Tomboy Island

“Whoa!” Ashley’s voice echoed of ancient stone. Dust hung in the air, tumbling in beams of light created by still active but broken crystals embedded in the ceiling. They illuminated bookshelves two stories high.

The rest of them echoed the sentiment. Alex immediately went to the nearest shelf and grabbed one of the books. It crumbled in his grasp at the lightest pull, the leather spine disintegrating and the paper long since ruined.

“That’s weird…” Ashley muttered.

“What is?” Kiara asked.

The mousey girl stepped outside the reach of the temperature bubble before she continued. “It’s about… 20 degrees in here, if I had to guess. No extra humidity here either.” Ashley tilted her head back, studying the dust in the air. “And… uh… mhm… yeah, there’s very little air movement… so this is all around a pretty optimal way to keep books… yet these are all…” She picked up another book and it fell apart just as fast. “...like that.”

“The temperature might have been unsteady over time?” Alex theorized.

“Could be,” Ashley agreed.

It was just one of several working theories. Finding evidence of which one was correct was the challenge ahead of them. Although, if he wanted to, Alex could also just have left. The path ahead was clearly visible, solving this mystery was just done for the sake of finding potential treasure.

“So… uh… should I bend over now?” Ashley asked. “You do need… a cocksleeve to think, right?”

“Need is a strong word.” Though his baritone made light of it, his hands were soon upon the ravenette. Her mouse ears twitched in excitement when she was picked up and carried to a stone table. It was tall enough that Ashley’s toes did not teach the marble floor once she was placed face-down. Her derrière, round and proportionate, as an alluring rise and fall on her otherwise so petite figure.

Alex rubbed his cock against her slit, letting the anticipation wetten them both. Slowly, he pushed inside. Though she had proven repeatedly that she could take his full size, he was still taking it slow with her - especially now. A dick warmer she would be, but one used gently. He needed her able to walk for the trip back.

Ashley moaned lightly, matching the simple rhythm he found within a minute. No slapping of flesh against flesh, no wet plaps, just a steady in and out while he marvelled at the shape of her small back and contemplated the library.

“Kiara, are you sensing anything?” he asked.

The day had revealed that she had some connection to metal. Unlike Ashley’s walls around his cock, it was not a stretch to assume the dwarf also had some senses related to stone.

“Yeah, I am sensing… something.” As the shortstack wandered, Alex kept half an eye on her. The jiggle of her tits even when taking a casual step was enticing and he found himself quickening his thrusts into his mousey cocksleeve.

“Oh… M-m-masterrrrrr!” Ashley cried out, her first climax of the entanglement hitting her hard. Pussy juices marked the edge of the table, gushing from her greedy cunt. If she could have milked him dry at the press of a button, she would have. Those tight walls certainly tried their best to have him spill every last drop inside.

Kiara inspected the shelves, rubbing their hands all over the stone. While he had her eyes on her, Janette quietly found her own clue. “Come look at this, Alex.”

Grunting, the man of the island slung an arm under Ashley. Her slender back was pinned against his chest, her cunt held in place while he walked. The bounce in his step added a little bit of pleasurable friction, the aroused twitches of her folds that much more. The pale, petite Asian drooled and sighed in fulfilled longing. At this moment, she really was just his cock glove.

Janette stood by one of the shelves. Her fingers sifted through the book dust, removing small, grey particles from the powdery remnants of knowledge. Once he was besides her, she wordlessly pinched one of the tiny objects. She raised it up to his face.

Alex had fantastic eyesight and it had only grown sharper since they had landed on this island. All the same, the object was tiny and he had to lean in to properly inspect it.

It was a grey, maggot-like thing. A mouth of eight sharp teeth was its only dominant feature, the rest was a dried up, elongated body. It reminded Alex of a dead twig, left out in the summer sun.

“There are dozens of these in the book dust,” Janette explained. “They must be responsible. Parasites.”

