A paladin and witch hunter bring a fallen witch to justice, only to stumble themselves. A sequel to Potion Problems.
tags: corruption, demon, gender bender, girl penis, nsfw, reality change, transformation
art by verinis
The witch hunter’s brow furrowed in anger, but when he finally spoke, his voice was as flat and cold as a frozen lake. “Did you really think that magic would let you do anything?”
His prisoner grinned up at him, the heavy chains that bound her apparently exerting no weight on her demeanor. “You know what? Yeah, I kinda did.”
The third and last person in the room sighed, her heavy armor groaning as it rose and fell in frustration. “Darvor, this is a farce. Her crimes are manifest and many. We do not need her testimony.”
Darvor turned to his partner. “There are rules, Sajina. Rites that must be followed. This is no longer about her. What we do now, we do for our sake, and for the sake of the coven.” He glared down at their prisoner, malice flitting under his ice. “Not for her.”
Sajina shrugged again and took her seat. The witch hunter stood for a moment longer, needing the space to unroll his recording equipment—ink and quill and treated vellum, the same tools the coven had recorded their history with for centuries. And as much as the paladin wanted to mock her partner’s slavish devotion to tradition, she had worn her ceremonial gold armor, and strapped to her back was an executioner’s sword. The witch hunter would ask his questions and satisfy his rites while she looked on, and then her blade would find the fallen witch’s neck and deliver final justice. So it had been, and so it would be.
Darvor was ready now. “Jolene ‘Jojo’ Sorenson, you have been found guilty of mortal crimes against your former coven, the least of which are crimes against reality—the use of potions and other magics to manipulate and permanently alter the world to dark and self-serving ends. In doing so, you slaved yourself to our order’s sworn enemy, the archdemoness Brandy, and have brought ruin upon those you once called your brothers and sisters. I will record your final confessions for posterity, and then you will be granted a swift death.”
By all appearances, Jojo was the same witch she had been months before, before she had met the archdemoness and fallen to darkness. But there was a hardness to her eyes and a cruelty on her lips that was new, and in the face of Darvor’s rote speech she barked out a harsh laugh. “Okay, fine,” she eventually agreed, as if it were the most amenable proposal in the world. “I’ll tell the truth.”
Darvor began to record the first of the prisoner’s statements. “You will forgive us if we doubt the veracity of your claims,” he intoned, dipping quill to ink, “but we don’t need your truth. This is an opportunity for you to bare your soul and make peace with your crimes; it falls to you to accept that grace.”
“Then I’ll start my exit interview with a question: for how long has Brandy”—Jojo smirked at the mention of the demoness’ name, as if in on some private joke—“been the archenemy of the coven?”
“Her evil is supposed to be the first thing any new witch is cautioned against,” Sajina replied, testy at the prospect of the interrogation dragging on longer than it needed to.
Darvor was more conciliatory. “For over a thousand years, she has lured witches to their doom, and all that time, we have stood against her and sought a way to end her evil.”
Jojo blinked and then laughed, genuinely surprised. “Holy fucking shit,” she cried, “you can’t be serious! Did I fuck up the potion that badly?”
The witch hunter’s quill hesitated for a moment. “I don’t—” he began.
“Look,” Jojo interrupted. “Somehow—improbably and nonsensically—you know that I’ve changed reality some, but you’re clearly not aware of how much I’ve done, both intentionally and accidentally. I made Brandy, like, two months ago.”
Darvor did not stop transcribing Jojo’s claims, but his scowl deepened. This time, he let Sajina voice his disbelief. “What are you trying to say—that you somehow time traveled?”
“No, no! Nothing like that. Like: a friend, Anna”—Sajina hissed at the name of Brandy’s chief consort—“asked me to make her a potion that would spice up her love life. I did, and I messed it up really badly. Two of the pages of my potion book were stuck together, and I mixed the base with sulphur and hellsroot. Then her boyfriend Bradley drank it, and all hell literally broke loose.”
