furry White-Gold

[Lord Sake]

Illustrated by the brilliant Jailor Eckman.

If Azhani being fourteen here makes you uncomfortable, you can just go ahead and read the Furaffinity version instead and pretend that she's whatever age you want her to be.

                A scrawny black Khajiit rose from the squatting position she’d been in, bringing her pants up with her – if those rags could even be called pants in the first place. She stepped carefully around the puddle she’d just made so as to avoid getting her toes wet then breathed deep and stretched. From the alley she was hiding in, Azhani eyed the house across the street while doing one last pass through her mental checklist.

                Braid still secure? She reached around and gave it a little tug. All good there. Couldn’t have that getting loose and allowing her hair to get caught in things or block her vision, after all. She’d previously considered just cutting it all off to avoid such problems, only to be dissuaded by the memories of her sister teaching her how to braid her own hair back when they were cubs.

                Bladder empty? It damn well better be with a puddle that big.

                House empty? Unless this guy had some prisoners in his basement that he never let out, the place was deserted and would stay that way for a few hours yet. If he stuck to his schedule, anyways.

                Appropriate clothing? Her pants were worn down to nothing at her knees and just about ready to fall apart in general, but they would conceal her treasure well enough; and of course they would keep her lady bits hidden too. She was also fortunate enough to have a shirt – really just a gunny sack with holes ripped into it for her head and arms, but she could use it to conceal jewelry or something of the sort if need be, and that was the important part. That and wearing a shirt guaranteed she wouldn’t get arrested for indecency like she could be had she simply covered her breasts. After all, those were technically only the top pair, and though the others would never be visible through even her summer fur except to those who knew to look for them, they still counted as exposed and guards could, would, and once even did bring her in on that. So wearing a sack meant Azhani didn’t have to worry about doing everything right on a job only to get jailed for something stupid.

                And since that wasn’t a concern, what was her route plan? In through the back door, which was always left unlocked. Afterwards, either pop into a nearby alley and disappear or get up on the roof if there’s trouble on the ground. Neither would be difficult. If for some reason there happened to be people in the house, getting out through a window would be a bit complicated but still viable. That was the emergency option, at least.

                But where could she find a fence? There was a skooma den somewhere in the wilderness around town, of which she happened to know the approximate location and how to get inside. For as disgusted as Azhani was by the concept of so much as breathing the same air as the vile creatures who had desecrated the sacred moon sugar, that would be her best option. Not like she would need to actually come into contact with any of the abomination itself anyways; just offload her plunder and be gone, hopefully without even catching the scent of sacrilege.

                Azhani took a deep breath. With all that out of the way, all that was left was to just clear her mind and focus. Get in, grab some stuff, get out. Nothing complicated. Nothing difficult. In, out, done.

                She poked her head out of the alley and looked both ways down the street. There were a handful of people around, fortunately none of whom were guards or soldiers. A bit more populated than she would have liked, but it’d have to do. Azhani stepped out onto the road and turned to her left, walking as casually as possible right past the place she’d wanted to hit, heading all the way down the street and turning onto a different, busier one, and following that for only a little while before slipping away around a corner to a narrow side street.

                This road was fortunately quiet, the only other life being a stray cat that gave Azhani a weird look before running off. But she wasn’t paying attention to that – she was counting to herself the number of buildings that passed on her right side, and stopped walking entirely when she reached the correct number.

                Azhani leaned back against the brick wall here for a moment, looking around again to check for anything at all moving around besides that cat. Then she checked yet again, and being absolutely certain of her privacy she turned around and looked at the wall. It was taller than she was by a fair bit – fortunately not impossibly tall – and didn’t have anything jutting out at the top or anything. She took a few steps back, rubbed her hands together, then threw herself at the wall, just managing to grab hold of it at the peak of her jump. Her feet found some tentative holds in their kicking about, and from there she pulled herself up, rolling over the top of the wall and landing unceremoniously on the grass on the other side.

                Now for the easy part.

                Azhani padded quickly across the little yard to the back door, crouched down to keep a low profile. Her toes touched the ground and made no noise but the gentle rustling of the grass underfoot, easily attributable to wind should anyone have been around to hear it.

                She paused at the door, lightly gripping the handle and leaning in to see if she could hear anything on the other side. Satisfied, she turned slowly to make as little sound as possible, and as she expected the handle didn’t catch on any lock so she cracked the door open just enough to slip through and shut it behind her just as quietly.

