An archaeologist and their inhuman rival face off. Fanfic sequel to Monstrifex’s Ichor of the Beast God.
guest story by Zyzzyza
tags: angel, nsfw, silver age, transformation
banner by Monstrifex
I hadn’t told anyone about Maddox, and I didn’t know why.
It wasn’t out of affection for the woman—she was a damned menace, and I’d have been happy to see her behind bars. Nor was it fear of being thought crazy: my colleagues would believe me, you didn’t do field archeology these days without losing some of that Enlightenment skepticism pretty fast. It might have been some sort of mesmerism thing, but I’d actually hit her in the face with a vase—cheap modern stuff from some factory in Nijmegen, don’t worry, I would never—back in a hotel near Cahokia a few weeks back, and at the least I assume she’d have stopped me from doing that first if she could.
No, I could tell people about her, and probably should. I just hadn’t, and I wasn’t sure why.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
“The Temple of the Sun” was a terrible name, but you know those nineteenth-century archeologists, all dynamite and poorly-applied mythological names and Viollet-le-Duc-ism. Anyways, it was the name now. The current best theory was that it was probably a sacred warehousing site for captured gods and idols of rival cities and peoples, with a small shrine to the sun and war goddess(es?) at the front. There was some exciting work being done in exploring the relations of Tel el-Tarish and their neighbours based on the storage and written inventories. I had read most of Professor Nasser’s papers in the last few years: excellent stuff, about as exemplary as new-school archeology got.
Of course I was a field archaeologist, old-school stuff, and when they broke through into some sort of lower vault they called me in as a specialist. “It seems like this is where they were keeping the Tears of Ishtar,” explained Nasser, as we stood looking down into the dark pit below.
“Tears of Ishtar?” I asked.
Nasser shrugged. “A trophy from somewhere in Chaldea, it seems. We can probably get the site more precisely once we find it. Some kind of sacred item of Ishtar’s, obviously. If you ‘eat’ it, whatever that means in context, it provides healing and strength, apparently.”
“Hrrrrrrm,” I said, my thoughts suddenly rushing. That sounded like the sort of thing Maddox would be interested in. There were easily two dozen colleagues and students of Nasser’s here, so the odds of her having some kind of contact who had told her when the vault was breached were pretty high. I’d been in Istanbul when Nasser had telegrammed me: it was a very short flight to Tel el-Tarish. It was pretty unlikely Maddox had gotten here first. But at the same time, she was sure to be close on my heels.
I was going to have to rush through this site, avoid whatever murderous nonsense the original builders had left here, and make sure the Tears of Ishtar ended up in the correct hands—the archeological profession, Professor Nasser’s, and the National Museum of Antioch, probably in that order. It was going to be the usual disaster as whenever I faced off with Maddox: she, no less than I, would never deliberately damage a site, but you weren’t supposed to sprint through untouched three-thousand-year-old hallways, open doors and work mechanisms untouched since the Bronze Age. If Nasser or anyone else had asked, I would have apologized for myself and my entire field with sincere shame.
This was what I lived for.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Maybe that was it, I thought, as I lowered myself into the vault. I would miss this if Maddox was gone. And I would, probably. But that didn’t quite seem to be it either.
The chamber was mudbrick, of course. Walls unmarked, floor likewise plain. Door on one side, stump of an earth-choked staircase on the other. Forward is through the door then. I shone my flashlight on the locking mechanism: mostly intact, and certainly something Nasser and his colleagues would want, but fortunately enough thousands of years of contact with the metal had damaged the wood of the door itself too much to hold it shut. I pushed gingerly, wincing a little as I did so, but the door opened cleanly, the lock staying attached to the jamb.
On the other side was the worst damn thing in the world: a long, black hallway, lined with shrines and carvings as far as the beam of my flashlight could reach. I knew what this was, because every goddamn culture in every goddamn period and continent built them: this was a gauntlet protecting the Tears of Ishtar. I licked my dry lips. My heart pounded. Even without Maddox, this was what field archeology was about.
Of course, being chased meant that I’d have to do this the extra cavalier way. Get through it first, get to the Tears, and then mark or disable the traps on the way out. (This would also slow Maddox down by forcing her to work her way through as well, although I had no illusions about her being in any danger from them, even before her whole… thing.)
