiosity as if measuring your resistance.

He spoke first, and the voice was all wrong: too deep, carrying a timbre like wind in a dead trunk, creaking and full of hollow space. “You’ve come further into the forest than others have in weeks,” he said. “You’re not afraid.”

There was no question in his words. You found your tongue regardless. “I have reason to be cautious, but I’m not afraid, no. I know this forest.”

The man—if he was a man—cocked his head, smiling in a way that made you think of a wolf in sunlight: beautiful, hungry, and so unbothered by your blade it might as well have been a thorn.

“What a curious thing to say,” he remarked. “You think you know the forest, but you cannot possibly know all its secrets, and the forest does not always agree with you.”

You had no answer to that, not one that would make him believe you. “I only mean that I know enough,” you said. “Enough to respect it.”

He stalked a slow circle, just beyond the reach of your knife yet always within lunging distance. An old, deep instinct in you recognized this dance, this patient assessment before a strike.

“You are the daughter of healers,” he said, “the one who finds bones and stones and wild remedies for the sick. You think you are unseen, but the forest always has eyes.” He stooped then, picking up a half-buried stone and turning it over in his palm. The hands, you noticed, were not quite right. The fingers were a shade too long, the skin thick and tight over the bones and veins. “Your presence is noticed. Even now, when you twist violets and dockweed in your clever hands.”

You recalled your grandmother’s lessons: never admit a name, never turn your back, never let a stranger dictate the space between you. “Then you know I am no threat to you or yours,” you said, and made yourself believe it, even as your heart raced. “The forest has given me its blessing,” you lied.

Something shifted in him then—not in his expression, exactly, but in the quality of his stillness, the way a predator goes motionless not from patience but from decision. “Your ancestors were blessed because of their bargains,” he said, weighted and deliberate. “They made their pacts and honored them. The land was shaped by their bargains, just as they were shaped by the land. But your generation—” he trailed off, gesturing at the bruised sky, the muddy water, the hush where birds used to cry. “No agreement has been struck. No tribute paid. The exchange must continue, or the balance will tip.”

“What exchange?” you demanded, pulse quickening.

“It has given many things to your kind,” he replied, pronouncing ‘your kind’ with a curious, almost academic detachment, “but there is always a toll, and it is different for each generation.”

“My mother still leaves honey in the hollows; it is a tradition I can continue.”

He shook his head, movement clipped, as if the neck itself was bored with the charade of human flesh. “Tokens are not tribute.” His tone was not cruel, only factual, and you realized, with a cold bloom in your belly, how many kinds of hunger there were in the world. “There is a price for the peace your village enjoys. Something must pass from you to the forest, same as it ever was.”

You tried to parse this—what your forebears had truly given, what they had perhaps hidden in their stories. “What price did the forest ask of them?”

“Your mother was clever enough to ask for nothing but safe passage between the trees. She left offerings. She did not take more than she needed. Your grandmother,” he paused, and here a ripple of amusement crossed his face, “your grandmother made a more interesting bargain.”

The wind pressed through the grasses, flattening the young reeds against the mud. A memory stirred—a story your mother told in the hush before sleep, stories half-forgotten. But his voice cut through the past, speaking the words you were beginning to recall.

“Your grandmother was greedy. She wanted safe passage and she wanted the voice of birds, the green touch, the sense for what flourished and what would die. She wished to heal but also to know when healing was hopeless, in her own marrow. Understand: the forest cannot birth a gift without first devouring the seed. When your grandmother asked, she gave up her dreams.”

You remembered the quiet unease of her sleep, the way she would doze sitting up, hands braided in her lap, or walk the lanes of her mind in silence for hours. She never dreamt or, if she did, she never remembered. You’d always assumed it was age—some feature of withered time. But even as a child you’d known there were no stories or nightmares waiting for you in her lap, only the faint comfort of her skin and the steady thrum of her heart.

You looked at the man—or the not-man—standing so tall his shadow cut the lake in two. His words hung between you, like frost in early spring, uncertain and unwilling to melt.