                Then it was just a matter of finding anything small, valuable, and not nailed down – Azhani snuck around checking tables and countertops and the like, snatching up loose coins and whatever else would fit in her pockets and looked like it’d be worth selling. She noticed a few boxes that likely had jewelry in them, but didn’t bother trying to open them since they’d almost certainly be locked. Opening some drawers did yield some cheap-looking rings, though, which was better than nothing.

                When she was satisfied with her search of the ground floor, she turned and headed over to something she’d found earlier but hadn’t tried anything with. It was a little display case sitting on a table near the stairs upwards, and judging by the necklace in it there was no way it wasn’t secured with some tough locks. But Azhani wanted that necklace anyways. No, more like needed it. It was clearly very good gold and it was set with a particularly large gem – if she were to grab that, she could eat like an Emperor for six months off of the money it alone would get her. She couldn’t afford to pass up the opportunity to get such a thing.

                Azhani gave the glass of the case a little tap with her claws. Didn’t seem terribly thick. If she could find something heavy… Just looking around, the first things that came to mind were the ceremonial weapons mounted on the wall, just barely out of reach for the little Khajiit but certainly possible to grab if she had something to stand on. And conveniently, one of those ceremonial weapons happened to be a mace. Almost like this guy wanted to be robbed.

                Leaving the necklace behind, Azhani went over to inspect the mounted mace, which was paired with an axe behind a shield bearing the Skingrad city crest on an otherwise-bare wall. No furniture below, nothing. Azhani looked up at it to gauge its height, then nodded to herself and disappeared into the next room to grab a chair, which she dragged all the way over to the wall and then sat on to catch her breath. Was she just weak or was this chair unreasonably heavy?

                After but a moment Azhani stood and hopped up onto the chair. After all, she didn’t have time to literally sit around doing nothing. With the extra height, she was easily able to grab the shield and toss it aside – if she was going to smash a display case anyways, she could afford to be a little reckless – then just grab the mace and step down to the floor again.

                Blunt instrument in hand, Azhani walked back to her target and adjusted her grip so that the mace was in both hands. She brought it over her head, and then down with a satisfying crash that was quite a bit louder than she expected. The mace was immediately dropped and the necklace picked up, and in a matter of seconds it was around Azhani’s neck and tucked down her shirt. Then she was gone before anyone had the chance to investigate the noise.

                Azhani was proud of how clean that escape was. She got out of the house, jumped the wall, and weaved her way through the alleys until she got to a road out of town and at no point did anyone bother her. Everything went exactly to plan, and for once actually turned out better than she had been expecting. All that was left was to sell off the baubles she’d grabbed and disappear to some other city, and at the moment her heart was set on going to Kvatch next. It wasn’t too far away, and Azhani would actually be able to pay for passage with money for once. Things were really looking good for the foreseeable future.

                So she was casually walking on through the wilds outside Skingrad, occasionally looking around or over her shoulder to make sure she wasn’t being followed, but otherwise just putting on the appearance of someone going for a nice little walk through the woods. She found her way over to a less-than-obvious cave, pushing some vines aside to get inside and feeling around for a heavy wooden door.

                Azhani took a deep breath before opening the door, partially to get a chance to confirm nobody else was present and partially to get one last taste of clean air for a while before heading in. Then she leaned on the door and slowly walked into it, pushing it open with her own body weight and nearly stumbling into the candlelit tunnel on the other side. She shut the door much the same way and followed the winding trail deeper into the den of sin, eventually coming upon a much lighter door. Azhani gagged and wrapped both hands around her muzzle as soon as she opened this door and got a whiff of the air on the other side – the air was heavy with the foul odor of blasphemy and, less importantly, hints of vomit and blood. Definitely a skooma den.

                After a moment to compose herself, Azhani stepped forward, a hand still hovering near her nose so that she’d hopefully be smelling her own fur more than the skooma smoke. She ended up before a little rickety desk, at which a Cathay or Cathay-raht was seated with a modestly-armored Orc standing nearby. For a moment Azhani nervously eyed the bodyguard who was easily twice her size, but brought her attention to the Khajiit quickly enough.

                «Hey,» she said. «I have some hot stuff here that I need to offload.»

                The Khajiit just tilted his head and shrugged. Azhani looked at him with a confused expression.