“Does that look like any kind of bookworm you are familiar with?” Alex asked.

“I was on cloud nine and now I have to study worms…” Ashley lamented, still impaled on his cock, while she was presented with the dead thing in turn. He could feel the shudder of disgust through her back and even in the shifting of her insides. “Nope, no clue what that is, except disgusting.”

Janette raised the pinched parasite to her own eye. “It reminds me of the skull you brought back.”

Alex did not immediately share that observation, but Janette could be trusted on this. She was the dryad and the horrid deer they had encountered had first mentioned the name Death Willow. An association with trees was thoroughly established, which was her area of expertise.

“So the Death Willow wanted this archive destroyed?” Alex muttered, while folding Ashley into a Full Nelson. Casually, he fucked her against a shelf. The light pace kept his blood pumping and thoughts moving. “Was it a specific desire or a manifestation of its general war against births?”

No one around had the answer. They would have to keep investigating.

“Kiara come help us with this!” Alex ordered. The dwarf might have discovered a lead of her own if she was left to her own devices, but they had a lead here first.

“Alright, you don’t have to shout at me!” the ginger replied, her annoyance as thin as the barrier between Ashley’s thoughts and her next orgasm.

Alex effortlessly kept the petite Asian pinned with one brawny arm, while aiding Janette in sifting through the dust. He checked the upper layers, Janette the middle, and Kiara the bottom. They weren’t sure what exactly they were looking for in the dust, but hoped for the best.

Fingers met a cluster of the maggot-like things near the edge of one shelf. He continued on to the left, finding very few of them at all. He stopped at a pillar between two shelves to accelerate his thrusts. The casual usage of his carriable cocksleeve had pushed him to the edge and he needed a moment to ride out that pleasure.

“No lazing about!” Kiara reprimanded jokingly.

“Y-yeah, yeah.” The pleasure of the moment was too much to keep his voice steady. Tight walls massaged him. With a short-lived roar, he pumped three more times into the black-haired mousey tomboy, then came to a still. Seed surged upwards. The white, thick load went right where it belonged: courting the womb of one of his women.

The brief instance of thoughtless bliss was rapidly washed away by inspired clarity. While the moaning, willing sex slave wrung every last drop out of him with her twitching insides, his eyes dashed to the piles of found parasites.

Looked at from a row-by-row basis, there was nothing really off. The maggots had clustered at the end of their life, that could have had a myriad of reasons. Looked at as a whole, however, one could connect where those mounds were made into several curves. It looked like ripples from a disturbed pond.

The pattern was too repetitive to be coincidence.

Alex lifted Ashley off his cock and put her on a nearby seat. Breathing heavily, she observed him intently. The other two women followed her example. Apparently, when he put his relief tool down, everyone understood that he had found something.

‘If they came out in waves, then there must be somewhere they came out from,’ Alex thought.

No longer scanning randomly but with purpose, Alex sifted through the dust again. He only ever did it for long enough to find the next piece of the pattern. He went from one shelf to the next. Every ripple discovered brought him closer to the source, the epicentre of the impact of knowledge devourers.

He found it hidden away in a corner. When his hand went through the dust there, he found something hard and brittle. With care, he swept the dust aside, revealing a grey root. It was covered in holes, little tunnels that the maggots no doubt had emerged from. In its totality, it was no larger than his hand and yet it had brought about the end of this entire library.

Staring at it made his stomach collapse into a knot. It was a manifestation of profound evil, an extension of the thing that prevented his seed from finding the purchase that it ought to. Its presence implied much and left so much unanswered. What was the Death Willow, why had it wanted this library gone and how far did it reach?

Primordial emotions fought inside Alex’s chest for dominance. He clenched his knuckles, just staring silently at the thing. In a moment of panic, he checked his hand. Touching it had not brought about any adverse effects, it seemed. Whatever this root was, it was dead now… but the storm of emotions remained.