“What are you?” you asked.

He smiled, and it was as if a branch bent and split under its own weight. “I am not the forest, but I am of the forest. Some call me Waldgeist—the spirit of the green. I walk the trees as you walk your own paths. I am the mind that grows beneath the bark, the will curled in every root. You have seen me before, though not with these eyes.” He stated it not as a boast, but as a simple fact that had always been true.

You swallowed, tongue dry as birch. You remembered not just the old tales, but the feeling itself—a shadow in your childhood room that was too tall, a silence in the woods that felt like a held breath. You remembered the certainty, even then, that you were never truly alone among the trees.

“Why do you look like a man, then?” you asked, pulse quickening. “Why come to me at all?”

He shrugged, a gesture that sent a ripple through the nearby trees. “I take a form you can understand. “A bargain must be struck between equals; this shape makes us so. I am here to collect.”

The words buckled the hush between you. You clutched the basket closer to your chest and kept the knife steady, but you knew, in some deep, marrow-knowing way, that neither would help you if he truly intended harm.

“What will the forest take from me?”

His blue eyes shifted, and with the next blink you saw the gold in them, as though some animal watched from behind the skin of a man. “That is for you to decide. You may attempt to make a bargain, if you wish. Or you may leave now and accept what the forest will claim in time.”

“Has the forest not already laid its claim by taking one of our young women?”

He did not answer right away. Instead, his lips thinned, losing all softness, and the blue of his eyes darkened like a storm. For a moment, he became as implacable as the roots beneath the soil. When he did speak, his voice was careful, measured, as if you had stumbled onto a delicate membrane between two worlds.

“That was not my doing,” he said. “The lake has its own demands, its own bargains. It is not forest.”

The words struck you as both a warning and a promise, a declaration that the world was layered in negotiations far more ancient than the bargains of your ancestral line.

He glanced down at the bruised violets shivering at your feet. “The creatures that dwell in water are older and stranger and more varied than you can imagine.” His eyes found yours again. “Do not worry for the lost girl. Her fate is with the water. Your business is with me.”

You gathered the violets into your palm, feeling an ache in your fingers as if the mere act of picking a flower now implicated you in an ancient cycle of debt. The Waldgeist waited, patient and unobtrusive, but you felt the pressure of his presence, the sense that the moment for negotiation was finite and slipping away like dandelion seeds on the wind.

“If I try to bargain,” you finally said, forcing your voice to work, “will you truly honor it?”

“I have always honored my contracts,” he said plainly.

You squared yourself and let your breath settle. Out here, feeling small amongst a vast web of nature, you managed a plainness you hoped was strength. “If my grandmother gave up her dreams, and my mother only left honey, what do you want of me?”

“Each generation pays a new price,” he said. “The forest never takes the same thing twice. It adapts. It learns.” The Waldgeist, the not-man, walked nearer. “You come to this place for the plants that nurture your people. You heal, but healing is only one side of the balance—life and death, and the line between them. I want the possibility that both can flourish.” He let the words flower in the air between you. He continued, “The forest wants to plant its seed in your womb. It wants you to swell with its green life, to birth the next guardian from your own blood and breath.”

The air left your lungs all at once. Your body as tribute. Your womb as a clearing for the next green thing. You had imagined many prices—your sight, your voice, your years—but not this. This was so much more intimate, more invasive, than you’d ever imagined. But as you stood in the hush, with the Waldgeist’s gaze upon you, you sensed he was not mocking. Not even predatory, not in the way of men, though the need in him was elemental and absolute. It was the same law that pulled the river to the lake.

“The only thing you have to offer that’s of any interest to me,” he said, his voice lowering to the hum of sap rising in the spring, “is that sweet, warm place between your legs.”

It wasn’t even a vulgarity, the way he said it. If anything, it was a kind of reverence—a hunger for the continuity that pulsed under everything alive. But a hot flush crawled up your neck, and your hands clenched the fabric of your skirt so hard you felt stems of violets snap between your knuckles. The leaves in the trees did not shudder. The entire forest waited, patient and unashamed.