As it was, it was the usual incredibly-slow-motion dash down the corridor. Arrow trap. Arrow trap. Arrow trap. Arrow trap. Arrow trap. The Tel el-Tarishians were systematic, if nothing else, but after the first few pressure plates I had the rhythm of the hallway, it seemed. I kept checking, of course, and it never paid to be hasty in these things. But it was manageable.
Three hours and halfway down the hall, I settled against the wall and had a half-thermos of coffee and a half-dozen of the stuffed grape leaves I’d packed back at the excavation camp. The adrenaline had long since ebbed, but sitting here in the near-dark of the corridor, drinking slightly-cooled coffee and gazing up and down at the endless expanse of traps, I felt alive like I seldom did. This wasn’t just my job, or even my career: this was my calling, what I was here on this earth to do. It was a thought I’d had before, and I wondered suddenly if Maddox shared it. She did, I was sure. She was a criminal and a menace, but here, in this space, we were the same: there was nothing outside of this hallway. Just you, the gauntlet, and an artefact at the end.
I gently set my thermos lid/cup on one of the pressure plates behind me. The bolt shot through across the passage like lightning, and I picked it up. Bronze, very narrow-headed, unfletched. The arrowhead shining an oily rainbow: possibly poison. Difficult to imagine how a liquid poison could have lasted this long, but of course these sorts of places had all sorts of unexpected ways of killing you. I didn’t touch the head, and carefully set it back down on the ground.
(Not where it had first struck the ground: I wasn’t going to make this any easier for Maddox than I had to.)
I was another hour or two down the latter half of the hall when I heard footsteps in the antechamber. I had left my rope hanging there, and it could have been Nasser or anyone else from the excavation, but it was going to be Maddox. Nasser and the others were supposed to keep her away, but I had more confidence in her than in them.
“Dr Farbright,” she said, behind me.
“Judith Maddox,” I said, without looking. I was halfway past yet another arrow trap, and couldn’t spare the attention for the moment. If she thought I was rubbing her face in my lead, well, I also wasn’t not doing that.
“You’re not that far, Farbright,” said Maddox, clearly following my thoughts, and sizing up the passage. “I could be down there in a minute without even breaking stride.”
“‘Sa gauntlet,” I mumbled, finally reaching another safe tile. “You can’t dash it.”
“I think I could,” purred Maddox, and purring was really the word for it. I couldn’t help myself: I glanced back down the passage.
Maddox was in shadow, no light but the dim glare of my own flashlight on her, but her cateyes glowed in the darkness. I could see fine auburn stripes starting to run up her neck and cheeks as I watched. She laughed at the look on my face: even though I had seen it before, closer, many times, it was always strange, and terrifying, and beautiful, watching this woman toss humanity on and off like a jacket.
“It’s all arrow traps,” I said, “And they’re all still poisoned. Can you take forty poison bolts in thirty seconds?”
It was my turn to chuckle at the look on her face. She leaned back, balanced carefully out of the line of fire, and put one booted foot down. A bolt shot across the hallway much closer to her face than I think she’d expected, and I laughed again. She picked the arrow up and sniffed it.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s some good stuff. Goddamnit.”
I shrugged. “Then I guess I’m four or five hours ahead.” I turned back to the next trap.
“One or two at best,” said Maddox, with indignant pride, but I was already ignoring her.
It was silent for the next little while. I had not done this with Maddox for years and years and years, not since we were students together under Evans at Knossos. We weren’t really together now, working separately and at cross-purposes, the short distance between us better measured in hours than feet, but somehow it still felt like we were on a team again. Whatever else she was, she was an archaeologist, like me.
She wasn’t moving faster than I had been, either. Hah. “One or two hours” indeed. I’d have the Tears and have a third of the traps marked or disabled by the time she met me coming back.
I was nearly there when the goddamned Tel el-Tarishians got me. The traps were irregularly placed and spaced, but every one was aligned to a (sometimes cunningly-concealed) arrowslit, and so when I saw the next plate I moved aside, to the wall, as I’d been doing for hours now. I felt the click of the concealed fucking wall-plate before I even heard it, and then there was a hot, wet feeling in my side as the knife sprang out into my kidneys.
“Fuck,” I said. No blood in my spit, but if the arrows were poisoned so was the bladetrap, for sure.