Overcome by a sudden impulse, Alex gripped the root. His fingers pressed into the brittle stone, finding purchase around the root. With a powerful yank, he tore the grey thing out of the wall. Where it was anchored snapped, the un-life had left it untold years ago.

Alex inspected first the hole in the wall, found nothing more of interest, then turned the item around in his hands. “Vile thing,” he muttered. “We are taking it along.”

“You sure?” Janette asked. She and the rest of his companions had stood aside throughout the entire display.

“Not entirely, but sure enough to do it,” he confessed. Kiara held still while he raised the lid on the backpack and dropped the deadwood inside. If nothing else, he wanted to have another token of his triumphs. “Now… since this was the origin point.” He gestured at the now destroyed bit of shelf. ”Perhaps we can find something that survived at the opposite end of the library?”

They did not hope for much, but it was still worth a try. Tracing the shelf furthest away from the invasion of maggots wasn’t as straightforward as just wandering to the other end of the library, but it also wasn’t a lot more complicated than that.

The dust there was rougher, the density of parasites within it lesser. The spines of several books had survived, though their contents had not. This held true all the way to the end of the shelf.

Alex lifted a book and out of the book fell a singular page. His reflexes urged him to catch it immediately. Reason won that battle and, rather than risk crumpling it with a hasty grab, he let it tumble to the ground. Careful, he picked it up.

It was too thick to be paper, likely being vellum. It had a goldish tint. Its edges were lightly damaged from the gnawing, wooden parasites, but the illustrations boxing in the otherwise page were still gorgeous and unfaded.

There was a light tingle of magic under his fingers that Alex could not quite place. It felt like the page was awaiting a question. Alex had many he wanted answered, but he had a hunch that it would be wasted. There was no way he would get an answer in modern English. “Put this in the gauntlet,” he told Janette.

“As you wish, Master,” she obeyed, storing the page away in the dimensional space where they did not have to worry about creases.

They scanned the rest of the library for any valuables, but found nothing more. There was only the path ahead and the way back.

With a quiet sense of foreboding in his heart, Alex led the way. Down from the library lead a staircase. It was interrupted every 5 metres or so by a corridor running across it. Though there were hints of further complexes stretching to the sides, they were all made inaccessible by the shifting of the stones. There was only the path down.

The heat returned stronger than ever. The edge of the temperate bubble was plainly visible, the difference in air temperature making the world beyond bend and wave. What his mind suspected they would find was confirmed when they entered the only and final chamber at the bottom of the complex.

It must have been grandiose once. A massive chamber whose ornaments of blue crystal still shone bright. It was akin to a cathedral. The calm beauty that this place was supposed to have was marred by the cracks of red, hot lava streaking through. Vents on the sides of the room spewed forth incandescent chains. They were not natural, their linkages too odd to be forged, shifting as they were observed, and the material radiating too much magic to be anything besides esoteric in its origin.

Four chains connected to four shackled wrists of an enormous creature. It wept when they entered and quickly rose to its full height when it noticed them. “FREE MEEEE!” it demanded, a snake-like mouth bellowing forth painful heat. “FREE ME!” It repeated, four arms straining against its bondage. Two smaller ones impotently slammed into the pool of lava beneath it. “FREEEEE MEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” it roared, the coils of its serpentine lower body thrashing against the unseen barrier of its range.

The creature was an embodiment of heat. Its skin was charred black. Magma poured constantly from the cracks all over itself. Its chest was particularly afflicted. The midriff seemed ready to tear between the layers of abdominal muscles, liquid stone oozing in-between like pus from an open wound. The centre of its chest was an incandescent hole, glaring at them like an angry eye.

[Shackled Lava Monster]

Spoiler

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Alex was tall. Even bound, the creature was twice his height. In anger, it rushed forwards, being stopped a few metres away from the man of the island and his accompanying women by chains and barriers.

“Free me,” it whimpered.