                «Are you not from home?» Azhani stared at the other Khajiit and sighed. “Really? How can you not speak…? Whatever.” She pulled her loot out of her pockets and dumped it all on the table, then carefully took off the necklace and set that down as well. “This is all hot. This one would like money for these things.”

                “Okay.” The Khajiit at the desk stood up and waved his bodyguard over. “This will take some time to sort out and appraise. If you could just wait here…”

                Azhani gave a little dismissive wave of one hand and padded over to the nearest chair while the Orc collected her goods. She took a seat and folded her arms with a little huff, letting her eyes close and attempting to shut out the stench of sin so she could get some rest.

                A loud crashing sound forced Azhani awake, and she immediately jumped to her feet, quickly looking around. The only thing she could see was the Khajiiti receptionist rushing around to smash bottles and check locks, and the voices she could hear told her why he was doing that – they were soldiers’ voices, barking orders. She just sighed and held up her hands, waiting for the inevitable. Soon enough, one of the soldiers came into view, and she groaned – he was wearing the armor of the Imperial City guard. What they were doing out here she couldn’t guess, but she knew this wouldn’t be very fun. With a sword dripping blood pointed at her, she turned around and put her hands together just above the base of her tail, a moment later feeling rough cord pressing into her wrists then an equally-rough hand pulling her by the arm back towards the skooma den’s exit.

                ‘Could have turned out worse,’ she reminded herself. ‘Can’t complain about free food and a roof over my head for a while.’

                “They were following you, you know.”

                “What?” Azhani looked over at the Cathay who up until recently had been a receptionist for a skooma den. “You are going to blame this one?”

                “Of course I am. They didn’t know where we were, and then you show up, and now one of my best enforcers is in the ground and I’m going to be doing at least five years.”

                Azhani narrowed her eyes. “Ever consider,” she growled. “That maybe you just haven’t been doing a good job of covering your tracks?” She flexed her claws but they couldn’t do anything bound behind her. “They knew you had a den there for months. A raid like this is not something the Legion does just because they followed one person.”

                “It’s easy to blame me when they don’t have anything on you except for the fact that you were there. You’ll be free this time tomorrow.”

                “It’s easy to blame you because it’s your own fault, «you braindead motherfucker.» It doesn’t matter how much time you or this one are going to spend in jail. You fucked up.” Azhani struggled against her bindings but, as expected, nothing happened.

                A voice from the front of the prison wagon rang out just then. “Be quiet back there,” the guard snapped. Azhani bared her teeth and hissed at the Cathay before turning back around to face forward, content to have gotten in the last word.

                She took slow, deep breaths and tried to forget about the jackass sitting next to her. When she looked towards the front of the cart, she could see the Skingrad city walls not too far in the distance. ‘Good,’ she told herself. ‘Get to the castle, spend the night in jail, get some decent food and some nice rest, try again when I’m out.’ By her calculations, since the dull-claw receptionist was right and the guards really only caught her being in a skooma den without any evidence that she’d bought or smoked any, she’d only spend a week locked up at most, and that was if they were slow with the paperwork. That would give her plenty of time to figure out her next move.

                Azhani’s only wish was that they’d move faster. She was starting to feel a little nagging sensation in her bladder, and the sooner she was in jail the sooner she could deal with that.

                There was an air of impatience about the courtyard of Castle Skingrad a mere hour later. The guards spoke amongst themselves in hushed but clearly annoyed tones, and the prisoners sat restlessly while they waited for the soldiers to make a decision.

                Eventually the call did come to file out, slowly so the guards could collect names and check whatever notes they’d brought with them. Things moved gradually and smoothly, at least until it came to be Azhani’s turn.

                “Wait,” she was told before she could even give her name, the speaking guard flipping through documents and visually inspecting her. “Not you,” he finally said. “You stay here.”

                ‘Oh fuck.’ Azhani sat down quietly, trying to at least appear calm. ‘Shit. Fucking shit fuck. What do they know? Oh, Bright Moons, what are they going to do? What am I going to do?’

                She took a deep breath and pressed her legs together. Getting freaked out over something like this wouldn’t do her any favors, especially when she knew from experience that stress would just aggravate her bladder and make it feel a lot fuller than it really was – and right now it was minimally so, which was exactly where Azhani wanted to keep it.

                This was definitely going to throw off her plans, though. No doubt she’d now be taken to the Imperial City, a journey that would take all day and leave her in a place she didn’t know anything about. Her plan had been to stick around Skingrad for a day or two after getting released, then work her way down to the Gold Coast. But now Azhani needed to come up with a way to survive in a city so incomprehensibly big that she still wasn’t sure if as many people even existed as she’d heard lived there.

