Guardian

by Jack Porter

  So, once they dozed off for the night, all spooning together under the remaining blanket to keep warm, I took off into the forest, scouring the path ahead for the safest routes. We tried to follow the game, and at the same time, stick close to water sources. At this point, our journey had been aimless wandering. The island didn’t provide any more roads, nor did it guide us through intuition or walls built of vines and trees. We were directionless, but for the moment, it didn’t matter since we had each other.

  My eyesight hadn’t improved in very much comparison to the enhancements found in the rest of my body, so sometimes during my nighttime rambles, I blundered over fallen trees and a couple of steep drop offs, but that was okay. It never hurt. The way I saw it, nothing could really harm me anymore. Every cut I got healed to nothing, and no amount of falling seemed to break a single bone in my body. I hoped it also meant that I wouldn’t ever get sick or struck with fever from the cold like Hannah had.

  One setback that came from this new power was the amount of food I needed to consume to keep up with all the energy I now possessed. I grew used to hunting nearly every night.

  Thanks to these new abilities, I was now capable of taking down most prey with my bare hands. I’d eat nearly a quarter of a whole deer myself for dinner. Or several dozen fish when larger prey was scarce. With this quantity, I ended up building a separate larger fire for my food than the girls.

  One night, after finding the path I wanted to take the next morning, and grabbing several hares for the girls’ breakfast, I decided to head back to camp. It was the wee hours of the morning, so I was careful about where I put my feet.

  The last few nights, I had noticed something different as I roamed. Some restlessness in the forest that I couldn’t explain. But it felt sinister, even though it was faint and half the time I thought I’d imagined it. I was thinking about it when I went back to camp, and almost forgot to be especially careful.

  Goddesses help you if you accidentally woke Piper before she was ready.

  When I slipped back through the large trees to the smoldering embers of the campfire, I noticed Hannah was missing from the group.

  Shrugging it off as a late-night tree trip, I began putting the thick branches I’d gathered from the forest floor onto the fire. But when thirty minutes passed and she wasn’t back, I decided to follow her small footprints in the moist earth until they ran out onto a grassy section of land.

  Finally, I found her kneeling beside an enormous white boulder. She stroked it as if it were a friend. As I drew closer, I heard her mournful crying.

  “Hannah!” I called, distressed at the fact that she may be delirious with some sort of ailment. “What are you doing all the way out—whoa.”

  That boulder wasn’t a boulder. It was a skull. And it was big enough to fit a house in. Attached to it was a similarly proportioned skeleton, one that was overgrown with grasses and vines.

  My mouth dropped open. “What is that?”

  “I heard her calling me,” Hannah’s wavery voice said. “From my dreams, she called me to this place. She was so afraid. So alone. But I was too late.” Sobbing again, she curled something I couldn’t see in her hands tight to her chest.

  “Hannah, honey, you’re not making any sense. Who called you?”

  “This goddess.” Hannah placed her hand on the skull. “There was a crystal like yours around her neck, but it was all fragmented and dark.” She sniffled. “Well, almost all. This little bit had some white left, so I used all my strength to pull it out of the vines.”

  “The crystal called to you? Have you felt any warmth or strength from it?”

  “No.”

  Putting my fingers to the longer scruff of my beard, I concentrated. The first time the crystal had begun glowing for me was when Layla and I—

  My mouth went dry as I thought about the implications. This could be a piece to the crystal puzzle. My crystal hadn’t lit up since defeating the guardian, remaining white as if it was an ordinary crystal. Would it glow blue if Hannah and I had sex?

  At least, it was a perfectly reasonable question, if there was such a thing when one was talking about magic crystals and goddesses.

  No matter what, I wanted to try it. I wanted Hannah to have the same powers I did. Hell, I wanted all the girls to find crystals if it meant what I hoped. If the tapestry had been correct, there were plenty of them laying around this island, right? And the man and woman on the tapestry had both been wearing crystals during sex. So much had happened that I hadn’t really thought of it at the time, but now that I did, I wanted to smack myself upside the head for not realizing it.