“Ha!” The paladin laughed, amused at this impossible jest. “It’d be just like one of Brandy’s minions to spin this sort of lie.” Then, after she had thought about it a moment: “But if she didn’t corrupt you down the path of evil, then… if it was just a potion, why didn’t its effects wear off?”
“Oh, don’t worry—she totally corrupted me.” Jojo smiled wolfishly, clearly enjoying herself. “As soon as I saw what I had made, I begged her to let me make it permanent. And, once I had forsaken my oaths and marshaled the terrible and unholy powers necessary to lock her form into reality, she was very thorough with her rewards.”
Darvor’s transcription crawled to a halt, and he lifted his eyes to glare at the witch. “To clarify: two months ago, you created a new demon lord from whole cloth, all thanks to mixing a potion wrong. You were so enamored with your creation that you forsook all previous oaths and swore yourself to serve the hellion. In so doing, you distorted reality so badly that the coven believes it has been fighting Brandy for a millennium.”
“Well, not believes,” Jojo pointed out. “The coven really has been fighting her for a thousand years. And also not?”
“Utterly preposterous,” Sajina rebuked. “Everything must come from something. It’s far more likely that you are lying, or that Brandy has deceived you.”
Darvor was more contemplative. “Intent is what shapes the success and efficacy of a spell or potion, but if we’re talking about a mistake… well, potions are still the most powerful magics available to a witch, and anything is possible with magic.” He prepared his quill to continue writing. “How replicable is your potion?”
“Extremely,” Jojo assured him. “There are a lot of things that are easy, once you’ve been shown how to do them. In fact, let me demonstrate.” She leaned down, placing her open palms on the safe room’s cold concrete floor.
Sajina sat up, instincts screaming. “Keep your hands—”
There was a sudden flash of power and then—nothing. Whatever Jojo had done, it had been completely contained by the magical chains that bound her, the remains of her spell now snaking towards the ceiling as harmless smoke.
The paladin did not relax. Jojo was grinning, as if waiting for something else.
The smoke reached the ceiling and, a moment later, the smoke detector mounted there. With a warble, the room’s automatic fire suppression system activated, soaking all three of them in a flood of cold, putrid water. Sajina cursed while Darvor futilely tried to protect his parchments, and Jojo cackled at the practical joke she had played.
The sprinklers ran for only a few seconds, but the damage was done. Already, the water was seeping through the joints of Sajina’s armor, soaking the padding underneath. The cloth would stay wet and close to her skin for hours, all while Darvor’s interminable questioning drug on and on. The paladin slumped, already resigned to hours of discomfort. “We should have just killed her when we caught her,” she muttered.
But if the deluge had extinguished Sajina’s earlier fire, it had the opposite effect on the witch hunter, the water melting through his icy composure as he desperately sought to save the interrogation’s transcripts. The water had been inconvenient enough, but the real damage came from the overflowed inkpot, its black corruption ruining everything it touched. Darvor’s hands now frantically smeared the ink back and forth, succeeding only in spreading the stain further and further.
It was only when he paused to brush water from his soaked lips that he realized the futility of his efforts. He froze, staring at his black hands, stained up to their wrists, tasting the mixture of ink and water on his tongue.
Then he threw his head back and laughed, a disconcerting reaction that seemed to unsettle even Jojo.
“Oh, lighten up, Sajina,” he finally gasped. And then, regaining some of his composure: “Have I ever told you how damn frustrating it is, working with you?”
The paladin looked on, confused. She glanced at the bound witch, then back at the witch hunter. “This doesn’t seem to be a good time to—”
“You’re always reacting to everything, Sajina. Emoting about this or that feeling. You sigh, you shrug, you groan. All you do is complain.”