He lifted his chin, as if he had tasted the shape of your resistance, and made clear that there was no shame or cruelty in the offer—only the certainty of the seasons, the calm of a thing that had always been true. “You may refuse,” he said, “and if you do, the forest will find another way to balance what has been taken from it. But should you choose to accept, you may name your own terms. I will match them if I can. If you wish to leave this place with no bargain, as I said you could earlier, I will not hinder you. The path out is always open, though it may not lead you back the way you came.”

You swallowed, the reality of the choice settling like a stone in your gut. He would not touch you—he had offered that dignity. You could walk away, unchanged, and let the seasons turn. But a different kind of cold crept in at the thought: the forest, left to its own devices, drawing its tribute in some slow, unpredictable, and perhaps far crueler way.

You looked up at him—the way he stood entirely at ease, as if a body was just a garment to be worn when convenient. The blood-and-earth in his veins seemed almost visible, his presence an axis on which the wind and the water now turned.

“What is your name?” you asked.

He did not hesitate, but you sensed the concept of a single name was foreign to him. “I have no name your tongue could form,” he said. “But your people have need of them. There was one who called me Steve.” The word landed, dry and spare. “You may use it, if you wish.”

It was so ordinary, so unburdened with myth. You turned the name over in your mind—smooth, plain, almost laughably small. Children did this, you remembered: named the thing under the bed to make it small. But the trees did not shrink. The wind did not shrink. And neither did he.

“Steve.”

What a small name for such a vast thing.

Something moved in his face—not a smile, not quite. The corners of his mouth drew back the way bark splits open in heat. “If you ask for a name,” he said, “I gather you agree.”

Your heart twisted, then steadied, and you nodded.

Steve stepped through the reeds and the cold lake water, the space between you closing until you could smell the wildness on him, the sharp green tang of willow bark and moss. He stopped with his face a hair’s breadth from yours, searching you with those ice-blue, wild eyes. As Steve leaned in, his gaze flicked from your mouth to your eyes, measuring your anticipation and fear with the patience of a tree waiting for the wind.

He lowered his head, tendrils of his hair brushing your cheek, and the animal warmth of his skin woke every nerve, every inch of scalp and spine. He waited, poised, until your chin tipped upward, an invitation.

The tip of his nose nearly grazed yours, and you could see the sweep of gold and green in his irises.

“Your kind,” he said, the syllables vibrating just above your jaw, “often begin their coupling with a kiss. Would that please you?”

You did not know what you expected—a command, a taking, some gesture of force, but his hands hovered at your waist, not touching, not yet, as if some ancient etiquette held him back until you gave consent.

You met his gaze, the question hanging between you. This was the first step, the seal on a pact you barely understood. The instinct to flee warred with a curiosity that held you fast. “Yes,” you breathed, the word both a surrender and a choice. “I would like to be kissed.”

You felt the air shift, the certainty of the woods folding up around you. You had imagined your first kiss as a hush in the honeyed dark, a stolen moment behind a barn or beneath the hush of twilight. You had not imagined the sensation of a mouth as wild and strange as the lake wind, nor the certainty of a hand—large, warm, with fingers a shade too long—drawing you in. Steve cupped your jaw, his thumb spanning the distance from cheekbone to chin, and when he bent his head, there was no trembling or hesitation—only a gentleness so deliberate that you understood, even through your shock, how hard he worked to contain himself.

His lips were cooler than you’d expected, but they pressed to yours with a strange, melting pressure that drew the air from your lungs in one startled, high gasp. Your knees gave, not from weakness, but as if the ground itself had softened beneath you. His other hand closed around your upper arm, bracing, the grip light but immovable, like the gentle crook of a branch against a windstorm. The kiss was not the fluttery, weightless thing you’d read about in stories—it was a gravity, a falling through the earth. His touch radiated from your jaw to the soles of your boots, a hot, heady rush that left you breathless.