                Assuming, of course, that she was ever going to be released at all. She’d heard the rumors of the Imperial City Prison being where criminals went to die, and somehow it didn’t seem like there was much chance of being saved by the same coincidence that had set the Hero of Kvatch free two hundred years ago. Hopefully they didn’t have enough dirt on her to lock her in there forever. For one thing, she was far too young to be thrown in a cage for the rest of her life, and more importantly she hadn’t even done anything worth such an extreme punishment.

                That, she decided, would be her comfort. She certainly couldn’t say she’d done nothing wrong, but there was no doubt in Azhani’s mind that she hadn’t done anything wrong enough for them to want her put away for more than a year or two. And that was her pessimistic estimate. She knew more realistically that, even if they knew about everything she’d ever done since leaving Rimmen, she could expect to serve six months. After all, there were far more dangerous criminals than herself running around. Jail space would need to be reserved for those who truly belonged segregated from society – the murders and skooma smugglers and their ilk. Burglary was pretty tame compared to all that, and it was for that very reason that Imperial courts, in Azhani’s experience, preferred to issue fines for such harmless petty crimes. Too bad all of her money was back in the drug cave – or, more realistically, in one of the soldiers’ purses – so she’d be left with no choice but to take the jail time.

                And she’d be able to live with that if they could actually get moving. Consoling herself with promises that it wouldn’t be as bad as she was expecting would do her no good if she had to wait to find out the truth. The uncertainty was more terrifying than any of the things Azhani could imagine happening to her in prison – after all, how could she be sure that they wouldn’t happen?

                ‘Stop thinking about that shit.’ A small part of Azhani’s mind that wasn’t panicking spoke up. ‘Calm the fuck down and just focus on now.’ She took a deep breath and shut her eyes for a minute. ‘Alright, so. On a prison cart. In Skingrad. With hands tied. No money. But that’s all fine. Nothing’s happening right now. Bit of time to relax.’ Azhani opened her eyes and blinked a few times. ‘Could do with a piss before a trip to the Imperial City.’ Now that she was starting to calm down, her bladder wasn’t quite as excited, but there was definitely a bit in there. Not enough to need it gone, but absolutely more than enough to make such a long journey very uncomfortable. Azhani just sighed. ‘Not like they’d give me enough privacy though.’ She shuddered when her mind drifted over to the logistics of urinating with her hands tied behind her back. ‘No, thanks.’

                With her eyes closed Azhani leaned back against the side of the cart as far as she could. ‘This will all be over soon enough.’

                Not a minute later she was forced back to full alertness by a jab to her side. After letting out a little pained squeak she determined that a Legionnaire had poked her with the blunt end of his spear.

                “It seems the Count would like to see you after all, cat,” he said.

                Azhani glared at him but stood and allowed him to drag her by the arm into the castle regardless of the insult – not like she could do anything else anyways. Before long she was being shoved down a large ornate hall with a man on a throne at the far end.

                “So you’re the one the Legion’s taken a liking to, hm?” The Count spoke once Azhani righted herself after stumbling towards him. “Thought you’d be taller.” One of the Count’s bodyguards chuckled quietly, and the Count himself continued visually inspecting the little Khajiit from his seat still several yards away. “Those brave Legionnaires outside have told me some interesting things about you, but I’d like to hear from you as well… Tell me, Khajiit, how old are you?”

                One of Azhani’s ears twitched before she answered the question. “Fourteen.”

                “Really? Quite the accomplished young lady, aren’t we?” The Count leaned forwards and tented his fingers. “You’ve done quite a lot of things, in not very much time. Legion thinks that’s worth sending you to the capital. I think I at least deserve an explanation as to why you were arrested on my land before I let you get hauled off.”

                Azhani stood silently, repeatedly flicking her tail behind her.

                “Let me put it this way, then,” the Count said, leaning back again. “Your fellow Khajiit admitted that he was running a skooma den, and according to him you came to him trying to launder stolen goods. Perhaps you can help me and my soldiers and tell us where you found those things.”

                “This one stole nothing,” Azhani growled. “You cannot prove she did what you say.”

                The Count chuckled. “So you were buying skooma, then? I’m told you didn’t have so much as a coinpurse when you were arrested. No, I don’t think that’s what you were doing. But I do think you can tell us who’s lost some valuables recently.”