His voice had a bite to it that Sajina had never noticed, a hard edge that suited the sharp, almost feminine angles of his face. “That’s not a very nice thing to say,” the paladin complained, frowning, trying to focus. She had something else to say, a need to express her growing sense of unease, but she distractedly looked down at her wet armor. Under her breastplate, it felt as if her soaked underarmor was beginning to shrink, constricting around her.
Darvor swept his hair back off his face, long, black fingers running through similarly long, black hair. It hung, shiny and straight, down past his chin, longer than Sajina remembered he wore it. It was certainly less gray than it had been in years, but it suited the humored smirk that settled on his face. His regular svelte look was only compounded by the stain that now reached up past his elbows.
Sajina blushed, suddenly very self-conscious of how pretty her partner was, and how warm she was feeling in her armor. “We… we have an interrogation to finish,” she said, glancing away. “Please.”
The witch hunter continued to look at her for a long moment, a half-smile on his face, and then nodded. “You’re right, we do.”
He swept the ruined parchments to the floor, leaving a mostly dry and clean writing surface. Then he raised a long pointed nail to his lips, coating it with the black saliva that bubbled out.
“What the fuuuuck?” Sajina hissed, confused and horrified. This wasn’t right! She needed to say something, but the tightness was growing, crushing out any thought longer than just a few words. She—
“So the first question I have for you,” the witch hunter began, “is just how long you’ve known.”
Sajina looked around, bewildered, while Darvor’s ink-stained talon hung over the table’s surface, eagerly waiting to etch out the paladin’s answer.
To the side, Sajina could see Jojo looking on, amused, and the wrongness the paladin felt only intensified. “Darvor, I don’t… this isn’t my interrogation?” She sounded less certain than she intended. “She’s the one on trial!”
Darvor glanced at the bound witch. “Jojo? Well, she’s clearly a witch, and she’s clearly in league with Brandy. What I’m trying to ascertain is if you are.”
“You…” There was so much wrong with what was happening that Sajina did not know where to start. “You have black ink for saliva and you’re transcribing with a talon. That’s not… normal?”
“Well, why else would the order have made me an interrogator?” He flashed a disarming smile. “I bring my own ink, and my claws can etch into the strongest stone.”
That… made a certain amount of sense, the paladin had to grant. But another memory flickered up, through the crushing pressure that was spreading from her chest through rest of her body, as if all her armor was conspiring against her. “But that’s… that’s never how we did it before? Tradition…”
Darvor laughed a tinkling laugh, a malicious little giggle, and Sajina saw his silver tongue slip across full, red lips. She shuddered at the noise and at the sight.
“Oh, Sajina. I am the writer of tradition.” Darvor clucked disapprovingly, drawing long nails across the tabletop, scratching out damning notes. “Brandy’s corruption must have seeped into you, deeper than we thought. Please, for your own sake, try to focus.”
At the mention of Brandy and corruption, the paladin looked again at Jojo, who seemed almost gleeful. Why would she be happy, this fallen potion maker who—
“The potion,” Sajina gasped, grasping at the thoughts she desperately needed to combine. “The water… it wasn’t putrid.”
Jojo smiled wider, as if glad someone had begun to figure it out.
“The rotten egg smell—it’s sulphur!” the paladin exclaimed, turning back to her partner. “They put the potion in the sprink—”
She cut herself off with a gasp, speechless at what she saw.
Darvor the witch hunter sat where she had sat the entire interrogation, her eternal smirk shining out from shiny, inky skin. It wasn’t clear where she ended and her clothes began; Sajina had often theorized that her partner didn’t wear clothes, per se—that Darvor’s robes were just an extension of the ink that seemed to cover her whole body. Or perhaps she was entirely living latex, formed in the shape of a woman. Sajina blushed at her thoughts, and at the embarrassment that came from her exclamation. But Darvor was striking.
As if hearing Sajina’s thoughts, the witch hunter cocked an eyebrow, her silver eyes flashing—
—and for a moment, the paladin could see it, could see who Darvor had been, could see what was happening to them, to reality—
—and then her armor gave one last constriction, and her focus broke under the all-consuming weight of unreality.