You let your basket fall, soft, to the mud and reeds. The knife fell from your loosening grip, but you did not care, not with his hands now cupping your face and the tangle of your hair wrapped around his knuckles.

Steve’s kiss was a demand and a question, and you felt yourself answering in the way your mouth parted for him, in the soft gasp that escaped you when his hand slid—firm, careful—down your neck to the slope of your shoulder. There was a steadiness to the way he touched you, as if he already knew you would break otherwise. When you shivered, he drew you nearer, until your body was bracketed by the length of him, the heat of him, the certainty.

Steve coaxed your mouth open further, the velvet of his tongue not so much probing as mapping. He kissed you with such unwavering patience that you began to ache, not from fear now, but from wanting the next gesture enough to hurt.

Your hand found his hair, feeling the strange, thrumming life under your palm—a rhythm denser and more vital than any human's. There was an ancient knowledge in the kiss, yet beneath it, a clumsy hunger, a desperate restraint. You felt his effort to keep from overwhelming you, and it sparked an unexpected tenderness.

His mouth relented, drawing back only enough that he could see how your face looked in the aftermath. You opened your eyes, though you found no words behind your teeth, only air and a low, helpless sound of longing. He smiled, a gentle recalibration of his features, as if observing minor marvels.

Steve’s gaze was so intent you had to look away, but his hand coaxed your jaw to center, thumb brushing over your lower lip as if to see how much of you he had changed already. “You are doing very well,” he said, his voice low and calm, the kind you’d use to soothe a frightened deer at the forest’s edge.

He cradled your wrist, and you saw the knots of lichen just under his skin, veins running wilder than any human’s. He gestured to the bare ground, and from the mud a fresh cluster of violets bloomed in an instant. He plucked one and tucked it behind your ear with a reverence that made you feel like the forest’s own altar.

Steve guided you backwards, his steps gentle and unhurried, until the soft earth gave beneath your boots and you realized the ground itself had changed. The waterlogged moss and churned mud had, in the span of a breath, thickened and risen into a plush, living mattress of green that welcomed the weight of your body as he guided you down. The rush of green scent was dizzying, a perfume of leaf-break, and violets, and deep, wet bark. You braced yourself on your elbows, startled by the way the bed molded around you.

Steve knelt in front of you, balanced and quiet, his hands braced on either side of your hips. The air around you felt altered, denser, each sound of the forest amplified, as if the world had shrunk to only the patch of earth the two of you occupied. He watched you for a long moment, letting you breathe, or maybe just savoring the fear that had turned itself, somewhere in the last dozen heartbeats, to anticipation. He leaned on his hands and bent toward you, the whole scaffold of his body arranged with an a predator’s poise that sent a shiver through your blood.

“Are you afraid?” he asked, his voice low enough that you felt it more than heard it, a vibration that moved from your jaw down through your sternum.

“Yes,” you said, and then, as if your hand had its own will, you reached up and touched the side of his face. “But not—not the way I was before.”

Steve’s answering smile was frightening in its understanding. “That is good,” he said. “Fear makes everything sharp and honest.”

His hands were impossibly strong at your hips, the pressure just shy of command. One moved up your ribcage, charting the landscape of your bones. You gasped at the intimacy, and at the strange paradox of feeling safe. You sensed he would not take what was not offered, even as you knew he could take anything he wished.

He bent his head again but this time his mouth pressed not to your lips but to the angle of your jaw, your ear, the frantic beat hidden shallow under the skin. The weight of him, looming, should have been terrifying, but instead you were frayed with a kind of anticipation that would not have been out of place on the cusp of a summer storm. You forced your hands not to tremble as you cupped the back of his neck and felt the heat of his skin. Steve’s breath was cool on your neck, the hint of it unsettlingly gentle. You tipped your head back, a motion of surrender you didn’t recognize as your own, and he followed the column of your throat to the hollow at its base, then lower, to the line of buttons fastening your blouse.

He made a sound, not quite human, almost a purr or a buzz, and pressed his face against your sternum as if he could inhale your very shape. His hands, so careful at your ribs, curved around your waist with a certainty that left you breathless. He did not tug at your clothes. Instead, he pressed his face to the thin linen and breathed you in, as if scent itself was the substance of desire.

