Between the Ridge and the River
Copyright© 2025 by Dilbert Jazz
Part III – The Bargain and the Rituals
Romance Sex Story: Part III – The Bargain and the Rituals - Clarita owes the mountain her seventh daughter’s seventh daughter. Michelle breaks every salt line she finds. Hate becomes hunger, hunger becomes rope and brand and fist. To keep the witch in the walls fed, they pay with blood, welts, hot wax, and shattering squirt under the Mothman’s red eyes. Love here is a debt paid in screams and perfect surrender. The ridge claimed them. They claimed each other harder.
Caution: This Romance Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Fa/Fa Mult Consensual Reluctant Romantic Lesbian Fiction Horror Paranormal Ghost Magic Were animal Demons BDSM DomSub MaleDom FemaleDom Humiliation Light Bond Rough Sadistic Spanking Torture Anal Sex Analingus Exhibitionism Fisting Oral Sex Sex Toys Spitting Squirting Voyeurism Water Sports Body Modification Menstrual Play Needles Public Sex Caution Slow Violence
(When Love Became Covenant)
Late February 2024 – The Pact
Three nights after the burning foot, the mountain gave them no choice.
Snow still lay axle-deep. The creek was a sheet of black glass. The Witch paced the rafters like a big cat that had tasted blood and now wanted the whole deer.
Clarita had not slept since carrying Michelle home. She kept the Fire roaring and the poker always within reach, eyes ringed bruise-purple. Michelle’s blistered foot was wrapped in comfrey and honey, but every time she closed her eyes, she felt a phantom rope around her wrists and woke gasping.
On the third night, the temperature inside the cabin plummeted so hard that the water bucket froze solid. Every candle snuffed at once. The Witch spoke from every corner at once, voice sweet as rot:
“Give me what I want willingly, or I’ll take it screaming.”
Clarita stood between Michelle and the dark, shotgun in one hand, poker in the other. Michelle rose from the cot, limping, and laid a trembling hand on Clarita’s arm.
“We end this tonight,” she said. “Our way.”
They worked by firelight and the green glow of the Witch’s amused eyes in the rafters.
Clarita poured a circle of corn whiskey thick as blood around the iron bedstead. She scattered graveyard dirt from Lora Lee’s grave and seven drops of their mingled blood (taken from the exact spot where Michelle’s palm had bled months ago, now healed into a pale scar). Every toy they owned was laid out like communion on a cedar chest: ropes, switches, beeswax candles, the chestnut dildo, the branding iron shaped like a crescent moon cradling a seven-pointed star.
Michelle stripped first. Clarita followed, movements slow and reverent, as if they were already in church.
When they were both naked, skin goose-bumped and trembling, Clarita took the longest rope (hand-twisted hemp boiled in belladonna, moonshine, and their own hair) and bound Michelle’s wrists behind her back. She tied the knots slowly, deliberately, each cinch a vow.
Then she looked straight into the dark where the Witch waited and spoke the words her mamaw had whispered over faithless lovers and dying livestock alike:
“You want suffering? You’ll have it. You want screams? You’ll drink them from us willingly. But you ride the pain, never the body. The body belongs to me. The heart belongs to her. Do we have a bargain?”
Every candle flared green. The rafters creaked like a woman stretching after a long sleep. The temperature rose twenty degrees in a heartbeat. Something ancient purred (low, satisfied, ravenous) and settled into the walls like a cat curling up by the Fire.
The rituals began that night and never truly ended. They became the rhythm of their days, the calendar by which they marked seasons, the language in which they said I love you when words were too small.
The Binding of the Three Knots
(Every new moon, when the sky is a bowl of black water and the stars refuse to look)
They walk the half-mile trail barefoot, soles numb on frozen leaf mold, breath pluming white in the absolute dark. The lightning-split chestnut oak waits at the head of the hollow: dead since the Civil War, yet still upright, bark hanging in long, wet ribbons that smell of tannin, old blood, and something metallic that makes the back of the tongue ache. Sap still bleeds from the seven axe scars Clarita keeps fresh, slow and amber, clotting in the cold like half-dried honey.