                Azhani’s ears angled back a little. “This one knows of no such thing,” she said.

                “So you have proof that you, in fact, did not walk into a skooma den with stolen property you were trying to sell?” The Count waited for a moment, and Azhani was silent. “I thought not,” he said. “Now why don’t you tell me where you got those trinkets?”

                The little Khajiit shook her head.

                “Fine then,” the Count said, frowning. “I will let the Legion have their way with you, if that’s what you want.” With a wave of his hand, he added, “Take her. She’s useless to me,” and right away Azhani was grabbed and dragged back to the cart.

                As soon as she was forced to sit down again, she turned back to her own thoughts. ‘Well, that was a waste of time.’ Azhani growled quietly, but still loud enough for the Legionnaire seated near her to throw her a suspicious look. ‘Probably could have got thrown in his dungeon instead of being hauled off to the Imperial City. But somehow being locked up in the same place as a drug dealer who blames me for getting his business raided doesn’t seem like the best situation…’

                Azhani was dragged from her thoughts momentarily when she felt the cart begin to move. ‘Well, here we go.’

                Some hours later, the Great Forest was coming into view up ahead and Azhani was uncomfortable. She wasn’t exactly unfamiliar with riding in carts, prison or otherwise, but even so being seated for more than an hour or two at a time was never all that pleasant of an experience. On top of that she was hungry – but then, when wasn’t she? – and thirsty… and she needed to pee. That particular need, over the past several miles of rough cobbled roads, had escalated from noticeable-but-ignorable to an ever-present annoyance. But there wasn’t anything that could be done about it.

                Even if they were to stop, which Azhani figured they would do somewhere around six hours into the ride, she wouldn’t be able to take advantage of it and resolve her problem with the guards watching as they surely would be. Not that it’d even come to that in the first place, though. There was no way they were going to untie her hands, and there was no way she’d let their hands anywhere near where they’d need to go. ‘Especially not him,’ Azhani mused to herself, looking at the soldier in the cart with her. ‘You think I’m an animal, don’t you? The way you keep looking at me, I’d bet you’re the real animal here.’ She let out a low growl, this time quiet enough to go unnoticed, but now her tail was twitching. ‘I’ll bite it off if you try anything, you bastard.’

                Then she sighed and pressed her thighs together. Of course nothing like that would really happen, but… Better that she be prepared for something that never happens than be caught off-guard.

                Azhani had more than enough to worry about anyways; she didn’t need her overactive imagination inventing new problems for her. It had kept her safe before, but right now there wasn’t anything she needed to be protected from. No, her main concern now was how long this trip would take. The edge of the Great Forest was in view, an hour or two ahead, which meant they were getting closer to the Imperial City. But if they were just now getting into the woods, they weren’t actually anywhere near the capital and wouldn’t be for quite a long time. Azhani was watching to see if the Tower would come into view, but she knew it wouldn’t until after they left the densest part of the forest. And then once it finally appeared it would still be several more hours just to get into the city, and perhaps more still to navigate to the prison.

                The thought made Azhani squirm. She was already well aware of her need to take a leak, so by the time they reached the Imperial City she’d be more liquid than Khajiit. If she could even wait that long, that is. She wasn’t quite sure what would happen in a situation like that. As far as she knew, her body wouldn’t allow her to relieve herself at all if there was someone to see. But surely that wouldn’t matter if she got to be too full. Her body would have to throw its pride away and give up before she got hurt… right?

                Azhani crossed her legs and leaned back as far as she could. That wasn’t a question she really wanted to learn the answer to. Hopefully it’d never come up. For now, she’d just suffer in silence with her many troubles, all of which were very familiar to her. She opened and closed her mouth a few times, hoping to do something about the dryness in her throat at least, but that just seemed to make it worse.

                ‘At least it’s spring,’ Azhani told herself with a groan. Had it been summer or winter, she’d have been in some serious trouble. ‘Azurah knows I have enough shit to deal with already.’ She shifted around a bit to try to get more comfortable, but the same problems stuck around. It didn’t seem like there was any really tolerable position to sit in, and it wasn’t like she could stand in a moving cart or lie down properly without the use of her hands. So she sighed and surrendered to the hours of discomfort still ahead for her.

