Sally stared after the retreating form of Modan’s perfectly round, naked buttocks for several long moments before it suddenly dawned on her just what the tingling sensation in her chest must mean.
“Water breathing!” she gasped in delight, reaching up and feeling around her mouth and neck to see if there were any physical changes there. There weren’t any as far as she could tell, but that did nothing to quell her excitement. With a huge grin plastered across her face, she ran off after her mistress, splashing and sloshing her way through the water until she too was totally submerged.
Out of habit, she held her breath and kept her eyes squeezed tightly shut as her head dipped below the surface, and it took her mind several moments to convince her body that it was still okay to continue breathing. She managed to get the hang of it soon enough however, and upon cautiously cracking one eye open she was startled to find that not only was she able to breathe without a problem, but she was also able to see with crystal clear clarity through the swirling murk as well.
With a skip in her step that was dampened only slightly by being underwater, she sloshed her way forward to Modan’s side, beaming as she gurgled in delight.
“This is amazing Mistress!”
Modan just smiled, patting her shoulder and nodding her head. Submerged as she was beneath the water, her dark hair now floated around her like a black halo and her breasts lifted up in the buoyant environment, lending an even more ethereal quality to her already mildly luminescent form.
“Come.”
Gesturing ahead of them, she half-walked and half-swam forward under the tree. Its roots held open the mouth of a tunnel lined on all sides by winding, twisting tendrils of wood, just barely holding back a heavy wall of mud and silt. The tunnel itself was far from dark however. All around its walls and along its ceiling, brightly glowing worms wriggled their way in and out of the muddy cracks between protruding roots, bathing the gloom in a soft, multi-hued phosphorescence as small, soft-shelled crabs scuttled past their ankles and deeper into the tree-cave.
“Gods below…” Sally half-gurgled and half-gasped in astonishment, her eyes growing wide as saucers as she was led through the opening. Unable to stop herself, she repeated again, “This is amazing!”
Never in a thousand lifetimes would she have ever thought that such a strange and wondrous place existed just beneath the deceptively placid waters of her mistress’s bog. Although, now that she gave it some thought, she supposed that she probably shouldn’t be that surprised either. She’d been routinely having her preconceived notions about the world around her challenged ever since she’d arrived, after all. Still though, the unknown territory stretching out before her was absolutely fascinating! Even here she could feel the gentle warmth of the Power pulsing out in steady waves from the small crabs and the even smaller worms squirming and scuttling around them. It was all so new, all so foreign, all so… beautiful.
Seemingly on a whim, Modan stooped forward and plucked up one of the glowing, multicolored worms from the mud. She then took hold of Sally’s right hand and wrapped it around her third finger like a ring.
“What is it, Mistress?” she breathed quietly, feeling her heart skip a beat as she stared transfixed at the coiled creature for several long moments.
She made sure to do her best to keep her hand as still as she possibly could, scared of accidentally startling the little worm into trying to escape, and held her breath for good measure, watching to see if it would move. However it soon grew apparent that it wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. If anything, it seemed to have frozen into place, unmoving, but still glowing softly.
“Just a pretty thing,” answered Modan with a shrug, her deeply melodious voice sounding somewhat muffled beneath the water.
Still smiling, she once again resumed leading the way further down through the tunnel, guiding them into a little cavern where several other tunnels all converged. There she took hold of Sally’s wrist once again, and raising it up high enough to cast the rainbow glow of the worm on her finger over the gloom, revealed in its center a great pit filled with silt and soft organic material, upon which sat a massive ball of legs, antennae, and chitin.
“Oh my!”
Sally let out another gasp of surprise that came out as a stream of bubbles from her mouth, and she had to immediately clamp down on the urge to retreat back behind her mistress at the sight of the creature before her.
Her first impression of the… thing… was that of a giant insect, then a crab, and then finally a lobster’s segmented body with many eyes and huge, oddly-shaped claws. The creature was bloated and soft-bodied except for where hard plates dotted its surface, and was at least as large as she was. As she watched, it seized one of the soft-shelled crabs still scuttling along the muddy floor and guided it up into its mouthparts, chewing heavily.
“W-what is it?” she asked with a mixture of awe and just a little bit of worry as she watched the massive, unnamed creature enjoy its meal.
It just had so many… appendages…
“An old charax,” answered Modan, gliding smoothly around the edge of its lair and motioning for Sally to follow.
Which she did.
Very slowly.