Sajina shook her head, confused. “You… were asking something?” Her tongue felt odd in her mouth.
Darvor’s smirk transitioned to something approximating a gentle, if condescending, smile. “Yes, how long you’ve known. About Brandy’s… influence on you.”
The paladin suddenly felt exposed, uncertain. She drew her arms across her chest, hands rubbing her shoulders against an unexpected chill. “I… still don’t know what you mean?”
The witch hunter stood and sauntered closer, her spade tail casually swaying back and forth. Sajina was transfixed—her partner had always had this tail, and yet she was watching it grow, curling around itself like a coiled snake. And the horns! Sajina could remember them, but she couldn’t remember them from a moment ago. Maybe Darvor’s body was more malleable than she realized? But she was getting distracted, and now Darvor was towering over the sitting paladin, smiling down, a warm and rubbery hand on her forearm.
“I know this is difficult for you, what with how your body has changed. But when were you first aware of your scales?”
“My scales?” Sajina looked down to see she was no longer wearing armor—and, for a fleeting moment, realized that her armor had become her flesh, the gold wrapping around her until she had been transmuted into a creature of beautiful scale.
“My scales,” she repeated, smiling. How silly of her—her armor hadn’t become scales. She simply… no longer wore armor. It was so liberating, to accept she had no need of it. No more constriction, no more ceremony! Just freedom, beautiful freedom. Of course she wasn’t wearing armor. She didn’t need armor. Not anymore. Not since… not since…
Anyways, she didn’t need armor.
“Your scales,” Darvor nudged. “When did you first notice them?”
“I don’t recall,” she said, the admission not enough to wipe the grin from her face. Surely she should be worried about this. Surely it wasn’t normal for paladins to look like this. Surely this was the malign influence of Brandy, twisting her body into something it wasn’t. But… but look at how content Jojo was, even kneeling in chains! Surely… surely being influenced by Brandy couldn’t be that bad, right?
No, that sounded wrong, Sajina chastised herself. She was a paladin, she couldn’t be influenced by Brandy! But if she had these scales, and if it wasn’t Brandy’s influence…
Her brow strained with thought. “I think… I think I might have always had them? Somehow?”
“That sounds right,” Darvor said supportively, approvingly. “But what about Brandy’s influence on you, mentally? I can’t help but see how comfortable you look.” She ran a hand along Sajina’s bare bicep, giving the strong muscle a loving squeeze. “You know, despite being naked. Did Brandy make you—” her voice dropped to an affected whisper “—an exhibitionist?”
A momentary shock knocked the smile off of Sajina’s face, but it returned almost immediately. Of course she wanted people to see her golden scales! Her hide could repel the sharpest of blades, and people should see that. Her arms slipped off her shoulders, sliding across her impenetrable skin, loving the sensation of what she was. She smiled lavishly, her long tongue playing across her sharp teeth.
“As if. Why would it take Brandy to make me show off this body? What do I have to hide? What do I have to be ashamed of? I’m strong and beautiful. People should recognize that.” She brought a hand up, sweeping her hair past the spiraled horns atop her head. Every part of her was meant to attract attention, after all.
Darvor stepped even closer, her smooth rubber legs slipping around to pin one of Sajina’s thighs between them. Her tail wrapped around the other thigh, stroking it.“Of course, of course,” she agreed. “And I know that you have a reputation as a great swordswoman. Very strong, very… virile. But do you always wield your sword so… publicly?”
Sajina looked around, confused. Yes, there had been something about an executioner’s sword, hadn’t there? Something about justice, about… about…
Then she saw Darvor’s lecherous grin, and she understood what her partner had been driving at. Without noticing, one of the paladin’s claws had slunk between her thighs and wrapped itself around the huge cock it found there. Even now, her claw was laconically stroking up and down, savoring is ridges and texture, her legs spreading just enough to make it clear she was enjoying giving the witch hunter a show. “I’m an extremely accomplished swordswoman—and in my experience, people like to watch me work.” She motioned to Jojo, who was still kneeling in her chains, smiling, but who also looked increasingly flushed.