Your mind reeled. The other girls’ whispers, your mother’s warnings—they all spoke of pain, of a force to be survived. You had braced for a claiming, but Steve’s hands seemed to know nothing of that script. The warmth that bloomed low in your belly was not fear, but a bewildering curiosity. He brought his fingers to the top button of your blouse, unfastening it with a patience that was its own kind of power, pressing a kiss to each new inch of skin. The sensation was like a lightning strike, and your spine arched involuntarily.

He paused then, waiting, gaze fixed on your face as if he required your permission at every increment. You nodded, or maybe whimpered—whatever escaped you was enough for him to continue, and the next button, and the next, his fingers working each button loose without ever scraping your skin or snagging a hair. Only when your sternum and the pale slope of your breasts were exposed to the soft, damp air did he let the backs of his knuckles brush you, not quite a caress, more a sampling. Steve’s lips and hands traveled the exposed skin, tracing the hollow of your clavicle, the soft undersides of your breasts, his mapping every new inch as if memorizing a terrain he might never traverse again.

When his mouth closed around your nipple, you jerked, startled as if pricked by a holly leaf, but the wet heat had you keening the next instant. Steve groaned low in his chest, and the sound was so animal you felt it thrumming through your bones. His mouth was soft and deliberate, his tongue flicking where the air itself had barely touched you before. His hand stayed broad and steady at your hip, anchoring you so you didn’t float away.

He took the time to explore, open-mouthed at the soft edge of your breast, then the other and the valley between, all the way up to your throat, where his teeth found your pulse. Marks: not of violence, but of tribute, the press of a thumbprint onto fruit to test its ripeness. You shivered beneath him, alive to every place his tongue mapped and every inch of you that burned in the aftermath.

As glorious as that was, you knew what surely would come next, the act described in so many whispers and warnings: the press and pain, the split-second of being claimed and broken open. That was how it always happened, in the barns and haylofts and cold, wet fields, the wedding nights, the way the boys made the girls bite down on a hand or a sleeve, their haste to have it over with. You readied yourself to be bruised, to be stretched and split and left sore.

You braced for the press of his body at the split of you, the forceful push. Instead, Steve drew your skirts up methodically, slowly, and the cool air shocked the skin beneath as he exposed it to the forest. He planted himself between your thighs, the solidness of his shoulders between your thighs coaxing your legs to fall fully open to accommodate the breadth of him. Air stalled in your throat as you felt the heat of his gaze, unflinching on your most intimate place. He made a low sound in his throat that resonated through you and the trees, something between approval and hunger. “You’re wet here,” he murmured, his voice thick with wanting that hollowed your stomach. “Like the forest gives sap in the spring—slow, and sweet, and ready.”

He bent closer, the brush of his breath raising the fine hairs of your thigh, and he let his mouth hover over your slick, exposed folds. He watched your trembling, then the way your hips bucked when his tongue finally, shockingly, flicked at the bud of you. His gaze was open and unhurried, as if he had all of time. He groaned with the first taste, a deep and honest sound that made your hands fist into the moss, tearing up strings of it beneath your nails. Each pass of his tongue was a deliberate, patient movement, spreading your wetness with reverence, savoring you, as if tasting the salt and iron of the earth itself.

You moaned, the sound ringing out over the water, and he answered it with a pulse of suction that wrung more from you. His hands anchored your shaking thighs apart. He did not stop, even when the sensation crested past bearing and you twisted against him—whether to escape or to pull him closer you could not have said—but he wouldn’t let you go. From the creases of his palms, where his lifelines ran deepest, thin green vines emerged from his skin the way shoots push through soil in early spring. They wound around your upper thighs in slow, tightening loops, textured like the underside of a leaf, faintly cool where your skin was heated. The vines didn’t pull you wider, but held you just as you were, their cool, living pressure a patient, unwavering claim on the surrender you already offered.