Michelle strips first. Clarita follows. No words. Words are for daylight.
Three ropes lie coiled on a flat stone like sleeping adders:
Pokeberry blood-red, boiled until the dye stinks of fermented fruit rot, sharp enough to sting eyes.
Black walnut hull and 180-proof moonshine, dripping brown liquor that burns like acid on bare skin.
Bone-pale, undyed, fibrous as dried sinew, still smelling faintly of the graveyard dirt it was buried in for one complete turning of the moon.
Michelle steps forward and places her chest against the trunk. The bark is jagged, frozen, greedy. It bites into her breasts immediately, splinters pricking nipples until they bead with tiny drops of blood that freeze almost instantly. Sap kisses the wounds and hardens into sticky amber scabs that will crack and bleed again with every breath.
Clarita begins.
First rope: pokeberry-red. She drags it across Michelle’s throat first (slow, savoring the way the fibers rasp like a cat’s tongue over windpipe). Then around the wrists, yanking them high against the trunk until the knots sink to marrow. Veins collapse. Fingers go numb, then explode with white-hot pins-and-needles Fire. Michelle’s shoulders scream; her cunt answers with a sudden, obscene clench that forces a thick rope of slick to slide down her inner thigh and spatter the frozen leaves.
Second rope: black walnut and moonshine. Still dripping. Clarita cinches it low around Michelle’s hips, pulls it viciously between her legs so the coarse hemp splits swollen labia like a dull blade. It sits directly against her clit (engorged, hypersensitive from a day spent edged and denied). One involuntary twitch and the rope saws raw nerves; Michelle’s knees buckle, a guttural sound tearing from her throat as fresh slick soaks the hemp dark.
Third rope: bone-pale. It lashes Michelle’s torso flush to the tree. Bark embeds deeper in her breasts; sap glues itself to nipples and hardens into torture. Every inhale drags splintered wood across raw flesh; every exhale tastes of her own blood where she’s bitten her tongue to stay quiet.
Clarita steps back. The night is so cold that the air itself seems to bite.
She cuts a switch from the same lightning-blessed tree (green wood, still bleeding pale sap that smells of ozone and summer storms). She tests it once: the whistle ends in a wet crack across Michelle’s ass that splits skin instantly. Pain detonates outward like white phosphorus. Ten strokes later, the flesh is a raised lattice of welts, blood beading in perfect lines, cooling to tacky trails that attract gnats even in winter (the Witch sends them, little black messengers that drink greedily).
Clarita drops to her knees in the frozen muck. The cold burns her skin like dry ice. She pries Michelle’s welted cheeks apart with thumbs that leave fresh bruises. Spits (once, deliberately, thick, and hot) directly onto Michelle’s asshole. The saliva lands scalding, then freezes almost instantly. Another glob follows, dripping slowly and obscenely down to the rope splitting her cunt.
Her tongue is Fire after the ice: flat, searing, rasping over welts like wet sand on sunburn. She circles the rim until muscle yields with a slick pop, then drives lower, sucking swollen folds into her mouth with vacuum force. Three fingers slam in without warning (knuckles grinding walls stretched to tearing). She curls viciously, thumb grinding the soaked rope against Michelle’s trapped clit.
Michelle’s world narrows to one point of white-hot overload.
Orgasm rips through like disembowelment: cunt contracting so hard it cramps, a torrent of squirt erupting in scalding arcs that splash Clarita’s face, soak her hair, hiss into the freezing mud in steaming puddles. The scent (sex, blood, moonshine, sap, grave apples) is so thick that Michelle gags on it.
Clarita does not let her breathe. She rises, mouth shining, and kisses Michelle hard (sharing the taste of her own destruction). Michelle sobs into the kiss, tasting copper, wintergreen, and the faint sweetness of Clarita’s tears.