The charax didn’t seem to take much notice of her presence though, or if it did, it was plain that it didn’t particularly care that she was there, and soon enough she was once more standing at her mistress’s side.
As she sidled close, Modan gestured up to the cavern ceiling, where a few large, unusually thick tree roots had punched through to hang down above the creature’s pit. As they watched, the charax took the broken, mostly-empty shell of the crab it had just been gnawing on and placed it on one of the roots, which in turn began to very slowly curl around it. The charax then looked back down the tunnel where they’d come from, and a moment later another crab scuttled from it and marched straight into its pit. The charax grabbed it, and just like the last one, brought it up to its mouthparts and began eating.
Scooping up a pinch of mud between her fingers, Modan held it in front of Sally, then pointed to the glowing worm around her finger lighting the cavern, then at the crab, and then finally at the charax.
“Do you understand?”
Very slowly and deliberately, Sally moved her gaze from the mud, to the worm, the crab, the charax, and then finally, the tree, puzzling out what she was supposed to be learning. Then, all at once, it came to her, and she beamed.
“Yes!” she exclaimed, beginning to tick off points on her fingers. “The worms consume the mud which is saturated with the Power. The crabs then eat the worms absorbing that Power. After which the charax eats the crabs, and then in turn it feeds the trees!”
She clapped her hands and eagerly rubbed her palms together, dancing from foot to foot in the soft earth, positively bubbling with excitement.
“It all trickles upward from creature to creature!”
Modan smiled and nodded.
“Correct. But it is also much more than that.”
Gesturing back toward the mouth of the tunnel they’d just emerged from, she went on.
“You see, the worms bore the life from the tree roots. The crabs rid the trees of them, and the charax then returns some of what was lost back to the trees… eventually.”
She then pointed to the woody, muddy wall behind Sally.
There she could see hundreds and hundreds of hollow bits of crab legs jammed into it in neat rows.
“Every spring when they wake from their long sleep, the trees consume the remnants of the crabs left to them by the charax, thereby restoring a measure of the Power that was lost to them by the worms.”
Sally stared in wide-eyed fascination at the wall of legs only a few hand-spans in front of her, mouth agape and filling with swirling silt as she tried to wrap her mind around just how vast and complicated the ecosystem of the seemingly placid and sleepy bog really was.
“This is… This is amazing, Mistress…” she breathed reverently, before her excitement overcame her once more. “Oh my, I have so many notes to make!”
“Indeed.”
Nodding again and smiling ever so slightly in self-satisfaction, Modan gestured again and began to lead them out through one of the other tunnels as the old charax nonchalantly continued to enjoy its seemingly endless meal behind them.
“Most charax never grow to be that large,” she explained as they swam forward. “When they are young, they sneak up on crabs and fish and other little animals, and are forced to hide from the bigger ones. However if they manage to live to sleep for five hundred winters, like the one you just saw, they grow to be great in Power… and in wisdom. The oldest charax can enchant their prey to happily feed themselves to them, and they are also able to ward the knuckers that once hunted them from entering their burrows. Their wisdom teaches them that the trees are important, and so they help them.”
“Incredible…”
Sally swam slowly after Modan, still trying to take it all in. She idly wondered just what other nuggets of wisdom a strange crab creature who sat around all day eating smaller crabs might have, but for the moment her mistress’s explanation made a lot of sense, and she tucked it away in the back of her mind for further analysis later on.
Up ahead of them she soon saw more light, and a moment later they exited the tunnel, emerging back into the central lake. Below them, Sally could see more of the crabs from the tunnel, as well as fish and fat water snakes, crawling about and mingling in their intricate waltz above the smooth stones lining the lakebed.
Hmmm… wait a moment now, she thought to herself as something caught her eye, feeling only slightly ridiculous as she paused to float in the water and rub her chin contemplatively.
There were a great many stones covering the lake bed, many of them half-buried by mud. And while that on its own wasn’t all that notable, there was something about what she was seeing as a whole that stuck out to her as odd. Staring harder, she soon saw that many of them were stacked on top of one another, almost as if…
No, not just stones! she realized with a jolt of excitement as a familiar series of shapes began to resolve in front of her in the murk.
That was a wall!
Now that she knew what to look for, it was clear to her that many, even most, of the stones in the lakebed had been deliberately stacked in a cyclopean fashion, though much of it had by now been worn away by centuries of water and nearly completely covered in tree roots. Nearly, but not entirely. It was obvious to the young mage now that she was looking at the side of a very old, and totally forgotten, building. And just beside it was the faint outline of a path. And a bit further on still, was that… a pillar?