You keened yet again, and Steve soothed it away with a tongue so dexterous and insistent he taught you a new way to live inside your own body, a way of being you'd never conceived. Your hands found his hair, and a sudden audacity took you, pulling him closer, grinding his mouth against you, feral and greedy and no longer a healer of the village but something wild, as much earthen as blood. He laughed, low and delighted, and you felt it where his mouth was still pressed against you—a terrible, gorgeous thing. He did not slow. He did not falter. He moved as though the wanting of you was its own kind of knowing, as though desire itself had handed him a map. His tongue traced your sex with an accuracy that made you wonder, briefly and wildly, if this was what it meant to be known—not seen, not touched, but learned, the way a river learns the shape of its banks over centuries of insistence.

When the wet, velvet heat of your climax broke over you, it did not snap or spark, but rolled up from your core in a long, rising wave—a secretion of you into the moss, into the air, into his mouth, which did not lose rhythm but drank and drew you further, until the only thing left was the trembling of your thighs and the stunned, empty ache where your voice used to live. Your eyes filled with tears, not of pain—never of pain—but of astonishment, as if every nerve in your body had just flowered at once, a bloom of both petal and thorn.

You had never known this could happen. That a tongue, a mouth, a pair of hands could make you forget yourself, undo the careful braid of your dignity and leave you sobbing for a mercy that, when he finally gave it, cracked open every seam in your body.

Your thighs still trembled against his cheeks when he slowed, his tongue drawing smaller and quieter shapes, the way rain gentles after a storm has spent itself. He did not stop, but his movements gentled and slowed. Your belly clenched once without warning, a small, wet sound leaving your throat before you could catch it, your spine curling involuntarily around the spasm. He raised his head at that. Steve pressed his lips, closed and warm, to the inside of your thigh. Then he moved up the length of you until his eyes were level with yours, his hands releasing your thighs, though the vines remained, loose now, a garland rather than a grip. You found his gaze before you meant to—bright with something that was not quite pride and not quite laughter, but lived fluidly in between. He kissed your mouth, unhurried, and you tasted yourself on his tongue, dark and unfamiliar, the flavor of a thing that had always been yours but that you were only now being introduced to.

He pressed his brow to yours and let you breathe, your own chest heaving against the solid warmth of his. The moss beneath you was velvet; the sky above, the dizzying blue, the gold of late afternoon flickering through willow fronds.

Your hunger had changed, no longer a storm but a strange, quiet hum beneath your skin. In the throb between your legs was both a memory and a promise, an echo of what he’d done and a question of what he still meant to do.

For a moment, Steve said nothing, only nuzzled into the hollow of your throat, the line of your jaw, as if the hollowed-out shape of your pleasure was a thing to be tended, not merely consumed. You lay in the aftermath, skin flush against the living bed of moss, feeling the pulse of your heart reverberate through your every limb. The world seemed sharper than it had ever been, each smell and sound and taste layered and immediate: the greeny wet-earth smell of the moss, the close heat of your own body, the lake’s cold mineral current threading through the trees, and him—less a presence than a gravity, one that didn’t pull you toward him but simply held you to the earth.

You did not want to move, but you wanted more, and he read both truths in your body. His hand slid between your thighs, fingers slicked with what he had drawn out of you, and he pressed the pads of them into you—not to hurt, only to test, to see how easily you would yield.

“The forest gives,” he murmured against your collarbone, the words a vibration you felt more than heard. “But it also takes. It’s only right you should receive first. It bargains in full measure… and now it is my turn.”

He stretched you open, one finger first, then two—so patient, so careful, you only realized you were being claimed when the green heat crested in you again, this time burning languid and low, like embers tended under moss. His hands were indecently strong, but he used them as if comfort was the primary goal—pressing, stroking, coaxing your body to soften around him. The first bite of pain was a shimmer, quickly edged away by the wet insistence of his movements and the wildness in your own hips. You rocked into him, greedy and bright, and the hesitancy that might have undone you was snuffed by a need to see how far, how deep, the pleasure could run.