                The cart stopped in the heart of the Great Forest, perhaps a half hour away from the woodline behind them, and Azhani wished they’d start moving again soon. But the cart stood still, and the soldier sitting in the back near Azhani got up and ordered her to do the same. She hesitated, not out of fear or any intentional defiance, but because by now they’d been travelling for six hours, meaning it had been at least seven or eight since Azhani committed to raiding that house. At best she hadn’t emptied her bladder for seven hours, and she didn’t want to consider that her estimate could be a bit short. The natural movement of the cart bouncing on the roads was already toying with her, and standing up after all that would just make things worse.

                But the soldier didn’t seem to care – he just gave the same order again, louder, which finally inspired Azhani to carefully force herself to stand up. She pressed her legs together as tightly as she could, though it didn’t do much to alleviate the feeling that her bladder was being dragged down in this new position.

                When the soldier grabbed her arm and forced her to turn around, Azhani was sure she could feel the waves being made inside her. All she could do about it was growl quietly and try to focus on the feeling of the soldier’s hands near her own, which was soon replaced by… nothing. Her hands weren’t being constricted and forced together anymore. She brought them over to her front and rubbed each wrist for a moment, then turned around – slowly this time so as to not disrupt the tides of her inner sea – and said but one word.

                “Why?”

                The guard in the cart with her just scoffed and stepped down to the ground, so the one who had been commanding the horse spoke instead.

                “Not supposed to force-feed prisoners anymore.” He was, when Azhani turned her attention to him, sorting through saddlebags. “But we can’t have you starved by the time we reach the City either. You just sit there.”

                Azhani lowered herself back onto the seat as carefully as possible, her twitching tail betraying her attempts to look calm. “Are you not afraid she will run off?” She started scratching at the cart floor with one foot to take her mind off the pressure, and for now she had both hands resting on that leg.

                “Run where?” It was the other guard now. “We’re in the middle of the woods. You try to run anywhere, we’ll have you back in five minutes. So don’t even think about it.”

                Azhani gave a little huff in response. If her mind weren’t occupied with more important matters, she’d be coming up with a plan to exploit their confidence.

                ‘Hey. Wait a minute…’

                “Could it perhaps be that this one might have some privacy for a minute, then? Since you are so sure that escape is not possible.” There was a hint of hope in her voice, but she wasn’t exactly optimistic. She’d been wrong about her prediction that they’d leave her hands tied, sure, but even the most overconfident of fools knows not to let an unbound prisoner have any time to themselves.

                One of the guards, the one that had been in the cart, laughed at her question. “No fucking way, cat. You can pick out a nice tree if you like but you piss under watch or not at all.”

                ‘Yeah, that figures.’ Her tail sank in disappointment, her legs crossed, and she muttered a response that she didn’t truly believe. “It’s not that bad anyways.”

                The other soldier stepped onto the cart with a wooden bowl in one hand a matching spoon in the other. “Maybe, but we’re not stopping again.” He handed over the bowl and spoon and stepped back. “You’ve got twenty minutes. Sort your shit out, do whatever you need to do, but in twenty minutes you’re tied up and back on the cart, and you’ll stay that way until you get to the City.”

                He jumped back to the ground and walked off into the trees without waiting for a response. Azhani wasn’t planning on giving him one anyways, and instead just looked down at the food she’d been given. It was some sort of crude watery gruel, smelling of nothing and looking like little more than mud. And yet somehow it still seemed more appetizing than most prison food she’d had the misfortune of tasting. Stranger still was the discovery that it wasn’t entirely inedible as she’d come to expect from “food” of that caliber.

                Sure, it tasted foul and despite apparently being mostly water was hard to swallow, but Azhani could safely say that she’d had worse. That pleasant surprise was what she focused on to keep her attention away from the lake she was carrying around, and to suppress the knowledge that eating this would only make that a greater burden on her. There was nothing to be done anyways, and worrying about it would not lighten the load.

                There was no doubt that Azhani being able to focus on her food rather than her bladder was at least somewhat due to it being the first real meal she’d had for a week – she could pull scraps together to keep from starving, but it was never really filling and certainly not healthy. And for as bad as that gruel was, at least it was a proper, nutritious meal. If only there were a little moon sugar in it, it’d have been perfect.

                When her bowl was nearly empty, Azhani put the spoon aside and cleaned the bowl out by lapping up whatever was left in it, no doubt attracting weird looks from the guards for such feline behavior. She gave a contented sigh when there wasn’t a drop of food left, then set the bowl down and got up to stretch. Once again gravity pressed even harder on her bladder when she stood, but she just bent at the knees for a moment while this new wave passed. When it did, she straightened up and pressed her legs together, bringing one hand down to her belly. She could feel a slight dome forming in the general area of her waistband, an uncomfortable departure from the norm.