“Doctor?” asked Maddox, looking up. And then, realizing what had happened: “Farbright!”
“False-sense-of-security trap,” I said. “Clever little shits.”
“Stay there, I’ll get you,” she said, her glowing eyes darting up and down the gauntlet. Her frame was already expanding in the narrow confines of her shirt.
“No point you getting shot too,” I said, with more nonchalance than I was feeling. “I can still make this.” I pulled myself off the knife and packed my shirt into the wound as best I could, although the poison would surely kill me faster than shock.
“Make what?” demanded Maddox.
“You’ve already forgotten what they were storing here?” I said, feeling momentarily, genuinely smug, despite the warmth leaching out of my torso by the second.
Two more rounds of arrows, probably. No more than three. Shots to anywhere but the head or heart wouldn’t be fatal, or rather, wouldn’t be fatal fast enough to make a difference, given that I was already poisoned. I swept the beam of my flashlight over the walls. One arrow slit there, one probably there, a maybe third there. If I dashed I’d take one in the leg and one in the shoulder. I shifted my pack to block the latter, at least.
“Farbright, you can’t—” Maddox began, and I ran for it.
I’d judged right. One arrow caught me in the calf, where it hurt a lot more than the knife wound had or did, and the second thunked into my pack as I went by. I heard a third fire but it missed me entirely, I think, and then I was through. There was a locked door here, too, and I pushed this one open without even a fraction of the regret that I’d had with the first, so long ago (although it, too, came nicely away from the lock).
I entered the treasure chamber, feeling none of the triumph I usually would have, given that I was poisoned and dying. It was bigger than I expected, or seemed that way, because it was so empty: there was nothing in here except a small stone altar, or maybe just a dais. On it was a little clay idol of Innana. In front of her, a low, broad, clay dish, and in it—
Pearls. Gleaming, opalescent pearls, tiny but gorgeous in my dim flashlight light, dozens or hundreds of them, filling the bowl to brimming. I’d half guessed it would be this, for the Tears of Ishtar to be edible (my other thought had been amber, perhaps). I stepped forward, my injured left leg suddenly weak and my whole body clumsy, and scooped a dozen little beads out of the dish.
This was absolutely desecration, every bit as bad as anything Maddox had ever done. I was confident that this was one of those weird never-runs-dry artefacts you ran into from time to time, like the Beast God’s Ichor that had started Maddox’s whole… thing, but even so I shouldn’t be doing this. I silently swore to all of my teachers and colleagues and any students I might have in future that I was doing this only in extremis and never would again, and then my knee gave out entirely and I fell down against the altar.
I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get my coffee thermos open to wash them down, so I just dumped the Tears into my mouth and tried to dry-swallow them like aspirin. I got one down before the others dissolved in my mouth and I felt very silly.
The wound in my side and the one in my leg alike stopped hurting. I wasn’t numb, quite: it felt less like the distancing of morphine and more like the injuries had just ceased being injured. “That was… anticlimactic,” I said. I had seen the Ichor working on Maddox, and if this was different in origin and intent I knew archeological artefacts tended towards the dramatic. I stood back up easily, and looked down at my bloodstained pant leg, and the blood looked almost blue. It was illuminated from within: from where the arrow-wound had been.
I should have eaten just one pearl, I realized, and then dropped to my hands and knees in not-pain.
The sensation was indescribable, not pleasant at all but also not painful: like incredible pressure being applied to every inch of my body all at once, but completely painlessly, like my body could somehow take it. I could see my hands in front of me, my own hands, normal and unchanged and unchanging, and I could feel them being crushed and warped and reshaped, even as they remained the same. Well, they were starting to glow a little blue-white. The whole room was lighting up with my… not-transformation.
The squeezing and kneading went on and on, I had to be the size of a coke bottle now, except that I knew I wasn’t, I could see myself and except for the pearlescent glow shining through my clothes and skin I looked just fine. I grabbed the top of the altar and even managed to haul myself back upright, on my own two perfectly fine feet. The crushing stopped, and I wondered if I’d done wrong by standing, and then an entirely different sort of not-pain tore through me as my tiny, crumpled self was pulled back outward in an entirely different shape, new limbs and parts being stretched out to fill out myself. And still nothing was actually changing, except that the light under my flesh was fading again.