In the branches above, unseen, the Witch drinks the pain like moonshine (slow, savoring, purring so deep the tree itself vibrates).
They stay tied until the first pale hint of dawn creeps over the ridge, until the ropes have to be cut away because circulation is gone and fingers are blue. Michelle’s body is a map of the night: welts like topographical lines, sap-crusted breasts, cunt swollen shut from the rope’s cruel kiss, thighs streaked with dried blood and squirt and frozen tears.
Clarita carries her home the same way she did the night of the burning foot (fireman-style, Michelle’s face buried in her neck, breathing her in like oxygen). The mountain exhales across the hollow, satisfied.
Another new moon paid in full. Another month, the Witch sleeps quietly and fat. Another knot in the rope that will never, ever come undone.
The Graveyard Offering
(Once a year, on the night the veil is thinnest: Samhain, when the dead walk easily and the living had better pay their respects)
The date shifts with the old calendar (never the neat October 31 the flatlanders celebrate, but the true cross-quarter night when the frost first turns hard and the beansidhe screams down every hollow like a warning).
They wait for the signs:
the first whippoorwill that sings after dark (a death omen),
the night the creek runs backward for seven minutes,
the evening the Mothman’s red eyes appear low over the ridge, close enough to count the veins.
When all three align, they know it is time.
They walk the deer trail behind the cabin at dusk, barefoot again, carrying only what is required:
A quart mason jar of applejack so raw it strips paint.
Seven beeswax candles made from hives that fed on coffin flowers and graveyard yarrow.
A bowl of cornbread soaked in honey and menstrual blood (one cycle from each of them, saved all year).
Four iron survey stakes, cold from sitting in the creek all day.
The razor-strop collar and chain leash.
A single scarlet candle the length of a forearm, thick as a wrist, poured while they fucked on Lora Lee’s grave the previous summer.
The old family cemetery is half-swallowed by laurel and time. Headstones lean like drunks; some are only fieldstones scratched with initials and death dates from before the Civil War. The ground is uneven, hummocked with unmarked graves and the soft give of coffin rot.
Michelle wears nothing but the collar (leather warm from her throat, buckle worn smooth by generations of discipline). Clarita leads her on the chain leash, iron links clinking cold against Michelle’s bare breasts with every step. The metal bites nipples already peaked from frost and anticipation.
They stop between two graves:
Great-grandmaw Lora Lee, 1847–1919, carved with a crude pentagram and the words SHE DANCED WITH THE DEVIL AND WON.
Uncle Jonah, 1888–1922, stone blank except for a single deep gouge where his name was chiseled out the night he vanished.
Clarita drives the four iron stakes deep (the ground resists, then yields with a wet, sucking sigh, as if the Earth itself is reluctant to give them up). Michelle is staked spread-eagled on her back, wrists, and ankles stretched until joints pop and every muscle screams. The soil is ice against her shoulder blades; worms and coffin beetles scatter from the disturbance.
Clarita lights the seven candles and places them at the cardinal points and the three crossroads of the soul. Green flame (unnatural, cold) rises straight up despite the wind.
She pours the applejack first (slow, deliberate, starting at Michelle’s throat and letting it run in rivulets down between her breasts, over the soft bowl of her belly, pooling in her navel before spilling lower). When the liquor reaches Michelle’s cunt (already raw and swollen from a day of denial and the walk through briars), it burns like molten silver. The alcohol sears split skin, bubbles on her clit, floods her entrance until Michelle arches off the ground with a guttural scream that echoes off the ridges and comes back layered with other voices.
Clarita drinks where the applejack pools (lapping it from Michelle’s cunt like a wolf at a spring, tongue dragging through every fold, teeth nipping clit until fresh blood beads and mixes with the liquor). Michelle’s hips try to levitate; the stakes hold her mercilessly open.
Then the coffin-wax candle.