  Maybe these crystals would protect the girls against whatever restlessness I felt roaming the forest. What if we found all the crystals, and all the temples? I had felt their siren call just after defeating the guardian, but not since. Suddenly, I felt as if we’d been wasting time, although not as I looked at Hannah’s beautiful body. There were parts of the last three weeks that had been intensely divine.

  But getting to the point of sex with Hannah was going to be a challenge. Especially with her smaller than usual body. “Hannah?”

  “Yes?” she asked.

  “I have a theory about how to unlock your crystal’s power for you. I don’t think you’ll hate it, but it is going to be incredibly risky.”

  Fifteen

  When I explained how intimacy with Layla had kickstarted my crystal’s blue-white glow, Hannah practically pounced on me, dragging off my clothes and hers like some fierce predator.

  She was so frantic for my body that I had to chuckle and pry her off of me.

  “We’re going to have to take this slow,” I warned her, letting my thoughts drift to the real danger of what we were about to do.

  “The hell we are. Do you even know how long I’ve wanted your d—”

  “Hannah, behave. Or this isn’t happening.”

  Hannah’s small body melted into me. Her pale green eyes went molten at my strict voice. The authoritative one that turned her into putty in my arms.

  “Let’s see if we can’t find a more appropriate spot,” I suggested, holding my arm out to Hannah like a gentleman instead of a barely clothed wild-man in the forest.

  Agreeing, Hannah took my hand in hers and walked deeper into the forest, leaving the giant goddess to her eternal slumber.

  Along the way, I plucked a couple of banana leaves and twisted the fibers into a crude, knotted necklace for Hannah’s crystal.

  She put it around her neck, and we both laughed as the crystal disappeared between her breasts.

  For a while we talked, but soon she became impatient, and began rubbing her hands over me whenever the dense vegetation forced us to walk close together.

  Morning’s first rays were shining on us when we stumbled on a bit of luck. A cave.

  Not only had we found a perfect place for our little experiment, we’d also landed ourselves in a choice new camp.

  With us being almost naked already and raring to go since Hannah couldn’t keep her hands to herself the entire hike, we wasted no time in shedding what clothes we did have and collapsing into each other’s arms.

  “This is something you have to do,” I said. “If I put any power into my body at all, I’ll hurt you.”

  Hannah winked, not trying in the slightest to be serious. She raked her hands and tongue up and down my shaft and replied, “Cowgirl position, gotcha. I’m pretty familiar with that one.”

  “I just bet you are, my southern belle.”

  “Oh my, you know how to flatter a woman,” she said, letting her accent go thick and syrupy.

  Then she lifted herself up and positioned her hips perfectly over me.

  I took a deep breath. It would take a lot of will on my part not to move a single muscle as she sat down on my cock.

  It was a slow process. One inch. Pause. Another, until she was so full of me that she was letting out a continuous string of moans. “So big, so fucking big.” Hannah clutched at the dark curling ha
ir on my chest.

  She was only halfway down, but it was as far as her body could allow her to go.

  Biting the knuckles of one hand so I wouldn’t lose my mind and fuck her to literal death, I used a finger and thumb with the other hand to steady my member for her so she could bob up and down.

  Hannah’s full pillowy breasts bounced in a beautiful rhythm as she fucked herself on my cock, and I couldn’t resist reaching out and grabbing one.

  She cried out as her face scrunched up in discomfort, and I snatched my hand back.

  Sweat trickled down her breasts with her efforts as she continued to ride me and moaned, “It's okay darlin’, I like a bit of pain with my man.”

  I was more careful this time, gently easing the large pads of my thumbs around her nipples until her body clenched impossibly tight around me.

  My crystal began to glow like before. And as if sensing my crystal near, Hannah’s crystal began to light up as well.

  “Oh god. This is amazing, Dexter. You’re so amazing. I can’t take it. I’m going to come—going to—ah!” Her eyes squeezed shut as she cried out in pleasure.