This was, with all respect to Innana and her Tears, the stupidest artefact I’d ever heard of. Well, I wasn’t dead. That was important, fair. But what the hell. The sensations stopped entirely, the light inside me went out and I was back to the little beam of my fallen flashlight, and I could feel the straps of my pack on my two human shoulders, and the weight of my human body pressing down on the soles of my two human feet, and I said, in my entirely human voice, “that was even more anticlimactic.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Maddox arrived a few hours later. She’d made good time through the latter two-thirds of the gauntlet, and knew where to avoid the knife trap, clearly. I’d taken some notes and photographs of the Tears and their altar in situ, and then eaten the rest of my grape leaves and drank the rest of my coffee, and then changed the flashlight batteries and settled down with the issue of The Journal of American Antiquities I’d brought on the flight from Istanbul and continued reading it.
“Doctor? Are you alright? I heard screaming.”
I folded the issue and returned it to my pack. “I was screaming? Huh, figures. But no, I’m fine, just overdosed on the Tears like an idiot.”
Maddox looked over at the altar. She hadn’t even glanced at it on the way in: she’d headed straight for me. Kind of her. “Those are the Tears?”
“Yes. They do work. You made it in here; you can take one”—I lifted a single finger—”as a memento if you like. The rest, and the holder, are going to Antioch.”
She carefully picked out one pearl and slipped it into a jacket pouch, and then looked back at me with a smirk. “And if I disagree?” The stripes were running up her neck again, and I could see claws sliding out of her fingertips.
“I got it first, fair and square,” I said, mildly. I didn’t think she was actually going to try to kill me for it, not after her sincere panic at the blade trap.
Maddox hadn’t halted her transformation this time: her shirt ripped dramatically open, revealing her taut, muscular torso and big, firm tits, and the thick mane of fur spilling down her body. Her huge, clawed paws tore through her boots, and her braid undid itself as her vast crown of horns grew out of her head. “I’ll fight you for it,” she said, and her voice was a rumbling volcano and honey at the same time.
“Christ, Maddox,” I said. I knew what she meant by “fight”. But I got up anyways, and—
—I just kept getting up.
My body lifted off the ground as my wings sprang from my back, vast and white, gently beating, holding me aloft. I could feel more wings, coming from my hips, my shoulderblades near the spine, a second pair from my back, my wrists and ankles. The second big pair folded over in front of my body, concealing it, and the little pair from my shoulder blades fit perfectly in front of my face, which somehow felt extraordinarily right. I could still see, though: each wing had an eye at the wrist, and I could watch Maddox’s comically shocked expression as my new body unfolded. I laughed at myself, a little, too—so disappointed when the Tears did nothing, when Inanna or my subconscious or perhaps just the serendipitous normal action of the Tears was saving it until Maddox could watch and be gobsmacked, just like I had been when it happened to her.
Of course, Maddox recovered quicker than I had, and of course, being Maddox, reacted just like she had when she first drank the Ichor. “Goddamn,” she said, shock quickly fading back to arousal. “Show me what you’ve got, Doctor.”
I spread my wings, revealing my naked body. (Maddox, who habitually shredded her clothes growing out of them and then left human and wearing them again, had once advised me to not worry about her clothes. I figured it could probably apply to me as well.) I was in pretty good shape—field archeology was a demanding career—but my body looked better than it had in years, if ever. Lean and well-muscled, with just a little swell in the chest and my dick big and, well, alright, pleasantly erect as my score of eyes gazed at Maddox’s nakedness. Maddox looked back and licked her lips with her rough, animalian tongue.
“Looks good,” she purred, and then lunged forward, taking me in her mouth. As I knew from experience, she really liked this. I grabbed the back of her head with my hands and wrapped my legs around her broad furry back (the advantage of floating four feet off the ground—she was much larger than a human, but could easily suck my cock just by kneeling). Then I set my wings to stroking her, soft white feathers and soft red fur tangling pleasantly. Maddox moaned around my shaft.
I was getting close already—she had an embarrassing amount of experience with me—and her eyes were starting to glow brighter. They always did when fucking. She was fingering herself with one of her massive furred hands, and I got another wing down there to stroke her clit with her. She gasped on me again, and her eyes—her whole face—were glowing now. I was close, and she was close, and we both went over together, a spasm of hands and wings and all my eyes shutting together for a moment, even as hers blazed gold.
