Over hill, over dale,
Through bush, through briar,
Over park, over pale,
Through flood, through fire…
…Annette ran like fuck.
Her muscles burned from hill-climbing, her lungs from dale-traversing and pale-hurdling. Her ash-blond hair had snagged on bushes. Briars had torn her gown and fires had singed it. Drenched by floods the cobwebbed fabric clung to her slender frame. She was scratched and scorched and foot-sore, yet the pursuit would not relent. Each tumble to the forest floor stained her costume further (after all Miss Ramsey’s work!), each clamber to her feet rendered her more weary.
Despairing that she could outrun them, she flung her lissom self over a verge with all the elfin spryness she could muster. Limbs flailing, she spilled down the bank of spongy moss and tangling ivy strands, coming to panting rest in a pond’s murky shallows.
Retreat into shadow was her aim, but the endpoint of her sprawling descent provided scant cover. As Annette peered upwards over her shoulder, the mess to which the chase had reduced her was illuminated harshly–by the moon, but not that prying orb alone.
“What, jealous nymph!” The voice was rich and velvet, soaked in scorn, yet causing the delta between the fairy’s thighs to liquify. She could but stare, captivated, as proud Titania strode to the hollow’s lip and towered there, flanked by a coterie of chittering woodland sprites. The Queen was draped in a translucent gauze spun with gold thread. Her hair, crowned with wildflowers, flowed over her shoulders in a rose-gold cascade. She looked majestic (small wonder Ms Jenkins had cast Godiva Chaplin in the role), her face sneering amusement at the fairy’s crumpled fate.
Ill met by moonlight… Annette thought. No shit!
“Think’st thou could escape me, little thief?” The Queen’s sylvan minions thrilled to her regal tone. “Plann’st thou to usurp my fairy throne?”
God, she’s hot. She’s so damn Shakespearian! Annette marvelled in her mud-slimed plight, yet not one word of retort could she croak.
“Speak!” Titania demanded, her queenly visage darkening. “Answer me, slatternly imp!”
“It was only the final night,” Annette managed.
“What… Dar’st thou to defend thy treachery?” Titania’s wrath grew like massing thunderclouds.
“You had flu. Ms Jenkins said you were too poorly to…”
“Too sick you say, to rule these ferny glades?
“To spar and flirt with my beloved Oberon?
“To ride the donkey-man within my bower?”
She’s improvising pentameters! Annette thought, crushing fiercely, despite her terror. And such amazing delivery!
“Think’st thou I’d yield my power to such as thee?” the Queen pursued. “Thou brat, thou gnome, thou sluttish… understudy!”
“You’d lost your voice,” Annette ventured, scarcely finding hers. “And I’d learnt all the…”
“Silence!” Titania achieved full thunderclap (no frantic Lemsip-drinking required), and her fairy troop cowered, giggling. “Peaseblossom was thy name, and thus it stays.
“Yet…” She paused, milking the moment’s drama. “…I have other plans for thee, my love.”
She smiled, radiating beauty and malice. Annette’s little fists clenched in the sludge, her nipples bristling against what remained of her dress.
“But since thou lov’st to strut upon the stage,” the Queen proclaimed,
“And crave the leering worship of a crowd…”
Annette gulped and felt a world away from the Sandown Academy studio theatre.
“Then nymph shalt thou provide us all a show.”
Much snickering issued from Titania’s retinue.
“Behold–thy fellow players, one and all.”
Shadow criss-crossed Annette. She stared around, lips widening into a scarlet O. The beasts had tracked her down–all six of them.
“I claimed this puckish magic for myself,” Titania informed her.
“Caused all these ‘hempen homespuns’ to transform.”
Transform they had, Nick Bottom et al, though none was fully ‘beast’. They loomed in moonlit silhouette above her, a sculpted sextet, pure brawny youthful manhood with one change. A pair of bristling ass’s ears adorned each head. Make that, arguably, two changes. Each naked youth sported a donkey-sized appendage at the groin. Six staggering protuberances swayed above Annette and glistened at the tip when caught in moonlight.
The fairy gasped.
The playwright’s ‘rude mechanicals’ had been recast, she somehow knew, with members of the Sandown First XV. Great hulking rugby forwards, more used to pumping weights than running lines. Annette had watched them on the pitch mud-smeared and braying. She’d rolled her eyes back then at all their vapid man-boy raillery. Tonight she grovelled in the dirt as they closed in, till their extensions hovered in a mighty phalanx over her.
“Now service thou these monsters as I watch,” Titania commanded, and her one-time fairy servant quailed.
“With hands and mouth and all at thy disposal.
“Deny not thine own wanton fantasy.”
“My fantasy?”
“Thine own. Embrace what thou hast nightly dreamt of.”
Then Annette’s understanding dawned. This whole reality–from miry squelch beneath to armoury of phalluses above–was spun from thread as frail as that which formed her largely shredded gown. She sensed her dream-forest fraying at its edges. One single thought would sunder it entirely–release her from Titania’s gorgeous cruelty and these enchanted creatures’ bestial lust. To bedside lamp and books and secret stash of sex-toys. To sweaty sheets and sore frustration, that clammy solstice night.
Annette chose soreness of another kind.
“Yes, my Queen,” she said, cunt pulsing as she wrapped her hands around two stout and oozing limbs, their solidity reaffirming that whole phantom world’s existence.
“Take her.” Godiva–as Titania. Cold and beautiful, that voice in Annette’s ears, as the first cock, throbbing and salty, filled her fairy mouth. She heard the gleeful entourage as well–likewise recast, she realised, the hot shame surging, with all her sixth-form peers. They'd watch the slavering man-beasts crowd around to rip the fairy-fabric from her body and claim her tenderness with horny hands.
“Stop her so tight that no air may escape,” the Queen commanded.
Godiva Chaplin, you bitch, Annette thought vaguely… as she yielded herself completely to her Dream.
