The orgasm was a shock. After two years of marriage, Abigail had gotten used to the idea that sex was something her husband enjoyed, and that was more pleasant when she tried to enjoy it as well. And then she found herself trapped in a cave with a madman who believed that in order to heal his broken leg so they could defeat the ogre and escape, they had to summon a witch. And that summoning the witch required her to have sex with him, in spite the starvaton and the dehydration and the fact that Abner’s headless, limbless body was RIGHT THERE. She had so little sanity left at that point that she had agreed, and she had climbed on top of the madman, and after the initial embarrassment and discomfort she had been baffled to find that she was actually enjoying herself, and then there had been that earth-shaking, screaming orgasm, and she had passed out.
/////
She was somewhere green. She had the impression of leaves and damp earth and… green. None of her senses seemed to be working quite right. She suspected she might be naked, but she wasn’t sure, and didn’t much care. She felt safe and secure and vaguely happy, even though something in her mind told her that wasn’t right. There was a beautiful woman in front of her, though she didn’t know how she knew that. She just did.
“Greetings, Abigail,” the woman said. “You may call me Sybilla. And don’t worry about your vision; your eyes were not made for a place like this. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good, now, I have a great deal to say, and do, and not much time, so you need to pay attention. Josiah was under-prepared for this enemy, which is why he got hurt. But if he had been properly prepared, you might have been dead by the time he got there, so good for you, maybe. And I am very sorry about your husband.”
“Thank you?”
“To kill the ogre and escape, Josiah needs both of his legs, which takes energy, which I can’t begin to provide at this distance, and I can’t take it from him, or he will be too week to fight. So I need to take it from you. It will leave you too weak to walk for a little while; food and water and a day’s rest will be all you need to recover. But, and this is very important, I need your consent. And you need to understand that it is going to hurt a great deal along the way.”
“So… I agree to pain, and exhaustion, but I get to live and will recover, or refuse, and the ogre tears off my head and eats me.”
“Yes.”
“Do as you will.”
“Second item: Instructions for Josiah. You will be groggy when you talk to him, so you will need to concentrate. First, he needs to find a stone, about the size of your fist, a stone that feels comfortable in his hand, that he thinks he can throw hard and far and accurately. He must give it a name, and promise SINCERELY to recover it when the fight is over, and to carry it with him on his travels. The sincerity is important, but he’s Josiah; he’ll get it right. When the ogre opens the door, looking for its next snack, Josiah must throw the stone into its face, and when it falls, use a larger rock to batter the ogre’s head into paste. Do you have all that?”
“Small rock, name and loyalty, large rock for hammer, small rock into face, destroy ogre’s head.”
“Good. Now, about you. I set it up so that Josiah needed to use sex to summon me, because the idiot thinks sex is evil. But I didn’t intend for you to get caught up in things, and I apologize for that. So… Josiah will escort you wherever you want to go; tell him I instructed him so. But where? You were not terribly happy with your family, and now you are two years older and a widow, and even less marriageble. And Abner’s family…”
“How do you know Abner’s name?”
Sybilla laughed. “This is the point where you wonder how it works? I’m a witch, Abigail. It’s magic. Just ride the wind.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Abner’s family will have no interest in you, UNLESS you are carrying Abner’s child.”
“Which I’m not.”
“No, but you could be carrying Josiah’s child, and believe with all your heart that it was Abner’s.”
“You could do that?”
“Witch. Magic. Remember?”
“Right.”
“But once again, it needs to be YOUR choice.”
“What about Josiah?”
“Josiah will live in blissful ignorance. The full truth will be mine alone.”
“I’m not sure about that part. Doesn’t he deserve to know?”
“Perhaps. But he’s painfully honest and distressingly chivalrous, and will feel a need to get involved, which will ruin your future, and his, because he’s really not any good at anything other than killing monsters. So he’s definitely better off not knowing.”
“But…”
“Fine. I will bury the truth inside of you, and if, at some time after the child is born, you encounter Josiah again, you will remember. And you will know that you have a choice of retaining the truth, or of going back to the way things were. Is that good enough?”
“I… guess.”
“So… Do you wish to be the mother of Abner’s child?”
“Yes.”
“So be it. Now, remember, when you wake up, you will be in pain, but you MUST give Josiah his instructions, or you will die.”
“I understand.”
/////
Events proceeded as Sybilla had promised. Abigail never had a good explanation why she named her son, “Josiah”; it just seemed right. And Josiah Abel, the monster killer, carried away a stone named, “Abner.”
3-6-2024
This is the second story I have written about Josiah Abel (the first was, “Confessional”, see the link below), but it is also, sort of, the first. That is, I conceived the character, and then came up with the bones of this story, but couldn’t figure out how to tell it, and wrote “Confessional”. And now, ten months later, I finally have the story I set out to tell in the first place. And I also have Josiah firmly on his feet, and I certainly WANT to do more with him.
If you would care to read the earlier story mentioned above, you can find it here.