Darvor sunk lower, letting her pussy now grind against Sajina’s thigh, her slick body effortlessly sliding across the scales, black against gold. “That’s all well and good, but…” She leaned in closer, her voice sinking to a conspiratorial level. “… but I’ve heard other rumors, rumors that I absolutely must ferret out.”
Sajina let her own thick tail wrap up behind the smaller witch hunter, dragging her even closer, letting their bodies pin her cock between them. “And what would those be?”
“Well…” And there was a sudden predatory flash to Darvor’s eyes, a power that she had hidden with her dilatory questioning. “… I’ve heard that you’re not really a swordswoman.”
The paladin was incredibly flushed now, suddenly hot and bothered by the power the smaller woman seemed to hold over her. “O-oh?”
Darvor brought a talon back to her lips, letting her ink spread over it. She dipped it between them, a single nail resting against the sensitive scales that lined the golden woman’s décolletage. The paladin shuddered as the nail scratched across her, staining her hide with the paired infernal runes for swordswoman.
And then with a swipe of her hand, the ink of the last rune flowed away.
“I’ve heard you’re just a sword,” Darvor whispered. “And as your interrogator, I absolutely must get to the bottom of this mystery.” She moved closer and shifted her hips, letting Sajina’s cock feel just how wet she was. “You’re so strong, but… you really like to be held by someone else, don’t you? To be wielded by someone else? Isn’t that right?”
Sajina felt those exact desires curl around her heart. “I—”
The smaller woman wrapped a hand in the paladin’s hair, pulling Sajina back even as she used the hold to pull herself up, her silver eyes staring down into Sajina’s gold. “But you know what else swords need?” She teased her pussy along the tip of the paladin’s cock. “They need to be sheathed.”
Sajina groaned and accepted this final truth. “Yeeeessssss,” she admitted, “I need—I need this. Please.”
Darvor smiled, cruelty and control and kindness all blending together. She wiggled her hips back and forth, teasing the draconic cock even more. “Just a moment longer, paladin.”
Under her, Sajina shuddered again, her title feeling like an insult, a rebuke an exhibitionist like her deserved.
“Don’t you want to know what all my questions revealed?”
Sajina nodded, not looking away from the beautiful eyes above her.
The witch hunter brought her inked talon down against Sajina’s throat, using the hand in her hair to pull the paladin’s head further back, making a taut writing surface of her neck. “I had been oh so concerned that you were lying to me, that you were saying something that you weren’t. But that’s okay now. You were never lying to me, were you?”
Sajina nodded. She’d never lie to Darvor.
“It’s just your memories that were lying. But that’s all better now.”
The ink was flowing out of the talon, etching across her throat, branding her, reminding her of who and what she really was.
“Like me, you’ve always been a demon. And you’ve always been—”
“—Brandy’s,” the golden demoness finished, feeling her owner’s rune against her throat, knowing in her mind’s eye that it was the mirror image for the silver rune etched in her lover’s skin, suspended above her.
And then Darvor slowly lowered herself onto the demon’s cock, descending, sinking, carrying them both down into the black corruption below.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Darvor snapped awake with a gasp. For a moment, he thought his mouth was filled with choking black ink—
—that he wasn’t himself, that her flesh flowed and her tail curled and—
—but it was only the drool that had pooled while he was unconscious.
He jerked around, trying to get his bearings. The witch was still bound in her chains, but it appeared Sajina was slumped backward in her chair, engulfed by her armor, only now beginning to stir back to life.
“What happened?” she murmured, squeezing her eyes shut, as if suffering the effects of a hangover.