  Hannah’s pussy clenched so impossibly tight around me. And the stimulation of her body’s orgasm sent me spiraling over the edge.

  I was not gentle. I fucked her hard and fast to the sound of her screaming my name as she came again, then she collapsed into a limp satisfaction against my chest.

  “Oh god, Hannah,” I groaned, panting with my own pleasure, “that was the best... Hannah?”

  “Hurts,” she ground out.

  “Shit!” I gasped, only remembering that I needed to not do what I had just done. And then I wondered how I had done it at all. She shouldn’t have been able to handle me.

  “Grab the crystal,” I instructed, hoping to the goddesses that it worked its powers on her like mine had with me.

  She let out a sharp sob of pain as she slid her hand under her and clasped the glowing white light firmly in her hand. We both held our breath.

  A few minutes later, she sat up grinning from ear to ear. Already, she was taller in my lap. We almost saw eye to eye. And, she had settled down comfortably over my cock once again, this time taking me in fully without an apparent pain.

  “Wow. This is incredible!” she said. “I must have started to grow after my first orgasm, you know?”

  “How else would you have been able to handle me?” I asked, still feeling a twinge of guilt.

  “Don’t worry, Dexter, I haven’t felt this good in weeks! I feel like I could climb Everest. Or eat an entire Thanksgiving banquet by myself.”

  “It worked,” I let out a heavy breath. “I was so worried.”

  “Me too,” she answered, her voice going oddly quiet. “Maybe don’t do that with the other girls, okay?”

  “I swear.”

  We waited for another guardian to come out of the fading darkness, with Hannah sitting in my lap and breathing calm and slow against my chest. But it never did. I theorized that since the crystal once belonged to another, that guardian was already defeated. There had been no temple near the skeleton, after all.

  It is as good an idea as anything I’ve come up with, I thought.

  “It’s probably good that I didn’t have to defeat a monster,” Hannah said as we got up to put our discarded clothes back on. “I felt amazing for a few minutes, but it’s draining away already. Luckily, I get to keep my height. It’s like an amazing new world up here! Is this how you and Piper feel all the time?”

  “Pretty much.” I surveyed the grown woman under the glowing light of the rising red sun filtering through the mouth of the cave. Hannah’s height had indeed doubled. Her hips and breasts had grown in proportion to her new size too. “The feeling of energy shouldn’t wear off so quickly. Do you think the power works differently for the white crystals?”

  She thought for a moment and then shook her head. “You saw the goddess back there. Standing upright, she’d be the size of a small skyscraper. I think maybe my broken crystal is defective? Only this little piece had life left when I extracted it.” She plucked at her crystal, seeming a little let down. A moment later, she perked up again, smiling coyly. “I guess that just means we'll have to extend our extracurricular activities.”

  I chuckled at her eagerness. “Some other time. Right now, we should get back to camp. Feeling up for a run?”

  “Oh, I’m up for it. I was always high energy, and the effects of the crystal haven’t completely worn off.”

  “Let’s see if you can keep up then,” I challenged, and Hannah perked up at the task.

  Hand in hand, we sprinted back through the rainforest to tell the girls of our adventure.

  Along the way, though, Hannah and I were struck with a sense of panic and danger. We both slowed to a stop at the same time. “What is this doom I’m feeling, Dexter? A guardian?”

  “No, I didn’t sense a thing when the guardian attacked the first time. This is something new. And internal, in a way. It’s almost as if I’m back in the plane when it was crashing.”

  “Yeah, me too. Scary,” she whispered. “Oh, but it’s growing faint again.”

  “I can still feel it. It may not be touching your crystal as deeply.” I rubbed my chest as if I could wipe away the feeling of anxiety deep under my breastbone. “Do you sense the other crystals too?”

  “Yes, but not like I sensed this one. It’s like their voices are being echoed off of some distant cliff.”

  I nodded. “That’s what it is like for me. I think the dark feeling is fading for me too. It must have moved on. Whatever it was, let’s hope it doesn’t decide to pay us a visit anytime soon.”

