You feel your heart beat, your face close against the lamia’s, her scaly tail in a squeezing embrace behind your head and over your shoulders. You can’t tell if you’re gaining trust towards her or desire. She may be too close. You start to pull out of her grasp but stop. Conflicted though you are, you take a chance instead.
“O . . . Oh . . .” You try to say Okay, and tell the lamia you’ll trust her, but you get stuck on the first syllable as rings of radiant colors emerge from her alluring eyes and ripple out. A warning thought emerges, but the colors splash over it and it’s hard to grasp.
“That’s right, Human.” The lamia gives you a beaming smile as she looks at you (that warning thought shakes in your head but is washed away by the lamia’s eyes). “You can trust in me. It’s so easy to trust in me.”
She hugs her arms around you, holding you close, squeezing her tail tighter around your neck like a binding pillow. You heat up from the proximity of her soft, stroking body. Every striking color from her eyes tells you that, yes, you can trust her.
“All you have to do to effortlessly trust me,” she says, her tail sliding around to form another loop over your shoulders, “is look at me.” The warning thought shouts at you, but the vivid colors drowns it out.
You shiver as her gentle tail coils further down you, holding down your arms, and she pats your dizzy head, interlocking the fingers of her other hand with your own. The way she curls about you is so sweet, so easy to trust. You want to let her guide you.
“That’s right, just look at me,” she says. “You trust me enough to let me look at you, of course.”
The warning thought finally gets through: these are the exact things you avoided doing when you met her. This thought is snuffed out as the colors shimmer in your mind, shaking away all those loose, useless thoughts. Her gaze tells you that as long as you trust her, you don’t need to think. You can trust her, which means you can stare at her, and the longer you stare at her, the less you can or need to think.
“There you go, Human,” the lamia says, stroking your face with the end of her scaly tail. “You’re doing so well with trusting me, keep staring into my eyes and let the colors guide you, let me guide you down, deep, slower, sleepy.”
Your eyes feel like holes for the colors to seep into. The jungle falls away, hypnotic colors flowing over your sight, the sounds fading as only the lamia’s melodious voice slithers into your ears. Your head spins, and you feel loopy; your body goes slack, held up by the lamia’s tail coiling further down your body, binding your arms as she squeezes down your chest and torso, cool scales massaging your back.
“Now then,” the lamia says, “you say you never want to ever leave this place, is that right?” She nods her head, and you nod along, your gaze ensnared to her eyes. She smirks, petting your head. “And you want my help to do that, right?” She nods your head with her tail around you; your gaze shifts to stay focused on her eyes and you grow dizzy.
You’re not really sure what you want right now. You want whatever she says you want. You want to stare into her eyes, relax in her growing tail hug. You don’t even really remember what the jungle is right now, there’s only the lamia. You want to stay with the lamia. That sounds close enough. You just want to sink with these scales and drown in these pretty colors . . .
“I can certainly help you out,” the lamia says, giving your face a squeeze, followed by the rest of your body. She wraps around your hips, holding most of your body tight in her grasp as she holds most of your mind in her grasp. “But you will have to follow what I tell you precisely.”
She squeezes under your chin further, pushing your face into a loose smile. The end of her tail she slithers atop your head to curl through your hair, while her soft hands she squeezes into your puffed, smiling cheeks.
“For me to be able to help you stay here,” she says in a syrupy-sweet voice, “you will have to obey me.” She whispers, “You must obey every command, every word I tell you. I will only be able to help you if you are perfectly obedient to every instruction I give.” She squeezes tighter, you grin wider. You understand. You obey. You want to obey. “In fact”—she leans closer, her whisper deeper, like hot tea to her previously syrupy voice—“it would be easiest for me to help you if you simply . . . have no thoughts but mine.”
No thoughts.
No thoughts but her.
Your smile stretches across your face and eyes widen to absorb as much of her enchanting colors as possible. You have no need for your own thoughts anymore. All you need to do is trust in the lamia, obey her words, and everything will be fine. Her tail slides around you, the loops growing thicker as the end of her tail forms small coils atop your head.
“Trust in me,” she croons, “just in me . . .” She gives you a peck on the lips. “Obey me . . . yes, only me.” She kisses you, a deep, thought-melting kiss sending waves of shivering pleasure through your body and back into your mind, intensifying the colors pulsating through your thoughts.
When she pulls away you rise off the tree, the end of her tail wrapping around a higher branch to suspend you in her coils. Your legs dangle above the branch, but after a moment she binds your legs tight in her soft, thick tail, rubbing her scales in loops along your bare skin. You stare blankly through the colors in your mind to nowhere, grinning at the hypnotic pleasure soaking your mind. It’s intensified by her scaly massage; you become a limp, obedient plaything for your mistress lamia.
“Hang around a while,” the lamia says. She laughs and strokes your face. “You’ll never have to be sad and lonely again, my pet. No one will ever make you leave the jungle, because it will be only us, forever, and I’ll never let you leave the jungle.” She smooches you. “I’ll never let you leave me.”
In the end, was it a good idea to trust the lamia? You kept resisting her hypnotic advances before, but perhaps you were wrong to do so. Perhaps this truly is for the best.
Duth Olec's Cuckoo Cosmos 