You did not see his cock at first. When you felt the nudge of it, hard and impossibly hot against the inside of your leg, you looked down and saw that he was already bare, as if the forest itself had shed his clothes for him. The sight of him made your breath catch—he was built the way old trees are built, with a density that seemed to belong to something older and less tame than any man you’d known or could imagine.

An absurd, animal instinct made you shrink back, but his hands caught your hips and held you with tenderness—firm, but tender. The head of it was wet, already slick, crowned by a bead of clear fluid that you watched, dazed, as he thumbed down and pressed to your folds. You’d seen men before—quick glimpses, awkward fumbles in haylofts or behind market stalls—but this was not a man’s cock. It was a thing grown for a single purpose, and each time he guided it up your seam, parting you further, it was as if a new, second pulse had been hidden in your body, one that beat only for this.

He pressed the blunt head of his cock to your entrance and held it there. His eyes had gone wolf-bright, fixed on yours, reading the tremors that ran through you. The stretch was immediate, shocking—a white-hot claim of space where there had been none. Your body arched, seeking more instinctually, and a low rumble started in his chest, the sound of stone shifting deep underground. When he pushed past the first ring of resistance you gasped, a sound somewhere between agony and relief.

A white-hot seam of pain stitched through your hips and along your spine, pure and electric, and then, impossibly quickly, it was overtaken by the burning, desperate pleasure of being filled and filled and filled until you could not imagine more, and still he pressed deeper. You made a strangled noise that was half groan, half sob, your arms thrown up to brace against his chest, nails biting into the patches of moss-and-bark that surfaced between stretches of smooth, human skin. There was no logic to the fit of him, no sense in the physics of it, but he did not force. He gave, and your body took, the slow press of him unfolding you like a new language written into your bones.

His breath came hard through parted lips, but his eyes—his eyes did not move from yours, and what was in them was not hunger, or not only hunger… it was something older and more careful, the look of a man who understood exactly what he was holding, taking. The tendons in his neck stood out like roots finding purchase in stone, and he breathed through his nose in one long, deliberate pull, as if holding himself back from splitting you entirely. Inch by inch, he worked himself deeper, and you wept out loud when your body finally yielded and he was all the way inside you—a thickness that was almost unbearable, a depth that felt impossible as every nerve lit up and you did not think, for a moment, that you could bear another inch, even as his root dragged and pressed into a place you had never known you had. Steve made a soft, shushing noise, a caress of wind in your ear, and stilled inside you with a gentleness that nearly undid your sanity.

Your pulse beat hard in your throat. You felt full—so full—and with every tiny shift of your hips, every tentative intake of air, he seemed to bloom larger inside you. You didn’t think you could breathe until he gave you leave, and then you shuddered, the air shoving out in ragged, surprised gasps. The pain faded as swiftly as it had bloomed, replaced by the eerie awareness of being shaped from within. You were aware of every inch, every subtle shift, and it was intolerable and perfect.

He tilted his hips, a fractional shift that sent the cock inside you pressing higher somehow, grinding a spot that burned and throbbed with every minute twitch. All you could do was shudder and hold on as his hands ran up your body—stroking your sides, reverently palming your breasts, the whole time never pulling back, never pulling out, as if the very idea of separation was foreign to him.

He bent his head again, kissing all the places he could reach: your throat, wet with your sweat and the lake air; your ear, where he whispered words you barely understood, half in another tongue, the syllables soft and full of promise. His hands mapped you, his body claimed you, but it was not a violence, not an invasion. Something older than memory was being pressed into you, the way a name, spoken enough times, becomes the only word a mouth knows how to form.

He moved, slow at first—less a thrust than a rolling flex of pelvis and hip, a careful rocking as if he were teaching your body how to say yes. The first withdrawal was exquisitely, almost cruelly, slow. You felt every millimeter of him slide back along the walls of your cunt, a velvet scrape that left you gaping and gasping for more. Before you could mourn the loss, he pressed forward again, filling you deeper, the new angle making you see stars. Your hands clung to his shoulders, to the strange lattice of moss and bark beneath the skin, the unreal heat of him burning into your palms.