                ‘Okay,’ she told herself, bringing that hand up to her head. ‘I definitely can’t hold it another six hours. I’ve just got to pull myself together and piss here now, before I’m out of time. Fuck these guys, fuck them watching, I need to go so I’m just gonna have to deal with it and go.’

                With a deep breath Azhani carefully worked her way out of the cart, the feeling of dirt beneath her toes surprisingly comforting, and took a moment to take in her surroundings. Trees all around, and a few bushes that she’d be able to reach without going too deep into the woods, but they weren’t tall enough to hide her completely – though even if they were she was sure one of the Legionnaires would reach in and pull her out anyways. So she settled for at least concealing her most important parts behind one of the shorter bushes nearby, figuring that she was going to have eyes on her no matter what so there would be no point in going deeper into the woods to find a place to squat in peace.

                She took a moment to stretch again, sticking each leg out a little to the side and fanning out her toes, well aware how similar such a stretch was to what a housecat might do after a nap. Everyone already called her a cat anyways, so acting a bit like one couldn’t hurt.

                Then, satisfied, she made her way over to the nearest serviceable bush, stepping around to the far side and turning her back to the cart and soldiers. She grabbed the waistband of her pants and took a deep breath, then pulled them down as she dropped into a squat.

                The first thing Azhani noticed was that this new position greatly intensified her need, but even so the ground beneath her was still dry. She bobbed up and down a little bit while her tail flicked in annoyance. ‘Oh, come on. How can I need to piss this bad and still nothing?’

                She closed her eyes and sighed, trying to slow her breathing. ‘Just let go. It’s not that hard.’ And still nothing happened. She could feel the gaze of one of the Legionnaires burning into the back of her head. ‘Just ignore him. He’s not here. It’s just you, this bush, and all that piss that needs to come out right now.’ But her bladder wasn’t particularly motivated by her little speech, and all that happened was the guard watching her muttered something about getting on with it.

                She tried to block him out and shifted to a few different positions, but not one of them inspired the river to flow. ‘Come on,’ she told herself, her eyes starting to water. ‘Why can’t I do this? Why can’t he just turn around? Fuck.’ Now she was getting desperate. Nothing was working, and she just wanted to find a solution and be done with this torture. She even tried doing various things with her fingers, including putting them where she’d specifically been avoiding ever since she learned that under certain circumstances her claws had a mind of their own. But none of that worked either.

                Taking a deep breath in an attempt to control her breathing again, Azhani made a fist and pressed hard into the part of her belly that the balloon within had pushed out, causing her to bend over and gasp in pain. She hissed quietly and opened her eyes, looking down towards her feet. There was the tiniest of indications that a drop of liquid had hit the ground very recently. ‘It’s a start.’

                Then the guard informed her that she was almost out of time, so she tried one last time to ignore his presence and force herself to urinate. She could feel a few drops leave her, enough to make a tiny wet spot had her pants been up, but no more. It wasn’t even enough to feel relieved at all – if anything it just made her bladder angrier, but apparently still not angry enough to do anything.

                ‘Fuck.’ Azhani growled and reluctantly stood up, bringing her pants back up with her. She tied the little strings holding the front together a fair bit looser than usual, to avoid compressing anything particularly delicate in the area.

                And so she turned her back on her only chance at salvation before the Imperial City.

                ‘Bright Moons watch over me.’

‘Azurah, Alkosh, Sangiin, Baan Dar… Even Sheggorath. Just, anybody… If you’re listening, please make me pee my pants right now.’

A mere hour later, still in the depths of Cyrodiil’s Great Forest, it seemed that not a soul in the Sands nor the planes of Oblivion was listening to Azhani’s pleading. Her hands, of course, were tied up behind her back again, and she could find no position to sit in where the movements of the cart wouldn’t jostle her full bladder.

She hadn’t been able to make use of the one opportunity she’d been given to relieve herself, and when she stepped back onto the cart she felt more desperate than when she stepped off. And now, after only an hour, with all the water in her food catching up to her, she wanted nothing more than to just be able to pee, even if that meant wetting herself.

Though she did have to admit that it wasn’t actually all that bad – she could still think clearly and figured she could handle a bit more time, though her bladder felt like a rock weighing her down from the inside and she knew it would just get worse the longer she waited.