This must have been where her cultists worshipped her long ago… Oh my, how fascinating!
Truly this was indeed a wondrous place.
“And this is just one bog!” Sally gurgle-squealed to herself in delight as Modan returned to the surface ahead of her.
Perhaps one day she could discover more. If her mistress had a mother, then it stood to reason that she also had sisters, right?
Kicking her legs in glee as her imagination began to concoct vivid fantasies of forgotten relics and hidden temples full of mysterious creatures, Sally swam up after her guide, and as her head crested the surface, she couldn’t help but giggle and beam.
This was all so exciting!
Modan was already there waiting for Sally with an indulgent smile when she at last broke the surface of the lake, floating a foot or so ahead of her and just high enough for the very tops of her round breasts to be visible above the waterline.
“How’s your tush?”
Caught up as she had been in the whirlwind of her mistress’s enchanted kiss and the revelation of the unseen marvels hidden just beneath the seemingly innocuous surface of her bog, Sally had nearly forgotten all about her earlier thrashing. However it seemed as though the crisscrossing patchwork of welts covering her bottom and thighs had just been waiting for Modan to call out to them, for no sooner had she mentioned them, then they began to tingle and throb once more.
Biting back on a wince and clamping down on the urge to reach back and rub at the tender ridges, Sally put on a brave face. She didn’t want to seem ungrateful or petulant in the face of everything that she’d just been taught, after all, and so with a grimace that did little to hide her true feelings on the matter she replied.
“Um… It’s fine Mistress.”
Modan smirked.
“I thought you might say that. The minerals here are good for your skin. And excellent, we won’t need any more berries for you, then.”
Sally felt the brave face that she was putting on falter just a bit at hearing that – even as she made a mental note to try and collect some of the murky water to study more in-depth later – as she realized that she’d just fibbed her way out of having more of those wonderful berry juices applied to her tender nates. For a brief moment she considered revising that assessment of her rear end, but just as quickly dismissed the idea. She couldn’t very well change her story now. That would just earn her more spanks for lying!
Turning away from her grimacing student, Modan casually glided back over to the edge of the central clearing and climbed up onto some roots.
Roots which Sally couldn’t help but notice had intertwined themselves over the years across the tops of several suspiciously geometrically shaped stones.
“Although, I’m sure you’re hungry, are you not?”
“Oh!”
Startled out of her self-pitying reverie, the young mage swallowed her chagrin and chided herself for being so silly as she swam over to join her mistress on the branch. What was done was done.
Besides, she was rather hungry.
“Yes Mistress.”
“Heh. I thought you might be,” answered Modan, grinning mischievously as she held up a struggling crab in each hand.
Her grin took on a decidedly more predatory bend to it then as she winked.
“I didn’t think the old charax would mind.”
Settling down onto the mossy top-cover of the branch, she gestured toward the spot next to her with one of the crabs.
“Come, sit.”
Sally eyed the wriggling crab with another grimace, wishing very much that it was a piping hot meat pie or something sweet instead, before setting aside her longing and easing herself carefully down onto the (mostly) soft and moss-covered surface of the root-branch with only a faint wince. As unappetizing as the offering may have looked, food was food. And besides, if a powerful water nymph like Modan thought it was what they should eat, who was she to second guess? Still though, she couldn’t help but wonder.
“Are they tasty, Mistress?” she asked while eying the crabs skeptically.
Maybe with a pinch of dragon pepper and a honey glaze…
Sally’s stomach grumbled.
Living day to day on travel rations had definitely taken a toll on her taste buds, and the mere thought of eating something other than cured meat and stale bread was enough to make her mouth water.
“What? Humans don’t eat crabs anymore?” asked Modan, looking a little ruffled, as if annoyed that humans would have the audacity to change their dietary habits over the course of centuries.
Sally blushed at the question, and accepting the squirming crab with a sheepish grin replied, “Um… Some people still do, I think. Around fishing wharves and near the ocean, I suppose. We usually just ate mutton or chicken at the monastery, though.”
Determined to impress this time, and doing her best to ignore the way the uneven, rough grooves of the tree bark was digging into her tender hindquarters, she closed her eyes and cupped her hands around the crab, focusing her mind on summoning energy from the Power. A moment later there came a bright flash and a hollow pop, and it was instantly flash-fried in her hands.