  Hannah nodded, and instead of running, we elected to walk the rest of the way, keeping all our senses on high alert for attack.

  Piper and Layla were awake and just starting to look for us when we reached the campfire. Megan was still fast asleep, looking like she didn’t have a care in the world, with her hair frizzing around her face without any product to keep it flat and bit of drool trailing out of her mouth. I found I liked that vulnerability. She tried so hard to look perfect every waking second of the day. I suspected her hair was one of the reasons she constantly jumped into the river. Maybe she didn’t want me seeing how she really looked in the morning.

  I’d have to explain to her how beautiful she was without all the extra. She had a natural beauty few possessed.

  Upon seeing Hannah with a crystal, Piper and Layla made loud gasps. Megan bolted upright and began patting her hair down immediately, confirming my suspicions. However, she froze like a fainting goat before it fell over upon seeing Hannah’s size, slightly taller than even Piper.

  “Where’d you get that?” Layla demanded. I detected a cool edge to her voice.

  Hannah talked a mile a minute, as if she were hyped up on the world’s strongest coffee, telling them about the goddess and that we figured out how sex activates the crystals.

  “Do you think you guys will get to be the size of Hannah’s deceased goddess?” Piper asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I don’t think I grew this time.”

  Megan eyed me up and down. “But you did! Only a little, though. Probably a good thing because if we can squeeze you inside us, we still have a chance of getting our own crystals and becoming superhuman like you guys,” Megan stated, hazel eyes glittering with enthusiasm.

  “I wonder,” I said, drawing out my words to consider them properly, “if I don’t orgasm, I’ll stay more or less the same as before? Hannah’s crystal only reacted when mine glowed first. I think the other crystals must draw power from mine.”

  Piper’s beautiful dark face screwed up as she shuffled to her feet from under the blanket and tried to string the pieces together. “Let me get this straight. The blue crystal gives you the power of a god permanently, it seems, and the white crystals take power from your crystal to give us the power of goddesses, but only if a crystal has called to us individually, and only if we ride your cock while
wearing it?”

  “That’s about the gist of it,” I said, rocking back on my heels. “I wonder if I should have orgasmed at all, that if I hadn’t, would I have grown? Because otherwise, it’s going to be impossible to activate any more crystals before too long.”

  No one had an answer, but I decided that the problem just needed some experimenting. My theory felt sound, although the tapestry and my subsequent knowledge hadn’t exactly confirmed anything to me in this regard.

  “This is a really weird island,” Layla sighed. “I guess we just need to give into it. What will be will be.”

  We all nodded and laughed.

  The fire was still going, so I shuffled around cooking some of the meat from my kill last night and serving us all breakfast. After we had finished eating, I stomped out the fire with my foot and the girls gathered what little we owned.

  Suddenly, Layla perked up as Hannah led the way. “I wonder, does it count if we finish you off with our mouths after? I mean, it’s not fair to have you all hot and bothered and not be able to finish the job.”

  Grinning, I shuffled the deer carcass over my shoulder and said, “There’s only one way to find out.”

  The girls and I spent the next few days at the cave, scouring the area for more crystals in a widening circle.

  Hannah and I were able to have sex several times. It was difficult to hold off my own pleasure so she could get her power, but I was more than happy to do so. Each time she grew a little more, and her power stayed for a little longer than before. Now she was eye level with me. I didn’t have to orgasm for her to continue growing, and I didn’t grow anymore.

  And each time, that feeling of doom arose to greet us for a longer, more intense, period of time.

  “Should we stop?” Hannah asked after the last heart-racing rendezvous in the trees outside the cave. “It was nearly an hour this time. It felt so close. Like it was staring at us from a distant hilltop.”

  I pursed my lips in thought. “I think that would be a good idea. Just until we figure out what it is and what it wants.”

  “That’s just as well,” she said. “I think I’m having an, I don’t know, an allergic reaction to something.”