We fit strangely, my paramour and I.

Paramour. She gave me that word as a gift. She whispered it to me in the spaces between our mating, and I fell in love with the shapes it made in the cool, clean air.

Her kind had come to the underwood before, but in cruel war-guises, wearing second skins of hide and metal, bringing fire and poison to my palace. These, I drove out. She was different. She came alone, in a skin spun of simple cloth, and wandered for a time among the roots and vines. Like them, she was looking for me, but she did so with respect.

I let her witness me tangled in my favourite coiling copse. She was not afraid. When I stretched forth a tendril to feel out the detail of her shape (for I am a creature of touch, knowing light and colour only by her accounts), she did not flee nor freeze in terror. No, she reached out an appendage of her own in kind, and greeted me on my terms.

Our commune was slow and careful, that first visit. I knew only a little of her tongue, and she was wholly unschooled in mine, but we came to know one another. She’s a small, rigid thing, hard and soft knit slipshod together, but she seems at peace with it, and I enjoyed learning by inference the shape of her frame, its pivots and fulcrums, constructing my understanding from half a dozen angles at a time. She was equally fascinated with my body, and I let her knead and pet my tendrils to her heart’s content.

I remember a flicker through my hearts when she made her apologies and left the underwood. I didn’t know whether I expected her to return, as she promised, but I knew I wanted her to.

She came back the very next night.

We were quick to find a routine – one thing my kind and hers share is a fondness for habit. She would come to the coiling copse, any night she could, and I would wrap her up in my arms, weaving a soft, yielding bough for her. And there we would talk, with bodies as much as with voices. We spoke of our lives, of the surface world I had never witnessed and the underwood she was coming to know. I learned more of her language, and taught her what words I could from my own, though her throat was not wholly suited to it. I discovered that she was disobeying her elders by her very presence here, that word had spread of me as a cruel, deadly tyrant of the caverns. But, she said, she knew me better than that.

In time, she started visiting without her second skin. She wanted to feel closer to me, she said, and I found I wanted it too. I was not accustomed to such deep physical acquaintance, and her naked form presented a whole new set of curves and creases and angles to explore and catalogue. The attention excited her, which I also liked; once I grew used to it and trained myself out of interpreting it as distress, it was a great pleasure to feel her wriggling happily in my grasp as I touched and shifted.

She explained that my touch was triggering her mating instinct, and that she would very much like me to keep doing it.

I learned quickly once I had a concrete goal. I learned of her breasts, how sensitive they were when squeezed, what joys my feeding tendrils could give her when they latched onto her. I learned of her sex, a tiny, complex thing with its own tricks and treasures to discover; it was her in microcosm, and I feared I might never learn its measure, but she responded well to my touch, and especially to the tendrils I slipped experimentally inside her. Through these things, I learned of her climaxes, shuddering, moaning unravellings I never tired of witnessing. Soon, we were closing the majority of our meetings with one. Soon after that, we often opened with them, too.