He began to fuck you then, not with the frantic, selfish rhythm of a man, but with the slow, inexorable certainty of a season turning. His eyes never left yours, reading every flutter of your lashes, every catch in your breath, as if cataloging the ways your body learned to take him.

That rhythm was slow and considerate, but soon the tempo changed. Steve braced his hands in the moss at either side of your head and moved with deliberate, rolling thrusts that grew in force and speed. Your gasps, your shivers, the dull percussion of your bodies meeting each other—it all became the rhythm of the forest, mingling with the hush of wind, the wet shudder of leaves. You felt the moss bed beneath you shudder, the roots trembling, as Steve’s hips snapped forward with more force. The careful, reverent worship of your body became an urgency, a drive, and it overtook both of you—his hands pinning yours above your head, his mouth finding your throat and holding it there, as if he could root you to the earth by the pulse alone.

He did not ask if you were ready. He did not have to. Your body gave its own answer, arching up, knees drawing higher and wider to accommodate the relentless, beautiful force of him. With each thrust, the forest blurred into green-gold strokes, the sky itself seeming to fall away, leaving only the bright, unspeakable ache of being filled and fucked.

You came apart, succumbing to it like a riptide. You clung to the filaments of his shoulders, body locking in great, shuddering spasms around the cock that was still splitting you. The sound that tore from your throat was not yours, or not one you had made before, and he drove into you through the whole shaking length of it, unhurried, relentless, the way weather moves through a valley.

Your cunt rippled, clamping, until you felt the answering quiver in him—a hardening, a climbing tension, the way his entire body drew up. Steve bowed over you, his hair a whisper against your skin. A grimace of pure ecstasy pulled at his mouth, and a low growl built in his chest as he fought for the last vestiges of control, holding himself back from breaking you completely. Only when you sobbed his name—ridiculous, simple—did he splinter, driving into you with a force that shoved all the air from your lungs, holding you impaled as his cock pulsed inside you, hot and fevered, a flood that felt like it was remaking you from within.

You were pinned to the earth not merely by his body, but by a force that had nothing to do with choice or want, something closer to gravity than desire. Even after he stilled, the moss beneath you continued to tremble in sympathetic rhythm with the frantic ricochet of your heartbeat. Steve did not move at once—he seemed to savor the heat of you, the locked and wet hold of your cunt, the way your body shuddered around every last pulse. When he finally withdrew, you felt the loss, whimpering at the stinging ache, the slow, deliberate slide of him from your body.

Steve knelt between your legs, cock smeared with your blood and his own seed, and in a motion so gentle it nearly made you weep again, he bowed his head to you. His tongue drew shudders from your body, tracing reverent patterns over newly awakened nerves, and you basked in the deliberate, shocking care of it.

When he was satisfied with his work, Steve moved back up over you, and his lips brushed your temple. “Hush,” he murmured, the words a soft vibration against your skin. “Again and again, until there is no question. The forest wants its fruit… and I will make sure it takes root.”

You could only nod, your body still caught between tremor and euphoria, your chest rising and falling in time with the damp, living earth. The words he’d spoken echoed in your mind: the seed, the fruit, the next guardian. You had thought life a slow accrual, a distant, speculative thing. But there was no speculation now. As your blood quieted, a stillness gathered deep in your womb—a heavy, waiting calm that confirmed the change was not coming, but had already arrived.

Lake monster Curtis being a bolotnik meant that when I incorporated another creature, I wanted to draw on more European folklore and play with the elements, and that's how rooted around until I found mention of the Waldgeist. I definitely took liberties in my interpretation, but just like I did with bolotnik!Curtis, I wanted to play around with the lore the way we've so commonly played with vampire and werewolf lore.

This was its own vibe to write - it flowed from beginning to end, and felt very magical-realism, and created its own kind of creative track in my head that was very different from some of the ideas and projects I've been working on lately, and so I hope it was as immersive to read as it was to write!

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