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Kain stood balanced on the sharply slanting roof of the highest tower, his left hand wrapped around the tall, needle-like lightning rod. Inside, the castle was so full of voices, and none of them seemed to be his own.
Something is troubling you. He remembered Rosa saying.
How do you know? He had asked.
You’ve been up on the roof.
Kain closed his eyes and let the wind buffet him as if he were a pennant, keeping his grip on the spire loose and shifting his weight on his heels and the balls of his feet as it pushed him to and fro. He was unarmed and unarmored, in loose trousers and a tunic. Practically nude against the cold air.
There he stood for a long while, thinking nothing, letting the wind wash over him and through him, hearing the distant sound of a wind chime in the town. A nightjar.
The wind picked up speed and took on the sound of a woman’s screaming voice. He opened his eyes. She approached.
He though to escape the roof, but he dreaded showing his fear of her more than he dreaded being at her mercy, and she might merely catch him in a gust on his way back to the ground and foul his landing. No, better to pretend at being unflappable.
The wind buffeted him and twisted around him and he again held fast to the spire. The air seemed to wrap around him, to linger cold under his loose clothes and make goosebumps rise on his skin.
And then she was there, lounging on the slanted roof and resting upon her golden, curly hair as if it were a throne. She batted her eyes at Kain.
“You prefer the company of the night to us,” Barbariccia said accusingly.
“I can’t think in there.”
Barbariccia flowed and writhed and rolled along with her hair until she was in front of Kain, not standing but floating. Her feet never touched the ground, nor anything else but her own hair.
“Tell me then, what do you think up here?”
Kain couldn’t say. He instead allowed his eyes to wander her body. It was strange, some quiet, numbed part of his mind thought. On the occasion his eyes had landed on a woman that wasn’t completely clothed, even on the rare occasion he had been invited to look, he had always politely averted his gaze. He did not bother now.
She was taller and larger than Kain, or would have been if her feet ever touched the ground. She had masses of golden, curly hair that turned and writhed and sometimes caressed her at her will. She was in form like a woman, but if any real woman had proportions like hers she was one among thousands. Long, slender limbs and broad hips. Barely a handsbreath of a waist above an almost comically voluptuous backside. Breasts each bigger than Kain’s head and falling in a shape no real woman’s maintained nude and unsupported. An adolescent boy’s dream of a woman.
He found her repulsive. He found her unspeakably erotic.
“Come now, we are old friends, you and I,” she pouted. “You can tell me.”
Were they old friends? She was the wind, but not the wind he knew. She was even more unpredictable. She could not be compelled to ruffle his hair or be relied upon to catch him if he fell. More woman than woman, more wind than the wind. Untouchable. Unpredictable.
Kain shook his head. “I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking anything.” He truly couldn’t say.
The truth was not so much that he came here to think as that he came here to look down at his world without being seen by it. A terrible thing to admit to when she knew him all too well.
There was a tale of a woman, not bound by any man or by any duty, and twisted by that freedom. Neither death nor the earth itself could hold her. When a young person brought themselves to pleasure in a dream or with their own hands, she was said to be their lover.
She was of the wind but she was not the wind, and he had known her before he had known that she was real.
“You’re really dreadfully boring,” she said, and in a motion something like a swimmer kicking to the surface, she rose, and the wind rose with her, whistling and swirling about them. For a moment, Kain was in a tornado of her hair, and he was losing his grip. In a panic, he reached for the spire that he was falling away from, but it was too far away. In the gust, he did what he had not done in more than a decade, and lost his footing. He fell, the heels of his palms scraping on the shingles as he slid on his back head first down the sharply slanted roof. He twisted and scrambled, trying and failing to slow his fall until there was nothing to scramble against and he was in midair. Before long-honed instinct could kick in and he could twist to right himself and perhaps call his own gust of wind to make a landing that wouldn’t kill him, she caught him. More accurately, her hair did, wrapping around his wrists and ankles. It circled around his waist, slipping under his shirt and writhing about him like a snake.