Sally’s face lit up with delight as the savory scent of sizzling crustacean meat wafted up to tickle her nostrils.
Success!
Mostly…
“Oh, oh, oh!” she hissed, juggling the suddenly very hot shell from hand to hand as she blew on it to help it cool.
Okay, so maybe the crab was just a bit crispier than she’d intended it to be, and perhaps it was smoking a little more than was probably healthy, but it was still cooked, and that was all that mattered as far as she was concerned.
“Impressive, little human.” observed Modan with just a hint of amusement as she dug into her own crab.
“Why thank you, Mistress.”
Feeling more than a little satisfied with her semi-clumsy handiwork, and grateful that she wouldn’t have to eat another meal of raw meat, Sally sank her teeth into the hot flesh of her soft-shelled crab and ripped out a huge bite.
It was delicious.
“Hmmm… I think I remember chickens,” mused Modan thoughtfully between slurps of raw meat that she sucked out from the broken exoskeleton of the still weakly struggling creature in her hands. “They had them here sometimes. I have never seen a ‘mutton’, though.”
At that, Sally snorted, spraying bits of burnt crab and crumbled shell down her front in the process. Wiping away some of the debris from her face and chest with the back of her free hand, she turned to face the nymph and giggled (all worries about being formal and respectful overridden in that moment by her mirth) as she explained, “Mutton isn’t a creature, silly. It’s the meat that comes from sheep!”
Sally looked thoughtful for a moment then, staring off into space and idly tapping one slightly greasy forefinger against the side of her cheek.
“…Although to be fair, I don’t really know why they call it that. It doesn’t really make sense now that I think about it…” she added as an afterthought as she brought her hand back down to her lap and let her eyes wander over the various flowers blooming in the naiad’s hair.
“Oh.”
Modan just shrugged and took another slurp of her meal, the poor crab in her hands finally dying.
“And what’s a sheep?”
“You don’t know what a sheep is?” demanded Sally incredulously, finding it hard to believe that there was something she knew that her mistress didn’t.
Modan narrowed her eyes then, and her tone grew suddenly frosty.
“Excuse me, but you didn’t know what a knucker was until yesterday. Or a charax for that matter.”
Setting aside her mostly-eaten crab, she narrowed her eyes.
“Um, Mistress, no, I wasn’t… That is to say…”
She hadn’t changed her position at all, but somehow she now seemed to be looming over the young mage, a frustrated predator regarding her tiresome prey.
“I only chided you for your ignorance of the Power because you claimed to be a priestess, and a scholar of it. By what right do you dare mock me?”
Suddenly entire swarms of butterflies were performing aerial acrobatics inside of Sally’s stomach, and it was all she could do not to scoot away from Modan or jump off of their log to hide in the water.
“M-Mistress, I… I didn’t mean to offend you!” she stuttered out nervously, her own crab forgotten beside her as she waved her hands in front of her in a doomed attempt to somehow snatch back the last few minutes. “I was just… It was just… I mean, I’ve never met someone who didn’t know what a sheep was before. I didn’t mean to imply that…!”
One by one, excuse after excuse started tumbling out of her with increasing speed as she frantically tried to come up with something to say that would make up for her rudeness and quell the naiad’s growing ire. Unfortunately for her, try as she might, that appeared to be a task beyond mortal ability now.=
Oh horsefeathers! she cursed silently. You really know how to put your foot in your mouth, don’t you, Sally?
Modan in turn simply kept her wayward student pinned in place with a steely, narrow-eyed glare as she piled up her flimsy excuses and attempts to backpedal, until finally, she’d had enough.
“Stand up.”
The words were spoken firmly and calmly, but they immediately cut through Sally’s rambling.
“But-!”
With a throaty little moan that expressed just how scrambled and nervous she was feeling far better than any words could have, she reluctantly slid off of the branch and back into the shallow water to stand nervously fidgeting in front of her displeased mistress.
Still just looking at her, but somehow seeming to be looming over her from on high, Modan spoke again.
“Come here.”
Sally’s heart felt like a humming bird trapped inside her chest then, demanding that she run away, but she just couldn’t bring herself to disobey.
“Y-yes Mistress…”
Swallowing hard, she carefully picked her way across the mossy mud and bits of branch, closing the distance to Modan’s right side.
SMACK!
The irate naiad slapped her thigh, sending a sharp report echoing across the still lake and making her ample lap wobble and bounce, just as her student’s already-welted bottom was about to.