“I don’t know,” the witch hunter snapped, realizing now that he felt his own headache coming on. He channeled that discomfort into a baleful glare at Jojo. “She must have cast some sort of spell on us, some ill-conceived effort to escape. Much good it did her.”
He saw the stained parchments splayed across the floor and muttered a curse to himself. “My transcriptions, ruined by…”
He slowed, running a hand across his cheek, hoping to find the warm comfort of flowing latex, or at least the wetness of fetid water. But it was just flesh, dry and human.
“… by the sprinklers,” Sajina finished, also beginning to remember.
Other thoughts were returning, other concerns. “Your sword—is it secure?”
The paladin looked at him, her expression empty of thought. “I’m just a sword,” she whispered, a half-remembered truth on her lips. And then: “Yes, it’s here, on my back.”
“Good, good,” the witch hunter nodded, happy when her questions were answered. And then he sighed, again seeing his ruined tools. “My notes.” It pained him to see tradition flaunted like this, but… but not as much as it could have. Traditions were made to be written, right?
“You do have notes, though,” Jojo chirped up, her insubordinate grin still there. “Look at the desk.”
He rolled his eyes. “There’s nothing here, witch, just—”
—just demonic runes that she remembered etching into its surface, just like the one branded against her throat, like the one she had branded into…
Sajina was running her hands across her throat, too, also looking for something. “Darvor, what… did she do to us?”
“Oh come on Sajina,” the witch chided. “You figured it out once.”
“You put your demon potion into the sprinklers,” Darvor hissed, grasping the truth in a maddening moment of clarity. “You changed us. You made us those… things. Those monsters.”
The witch’s chains tinkled as she nodded gleefully. “Yes, yes! Wasn’t it magnificent?”
The horror of what he had become—of what she had done—lanced through Darvor. His mouth flapped open, trying to deny the witch.
He found he couldn’t.
“Sajina,” he whispered, afraid of what he would say if he didn’t say this now. “Kill her.”
The paladin stood, reached for her sword—and then, as her hand clasped the hilt, she slipped to her knees. Her free hand roamed across her armor, still looking, still trying to feel. “No no no no no no,” she cried, fingers scratching at plate metal. “This isn’t right. This isn’t right. I was strong, I was beautiful! I had a body of golden scales, and a cock, and tail, and… and… and…”
The paladin clasped her head, as if she could use her hand to crush her thoughts back into an appropriate form. After a moment, her muttering faded out, and then her breathing slowed. She straightened and stood. She held Darvor’s stare with a sudden and implacable calm.
“No. I am strong. I am beautiful. I have a body of golden scales, and a cock, and a tail.” Her voice was level and her face almost serene, save for the dreadful certainty her eyes radiated.
Only now did she draw her sword, and in one fluid motion the chains that held Jojo were sundered, an armored gauntlet pulling the witch to her feet.
“They’ll try to stop…” Darvor started, and then was uncertain how to finish.
The witch and the demon turned, expectant, waiting.
He could feel the inky black twisting through his thoughts, corruption under bright ice. He thought of tradition and its ink. He thought of how perfect it was—so shiny and black, his ink or her skin, he didn’t know. He thought of her cruel smile, and her power, and her body.
He thought of her partner, and of Jojo, and above all, of Brandy.
And he knew, then, that his future was hers to write.
“They’ll try to stop us,” she finished, herself.
Author’s Note: Verinis is an up-and-coming 3D corruption comic artist who you might know from Cursed Artifacts: The Fall of the Magus. As soon as I saw his work, I knew I had to commission him to illustrate this story. We worked for a solid two weeks, collaborating on a corruption sequence that captured the essence of Potion Pandemonium, even if it diverged from the scene-to-scene specifics. We’re both really happy with the outcome, and I look forward to working with him again down the road!
Finally, a special thank you to my patrons, whose support made both the story and the art possible. They also got to read Potion Pandemonium two months early, and the $5 backers have exclusive access to behind-the-scenes director’s commentary!