5 - I often find myself dissatisfied with my life by Rocky41_7

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5 - I often find myself dissatisfied with my life

Thuringwethil shouldn’t have come; she knew that. Ungoliant’s lair—wherever she chose to make it—was always a dank, dark, vile place, and not in the ways that Thuringwethil liked. It was always out of the way, up in some high canyon or crevasse in the mountains, where the air bit terrible while trying to fly, and it always lacked in even the barest of accommodations.

            Why was she here?

            There was a trilling and a clacking of pincers that was a greeting, before Ungoliant rasped out her name, the word tearing itself from a throat not formed for verbal speech. At times as she truly needed to communicate, she could make it so, but most often she preferred not to converse in speech. A shadow passed over Thuringwethil as Ungoliant’s bulk moved with alarming speed and silence overhead. One hard leg reached down to paw at the breadth of Thuringwethil’s batlike ear, which she retained even in her more Elven shape.

            “You came,” Ungoliant whispered eagerly, lustily. “You came.”

            Thuringwethil considered several biting and dismissive responses, determined them all to be quite transparent and churlish, and said nothing.

            Ungoliant quivered over her as though Thuringwethil was a bit of prey in check mate. She tipped her head back to look up at the monstrous creature.

            “I did not come to converse with your belly,” she said. Ungoliant made a fretting noise and spun herself around, easing down into the gorge until she peered directly at Thuringwethil with all eight, shiny black eyes.

            “You came,” she hissed again. She leaned back on her rear legs to caress Thuringwethil’s hair and face with a pair of forelegs.

            “Stop that.” Thuringwethil moved back, her brutally sonorous voice putting a halt briefly to Ungoliant’s movement. For a moment, the great arachnid watched her unblinkingly, quivering again, then she sidled out of the way to allow Thuringwethil further into the gorge.

            “Come, come,” she whispered. Thuringwethil, telling herself there was no point in turning back now, went. Deeper in, at the gorge’s dead end, Ungoliant had fashioned a kind hammock of webbing, to which she rushed, around Thuringwethil. “Here, here,” she said, tapping the net with her legs. “Smooth. Not sticky.” She seemed to demonstrate by pressing her legs against the strands and showing how they came away easily.

            Thuringwethil wondered if this bore any relation to her previous complaints about the lack of furniture. For a moment she simply observed, her grayish arms folded, her pupilless eyes slightly narrowed.

            “Come!” Ungoliant urged.

            Thuringwethil breathed deeply, although she did not necessarily need to breathe, and approached. She climbed onto the web and it sagged under the pressure points of her oddly-jointed hands, but it did not give way. Ungoliant was making a low, soft rumbling noise which Thuringwethil knew to mean she was pleased.

            Thuringwethil lay back on the web and looked up. The dark sky was visible here, heavily clouded—as Ungoliant preferred it—with no stars visible. The dark, at least, was comforting. She rolled onto her side, touching the bareness of her throat, and Ungoliant settled at her back.

            “Pretty girl,” the arachnid whispered, touching Thuringwethil again with her many legs. “Pretty girl, pretty girl.” Her feet—were they feet?—touched Thuringwethil’s hair, her sides, her stomach, her own two legs. “You came, pretty girl.”

            “It’s cold here,” said Thuringwethil, merely to complain about something. Ungoliant pressed nearer, enveloping Thuringwethil in the cage of her legs.

            “I am not warm,” she said.

            “I know.” The bristles of hair on Ungoliant’s legs rubbed against Thuringwethil’s cloak.

            “He treats you well?” said Ungoliant. Thuringwethil snorted.

            “Mairon? He’s a little brat, same as always. I’d claw his eyes out of it wouldn’t throw Melkor into a rage. He favors him, you know. No one else has a chance at a real promotion. He’ll fuck up someday, I’m just waiting for when.”

            “I can take him,” Ungoliant whispered, her voice susurrant against Thuringwethil’s sensitive ears, shivering out through her body like ripples in the web. “Spin him a cocoon…drain him a little…”

            Thuringwethil laughed, a sharp, barking sound.

            “I’d like to see his face,” she said, turning onto her back. One of Ungoliant’s shorter legs stroked her cheek with surprisingly gentle dexterity. “But no. If I did end up with his job, I think I’d kill myself. No one but Mairon can bury themselves in bureaucracy like that and survive. Truthfully, I think he gets off on it.” She made a jacking off gesture to simulate her vision of Mairon masturbating on the troop manifests. This was a gesture the Maiar had learned from the Children.

            She heaved a sigh and looked past Ungoliant’s legs to the black sky.

            “I think I’m having a midlife crisis,” she said.

            “You expect to die soon?” said Ungoliant.

            “No. Never mind. Touch me.”

            So Ungoliant did, she reached her fëa in against Thuringwethil’s and the cold shock of it was like a bucket of ice water down her back; it always was. The rapacious hunger that pounded over her like the surf at the jetty stopped up Thuringwethil’s throat and made her arch her back, gasping as if she were being choked. Ungoliant knew no gentleness here, only desire; once she had begun, she would not stop; she raked her fangs down Thuringwethil’s very spirit until the vampire screamed and thrashed in the net, until she contorted without thought, until she sobbed.

            “Mine,” the great spider cackled, lowering her face to flicked her tongue against Thuringwethil’s neck and cheek, mouthing at her like a morsel of prey. “Mine, mine, mine.” Thuringwethil moaned senselessly, one flailing hand connecting weakly with an exoskeletal leg. “Mine, mine, mine.”

            The climax of this wretched affair left Thuringwethil sunk limp into the bowing center of the web, tear tracks like ice on her face, her muscles trembling as if she had been rolling a boulder up a hill all day. Ungoliant was crouched over her, making soft, creaking sounds to herself. She circled around, modifying the web to allow for slightly more sag, and then settled over Thuringwethil until the sky was no longer visible and the worst of the wind did not touch her.

            Thuringwethil groaned, but did not manage speech.

            “Rest,” Ungoliant hissed. “Soft thing, rest.” Thuringwethil’s pupilless eyes slid shut. She felt Ungoliant’s pincers flicking open and shut near her ear. “Soon I will swallow you,” the arachnid whispered. “Suck you dry, swallow you down, leave only the husk…my pretty girl.” Thuringwethil did not summon the energy to reply.

            Sure. Why not?

            What did death being consumed by some creature out of the Void even feel like?

            Thuringwethil’s mind lapsed into blankness; her being fell into some reduced level of consciousness, and thoughtless, she rested.

Chapter End Notes

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