Her body crouched on the edge of the roof, looking down at him as if he was at the bottom of a pool that she was admiring her reflection in. If she felt his weight at all, she didn’t show it. Her knees were spread wide and he could see that she was in form entirely like a woman, the arch of her sex spread wide and adorned with curling hair the same color as what held Kain fast. He could not seem to help himself from staring. He could not seem to help himself from so many things, lately. He was suddenly glad for the blonde ropes of her hair that held him, for if they hadn’t he might have lunged to taste her. She saw his gaze and smirked. His mouth watered. He loathed himself utterly.
Another gust of wind swept around them. Kain swayed in her grip like a child in a swing. The writhe of her hair around his limbs, the caress of the wind on his skin, the wanton, seductive form of her, all had him in her grip. All coaxed blood to pool in his cock, with him in his loose clothes powerless to stop or hide it, he could feel it rise in his cheeks as well.
“Not thinking of dear Rosa now, are you?”
Now he was, though he was still looking at a demon, the ghost of the idea of a woman.
“Unlike her, I might be impelled to touch you if you ask nicely.”
“No you won’t,” Kain said, so aroused now that his chest was heaving with each breath. “You don’t let anyone touch you. Or anything.”
“Ohhh, but you’re supposed to believe it when I lie. No, you’re right, I won’t touch you. But I will tease you. Would she even do that much?”
Her hair tightened around his limbs, a silken tendril of it wandered to caress his face. Another wrapped around his neck, snaking there, not tight enough to cut off his breath but tight enough to remind that it could.
“See, unlike her, Kain,” she said, drawing her hands over her own body as Kain watched her through slitted eyes. “I know you. I know that in your dizziest fantasies—oh, oh—” she said, moaning in such a convincing mimicry of Rosa’s voice that Kain’s eyes snapped open, large and round.
The hair binding his left hand snaked away, and Kain knew what she would have him do, what he must do in order to free himself. He reached to free his straining cock, swaying in the grip of her hair as she watched with slitted eyes.
“Dick like that and yet you can’t seem to touch a woman with it,” Barbariccia said in her own voice.
He could feel his cheeks heat more deeply in shame, but still he wrapped his hand around himself.
“See, I know, Kain,” she said as she smoothed her hands across her breasts in an almost distracted way and Kain almost felt, in his own hands, the flesh of her nipples perk under his thumbs. She moaned again in Rosa’s voice and Kain made an answering, choked sound as he stroked himself. “That even in your wildest dreams you can’t imagine her moaning your name in pleasure. I could help you with that,” she said in a mockery of gentleness. “Oh, oh, oh!” she screamed in Rosa’s voice. Kain picked up his pace with her fervor.
“I know you so very well,” she said, once more in her own voice. “I accept you as you are, knowing what you’ve thought, what you’ve seen, how you’ve pleasured yourself. How you punish yourself for it even as you do it.” She caressed her breasts and the interior of her thighs, seemingly disinterested and doing it only for his benefit. Watching him. Hooding her eyes at him and pouting as she toyed with him.
“Oh—Oh! Oh, stars!” she cried out in Rosa’s voice. Kain had a premonition of exactly what she was going to do as she cried out brokenly, and was powerless to stop both his oncoming orgasm and the imagery that came with it behind his closed eyes. His hands pale on the petite body of the real woman he adored, of limbs thicker and stronger than his own, of flyaway perfumed hair about his ears. Gods help him, he knew and imagined not only the scent he wore, but the way that his sweat transformed it into a musk that was unmistakably his. He imagined, not for the first time, the sensations of that body, not his body, as he plunged—
“Oh, Cecil,” she moaned, still sounding like Rosa, though she could not contain the screaming, mocking laugh in it as Kain came--head thrown back, mouth open, trembling--hard and fast over his hand, thrusting his hips against the force that held him in place, self-loathing setting in, sour, even before the pleasure ended.
He was forced back into his own body as the sex crazed madness left him and he hung limply in the net of her hair, not looking at her.
She lifted him back to the roof, still not touching him save for with her hair.
“I thought about dropping you,” she said as Kain crawled to standing on weak limbs, both terror and arousal having left him. He wished she had. “But then how would we play another day, hmm?” she said. She swirled around him, for a moment her face close enough to kiss. No human lashes were that long.
She was gone, leaving Kain in the dead air.