“Bend over.”
Again, the words were spoken calmly, but the sheer weight of authority behind them opened up a pit in the bottom of Sally’s stomach, and before she could stop herself she was pleading again as she shifted nervously from foot to foot in the mud.
“Pleeease Mistress, I’m sorry!”
She knew it wouldn’t work. That resisting would most likely just make things worse for her. But the sight of her mistress expectantly waiting for her to bend over was a frightening one, and she just couldn’t help herself.
Modan was unyielding in her resolve however, and she kept her pupil’s bright green eyes locked in the bottomless depths of her own liquid gaze.
“You do not want me to have to make you, little human.”
Now that definitely made poor Sally’s knees wobble, and with a frantic squeak she half-dove and half-collapsed in a heap across her mistress’s waiting lap, all pretense at resistance collapsing in an instant as her well-appointed backside squirmed into place.
“No, Mistress, you’re right, Mistress. I’m sorry, I’ll be good!”
Modan just shook her head as a half-smile played across her lips at that, hungrily eying the delicious pair of cheeks being presented to her.
“I’m honestly not sure if you will ever be good at this point.”
Still smirking, she gave Sally’s arched backside an affectionate squeeze that made the girl gasp, wince, and shiver all at once.
“But I think that this will at least help make you better for a little while.”
With that she leaned in hard against the naked girl’s back and began another bare, wet-bottomed spanking, just like the ones from the previous day, only far worse due to the layered stripes and half-healed marks already there.
SMACK! SMACK! SMACK!
Just as before, Modan’s hand was a ten ton boulder and her arm an avalanche as she brought it up to her shoulder before bringing it crashing back down to deliver a full force slap with her open palm straight against the softest curves of the wiggling and jiggling bottom laid out before her.
She didn’t bother with lecturing Sally this time. The girl already knew why and how she deserved this punishment. Instead she simply focused on delivering a hard, fast, and absolutely agonizing spanking in the fog.
“Ah! Ack! Owie!”
Likewise, Sally didn’t bother with launching into her usual chorus of promises to be good and proclamations of regret, instead clinging to her mistress’s damp thigh as best she could and simply taking her spanking with squeals and cries that quickly dissolved into sobs.
As her spanking dragged on however, she began to feel a small twinge of worry rising up in the back of her mind. That twinge soon burst into a full on explosion of anxious panic as her endurance was pushed to its limit and then shattered entirely as Modan continued to mercilessly punish her bottom and thighs, all the while showing no sign of slowing down anytime soon.
SMACK! SMACK! SMACK!
Gods below and demons above! If this is a spanking that’s supposed to help me behave for just a “little while”, there’s no way I ever want to find out what would make me behave even longer! Sally thought to herself as her legs scissored back and forth through the air behind her in time with a flurry of particularly unpleasant swats along the inner curves of her sit-spots. At the rate she’s going, I’ll be an old lady, withered and with my hair turned to gray, before I so much as even consider being naughty ever again!
With a look of utterly serene focus and determination etched into her regal features, Modan kept up the pace of her swatting, not altering her speed or technique in the slightest; just hitting Sally’s disobedient bottom, over and over and over again, the fleshy thwacks of her palm and the thrashing girl’s anguished cries mingling together and drowning out the usually placid background noises of the bog. With a relentlessly cruel sense of determination, she methodically turned the young mage’s entire bottom a very angry shade of bright, bright red, and then covered it all over again with another layer of hard smacks just to be thorough.
The entire ordeal only lasted a handful of minutes before Modan finally ceased her swatting, but to poor Sally it felt more like an eternity, leaving her panting and lying limp across her broad lap by the time it was all finally over.
—
“Mmmm….”
Feeling a keen sense of a job well done, the smugly self-satisfied naiad leaned forward and rested her elbows on top of the sobbing girl’s sweat-sheened back, propping her chin on her palms and gazing haughtily down at her beaten flesh like a queen looking down from her throne.
And truth be told, it was quite the sight to behold.
Sally’s already wide and well-endowed cheeks had swollen considerably under Modan’s careful attentions, and had taken on the color of fresh raspberries – like the ones she occasionally saw hanging from the bushes just outside her bog. With each shuddering breath the girl took they heaved hypnotically up and down, jiggling with each exhalation and wobbling above a matching set of equally-red upper thighs as well.
Modan licked her lips.
She looked absolutely delicious.