Clarita lights it from Lora Lee’s green flame. The wax is scarlet, scented with graveyard yarrow and something darker (myrrh, blood, the inside of a coffin lid). She holds it high and lets the first drop fall on Michelle’s left breast.
It hits like a molten needle. Skin sizzles. Michelle’s back bows so hard the stakes creak. Clarita paints runes with the wax (protection, possession, devotion) across the collarbones, the belly, the soft inner thighs, already trembling. Each drop is a brand without iron. By the time the candle is half spent, Michelle’s torso is a topography of hardened scarlet peaks and valleys, every breath cracking the wax and reopening the burns beneath.
Clarita sets the candle upright in the dirt between Michelle’s spread legs (so close the flame kisses her swollen cunt lips with every gust). Then she coats her hand (slow, deliberate) in the applejack that has pooled in Michelle’s entrance.
She fists her.
Starts with two fingers, then three, then four (twisting, scissoring, stretching). The fifth folds in with a wet, obscene pop. Michelle’s cunt resists, then yields with a sensation like being turned inside out. Clarita’s wrist disappears into the bracelet of old brand scars. She curls her fist, knuckles grinding against Michelle’s cervix until Michelle feels her guts shift and rearrange around the invasion.
The pain is beyond language (pleasure and torment braided so tight they are the same thing). Michelle’s scream is animal, continuous, echoing off the headstones and drawing shadows that lengthen and lean in like spectators.
Clarita rotates her fist slowly, then faster, then punches shallow and deep in a rhythm older than the graves themselves. Michelle’s orgasm builds like a storm front (pressure behind her pubic bone swelling until it feels like her bladder will burst). When it breaks, it is a gutting: cunt convulsing around Clarita’s wrist in violent spasms, a torrent of squirt exploding in forceful, steaming arcs that drench Clarita’s arm to the elbow, splash the headstones, and soak the grave dirt until it steams in the moonlight like the Earth itself is coming.
The dead lean closer. Lora Lee’s stone warms to the touch. Jonah’s blank marker weeps a single drop of something darker than water.
Clarita withdraws her fist slowly (Michelle’s cunt clinging, reluctant to let go), then licks her clean (tongue gentle now, reverent, gathering every trace of applejack, wax, blood, and release).
They leave the cornbread and honey on Lora Lee’s stone. By morning, it is always gone (crumbs scattered as someone ate fast and greedily).
They walk home in silence, Michelle leaning heavily on Clarita’s arm, thighs trembling, cunt throbbing with every step. Behind them, the green flames gutter out one by one.
The veil seals shut until next year. The Witch sleeps with music, belly full of the richest pain two living women can offer.
And the mountain remembers another payment made in full.
The Telling of the Sins
(Quiet nights by the hearth when the world is too heavy and words are too small)
These are not the nights of spectacle. No ropes, no iron, no graveyard dirt. Only firelight, the smell of woodsmoke and coffee, and the soft creak of the old rocking chair that belonged to Clarita’s mamaw.
They come to it when one of them (or both) has carried something too long.
Sometimes it is Michelle, haunted by the city ghosts she never quite buried: the girlfriend she let take the fall for drugs that were hers, the mother she robbed in her last lucid hour, the way she used to pray Clarita would leave so she wouldn’t have to admit how much she needed her.
Sometimes it is Clarita, carrying the weight of every winter she spent alone, the father who painted the kitchen ceiling with his brains, the years she told herself love was a debt the mountain continuously collects with interest, and she was better off bankrupt.
On those nights, the cabin is quiet except for the pop of apple wood in the stove and the low moan of wind around the eaves. The Witch sleeps in the walls, curled like a sated cat, because she knows this pain is the sweetest of all (the kind that is given freely, without spectacle, just two women and the truth).
Clarita sits in the rocker, legs spread, wearing nothing but an old flannel shirt open down the front. Michelle stands before her, naked, trembling (not from cold, but from the terrible freedom of being seen).
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