When I came back to myself, only a moment later, Maddox was sizing me up. “Another go, Doctor?” she asked, and I grabbed her and lifted her into the air with me. I didn’t know what she weighed in this form—she was nine feet tall, in the hundreds of pounds, surely—but I lifted her as easily as if she had been a doll. She whooped with glee as we balanced in midair. I would have to have some fun flying outdoors properly, I realized.
Maddox leaned in to kiss me. One huge paw reached up to gently brush my wings aside. “No,” I said urgently. “Close your eyes first.” It was deeply irrational and deeply true: I couldn’t let her see my face like this. I didn’t know why, but I knew she mustn’t.
She closed her eyes without question or hesitation and leaned in. I spread my most delicate wings and she kissed me, our mouths meeting with grace and lewdness alike. Below, her other hand was tracing one of my tits with an equally gentle razor-sharp claw; my wings not holding us aloft were stroking her all over, and my eyes were watching her, so beautiful, so powerful, so right.
After a long moment she broke away and I lowered my feathery veil again. “Let’s do this,” she said. “Midair. Me and you. Right now. I’ve never fucked an angel before.”
“I’m not, I don’t think, really,” I protested.
“Close enough,” she said. “I’m not really the Beast God either, but I look enough like her for sex.”
“Touché,” I said, and reached down and slid myself into her.
“Fuck!” cried Maddox, practically screaming. “How does this, hnnnnnah, feel even better, hnnnnnnnngh, than last time?”
I wanted to make some kind of comment at her expense, maybe about angels, but my mind was practically shut down with bliss. Her cunt in her monstrous form was perfect, tight and wet and squeezing and stroking like her mouth had, but somehow in this form my cock was every bit as impossibly sensitive. I couldn’t imagine how I wouldn’t come in moments, and yet somehow I didn’t, Maddox rocking on me and I driving my hips into her and the both of us making noises of pure pleasure as we fucked in the air over the altar.
After a time interval that could not have been more than a few minutes, but was an eternity of my mind crumbling to dust and rebuilding itself and then disintegrating under the onslaught of pleasure again, Maddox shut her eyes again and leaned in and we kissed and it was like completing a circuit, the pleasure looping through my mouth and hers and my body and hers and my cock and her cunt and we came together again, and this time I did lose control of myself and crashed down onto the brick floor of the treasure chamber.
Judith got up first, somehow. “Is it always as good for you… when you’re like this?” I asked, weakly.
She laughed. “No, that was… spectacular.” She was in her expedition shirt and pants again. Her boots were somehow resting behind the altar, so that she could sit down and pull them back on.
I looked at myself, easy enough to do with so many eyes. I didn’t want to embarrass myself asking her how to undo this, but it turned out to be simple: I folded all my wings back and then they were gone and I was sitting on the floor—uncracked, thank god, I couldn’t imagine explaining how I’d slammed into it so hard to Nasser—in my regular work clothes. Even the bloodstain on my pant leg was clean.
I had also wondered if it would feel wrong, returning to this the way Judith did, like I was hiding, but in fact my human body felt every bit as comfortable and natural as it always had. I was this, and I could also be not this if I wanted. Simple and unjudgemental. I got up, found that I was also missing my boots, and found them. “I” had apparently left them neatly lined up near the door.
“I told you before, don’t worry about the clothes,” said Judith.
“All right, all right,” I said. “I’ve got way too many arrow traps—and one fucking blade trap—to disarm on the way out. You going to lend a hand or disappear into the night like you always do when I beat you?”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
I didn’t tell anyone about Judith, I had realized, because it was her secret. She had shared it with me, but it wasn’t mine to tell. And now she had mine, and I knew she wouldn’t tell either. It was a different kind of bond, I supposed, than we’d previously had, but I didn’t mind it. Intimate, in a way, maybe even more so in a way than the flatter physical intimacy of sex. I could work with this.
She was still a damned menace.
Author’s Note: This was inspired by Monstrifex’s awesome short comic (available here, support your local porn merchants). It’s mostly just getting my ideas of where the story might go from there down on paper, but hey, I enjoyed writing it. The transformation was my little gift to them, the bitter rivalry/unconditional trust dynamics were my little gift to me (although they certainly also liked that). It was a blast writing up a universe where Indiana Jones actually qualifies as best practices.