The Chimaera

Jennifer Posada 

This is a pre-released chapter from my upcoming book, The Return of the Sexual Priestess.  If you fall in love with this and would like to read many other stories like it, you can find out more about the book and ways you can support me finishing it soon here…

The Chimaera

I gazed at the desert, hot bed of honeyed sand, and soaked up its heat as my tail slid across it.  Eyes of the hawk, I called within me and my vision extended and focused further.  Still no living thing to be seen that I could commune with as I needed to.

As I stretch scales slide down my back to accommodate the movement and protect me from the searing heat, and then flicker back to light, and became skin again when I cooled.  I am feathered at a moment’s notice…snakeskin, fin.

I bent to desert scrub and it leaned toward my touch.  A caress I knew and loved, but also which could not come close to quenching me.  I remembered the last time I was close to quenched, in the pool of the waterfall in another time and place.  The man was bathing there and by some miracle he recognized me…aquiline, gazelle.  He knew I was a creature, and that if I would allow him near me that it would be a rare experience to be treasured above all else.  The healing of a thousand years, or even lifetimes.  That he would be forever transformed.  Did his mother teach him to see?  Was he born that way?  It didn’t matter.  He could see me.  I allowed my wings to emerge and it was as if he expected them.  I wrapped them around him and he dissolved into me and met me, no reserve.  He opened like a flower and I gave him everything, and what came back to me was…the miracle I am capable of, and almost never get to share.  Forces like thunder moved through us silently, touching us like soft blades of grass and leaving everything changed.

Everything for miles and miles.

That experience had lasted me a long while, and even now was a source of the nourishment, as were all my experiences of the quenching.  But like the touch of the scrub the memories didn’t equal the fire that burned in me.  They didn’t make the howling hunger truly abate.  I had long come to know this hunger, and to do what I could in each moment to make it into song.  To actually howl it into the night, and creatures far and wide would always respond.  And I was not alone.

But there were no other creatures left like me.

I was the one who stayed.

Whenever humans would come I took one form, the human one.  But when none were there to see I was not just more than one creature at a time…I was in near constant flux, shapeshifting as I moved moment to moment, becoming whatever creature gave me the traits the moment most called for, and simply the ones that brought me the most pleasure.  Pleasure was a constant, even with the howling hunger.  Pleasure was my source and my direction.  My purpose and my channel for my gifts.  And if I needed to, and form became too painful, I could become the wind.

Pain was a newer phenomenon for me.  Some of it could become pleasure, if the right circumstances were there.  But those circumstances had become harder and harder to find.  Still, always, there were flowers.  Always there were birds.  And I could be either.

I just needed more of the one thing that fed me like nothing else.  The sexual connection with another creature.  Not just any creature, and not just any sexual connection.  The Pure.  The Pure came from love and had no limits.  The Pure was a force beyond comparison.  The Pure only happened if you had a body, even if it were a blur of more than one creature.  What creature you were didn’t matter.  The Pure was what bees felt climbing into flowers and drinking nectar.  But because I was a shapeshifter, part human, I needed to feel it with another like me.  They need not be a shapeshifter, since there were none though they always knew the Pure, they could be human but a human who could take the force I bring is rare.  I had spent what would be a whole lifetime to a full human looking for one like the man in the pool by the waterfall.

If I allowed myself to remember, yes, how he came to me open…I could feel the charge return and send the current through my nerves…illuminating my insides again and carrying me across the sacred threshold where form is made and transformed.  A shimmer of it moves up my spine and I focus my eyes on the horizon again.

There will be no meeting here.

I must dream the new location where one will wait for me.  I must let time and space morph again if needed, to find the passageway.  I cannot survive without this quenching.  Until I have come till I cannot.  I can wait, but not forever.  Without it I will perish.

Just then, unbidden yet my body knew, the blood came and I felt it even more as it released from inside of me, blessed, sacred, a rush of pleasure with its movement.  I knew my blood coming would bring the gift of allowing me to travel time and space.  I fell to my knees in humble gratitude for the miracle of my body, for even with all my non-physical magic, nothing compared to it.

I bled on the earth, and thought of the place I would go.  I opened to wherever I needed to be drawn to meet an other.  An other who could meet me.  I slipped between worlds and for a moment I disappeared.  There was no form of me, only my blood on the ground.

In the place between worlds I re-tethered and created the magnet for the energy by calling forth another memory.  The memory of the nymph woman.  Another who had met me.  She was not full shapeshifter like me anymore, but a nymph who had taken human form could still shapeshift within, and we could still meet there.  She, too, was met by me.  She, too, like the man at the waterfall had known me right away.  She, too, was quenched to carry her through what human trials may come for her, and remind her of who she really was in a way nothing else could.

In that moment between worlds, I remembered the thrill in my being when she first became tree bark and I became sap.

And we kissed.

There aren’t words for the ancient sea bed that rose.

The lust pulled me to its resonance.  I was shown a window in a tall tower.  I was shown that I should come to the window as a bird every morning and sing, until the one who was within would know me.  I was told to tell her the ancient stories, without words, so she would begin to remember.

I was told I would free this captive, and she would be queen.  Her reign would be that of the Sexual Priestess.  The last of her kind in her time, as I was the last of mine.  Though she would be the last, her impact would ripple down through generations, until more of her kind would return.  I was shown that I would free her not with breaking lock or finding key, but with showing her the quenching, and who she was when she had known it.

I was shown that I would no longer live in this world after this…keeping to the forests as a wild thing I would live as long as I could without the quenching and then have my last breath as a creature, shapeshifting into the between-worlds until the time to return to a body came again.  Lingering in the realms of every quenching I had ever known.  And then, when I returned, I would shapeshift only within like the nymph woman.  But I would never forget.  I could never not be shapeshifter, whether I could become a bird at will or not.  That was not the most important part of being a shapeshifter at all.  To be a shapeshifter was to be able to keep my essence and sense of self while still mobilizing an incredible amount of energy to transform.  To be a shapeshifter was to be a force of nature.  Not just to touch it, or move it through.  But to be it.  And to be this as a human was the greatest challenge, and perhaps the greatest gift, of all.

I landed as a bird at her window, and she became happy when I sang.  I returned every day, at sunset, until one day she said, “I wish you would become human and talk to me, and touch me.”
So I did.  Not a creature, not many forms.  Human like her.  She was both surprised and at once it was as if she had known me all along, from the first time I sang from her window.

When I reached her she was wet for me already.  Not having known who I was, or what was to come.  Her body knew.

She spent fevered nights waiting for me.

And when I slid my finger into her so slowly every center of her body lit up and she came with the force of a storm unleashed.  She lay there in the quenching, making universes.  Knowing who she was, finally, completely.

I came back and did it again and again, raising her threshold for orgasms until she could take all of me.  Then I kissed her goodbye and with tears in our eyes we thanked each other, and came again.

She would spend the rest of her life searching kingdoms for the ones who could make her feel what the chimera who came to her window made her feel.   (Looking for a creature who could handle her force.)

And that search would save worlds.