Azhani wiggled the toes on one foot, awkwardly scratching at the floor of the cart just to have something to do. If only there were anything around to help keep her mind off of the ever-increasing pressure inside her, but the scenery was all just trees. But at least that was better than looking down; she knew that she would just see the result of that pressure forcing her bladder to expand outwards if she did. Instead she leaned back as far as she could and closed her eyes with a mixed sigh and groan, pulling her ears back flat against her head.

‘I fucking knew I shouldn’t have gone to a skooma den.’ Her tail swished around angrily, not at her situation but at herself for getting into this mess in the first place. ‘But no, I just had to go fence my shit there of all places. And now I don’t have any of it or any of that gold. Fucking dumbass.’

She curled her toes and pulled her feet closer with a quiet groan. Azhani knew berating herself wasn’t going to solve any of her problems, and if not for the fact that she hadn’t let anything more than a few drops out of her bladder for more than eight hours by her count, she would remind herself to be thankful that she was going be locked up. In prison she’d have a bed, at least two meals a day, and wouldn’t have to worry about money or her safety. That was certainly far better than wandering the streets not knowing where she could rest at night, when and what she would eat, how she could afford to keep herself fed and dressed, or what sorts of thugs might be lurking around every corner.

Though she still wondered if that all was worth suffering so. Of course, given her aversion to urinating where she might be seen, she was no stranger to holding a full bladder for longer than she’d have liked. But even so, needing to wait half a day was new to her. Never before had she been forced to delay her relief for anywhere near as long as she would be now. If it ever got to the point where she felt her bladder was getting much too full, she could always run off to find somewhere to leave a puddle, be it a back alley or a deserted park or anywhere else. She could always do something if it got bad. She could always go somewhere. But not today. Today, no matter how badly she might need to find an alternative, she would have no choice but to hold it in until she was safely in her cell in the Imperial City and the guards left her alone.

Assuming she got a cell to herself, anyways. She hadn’t considered what might happen if there were someone else with her. If they were asleep when she got there, it probably wouldn’t be an issue, but if they weren’t? There was no telling how much longer she’d have to endure.

The thought forced her to open her eyes and get back into a more proper seated position. She was breathing quickly with her tail going wild behind her, but she managed to grab the rogue appendage when it came close to her bound hands and forced herself to take some deep breaths.

‘No, don’t worry about that. You’ll be fine.’ She didn’t really believe what she was trying to tell herself, but if she admitted that she’d just end up panicking. ‘It’ll be okay. It’ll work out.’

Then she leaned back again, groaning and stretching out her legs with her toes fanned out and claws on display. When she settled back into a standard position, she cast a quick look at the guard in the cart with her, and found that he was paying more attention to his sword than to his prisoner.

Azhani’s ears perked up and her tail rose optimistically. If he wasn’t watching, then maybe…

She looked over at the one at the reins, and he seemed to be focused on the road ahead, so she slid a little bit farther from the one in the cart and took a deep breath. ‘Nobody’s watching right now. Time to go.’ She closed her eyes and tried to relax. Her bladder was screaming at her that it wanted to be emptied, and this moment was its chance to get what it wanted.

But it wasn’t taking that chance. Azhani growled and muttered to herself in her native tongue. «Come now, they’re not looking. Don’t do this to me.» She tried forcing it, and just like last time she felt nothing more than a single warm drop between her legs. It wasn’t even enough to actually reach her pants; it just got the fur around there the tiniest bit wet and that was all.

Her tail and ears fell as she crossed her legs and whined. How could it be possible that her body demand that she do something, but then refuse to let her do it? She threw her head back and groaned loudly enough that the guard sitting in the cart looked over at her.

“What are you complaining about?” He finally put his sword away, and Azhani glared at him while he watched her body language. “You had your chance. We told you how this was going to work, and you made your choice. Don’t you dare get fucking cat piss on the cart.”

“That will not be a problem,” Azhani said quietly.

“You’d better hope not.” Then the guard pulled a waterskin from his belt, and Azhani turned away before he started drinking. That wasn’t something she wanted to think about right now.

Instead she tried to focus on… anything at all, really, other than her own body. Her bladder was starting to feel painfully heavy and she just needed something to take her mind off of it. She looked around and saw only trees, and above there was nothing but a gap in the leaves revealing a perfectly clear early-afternoon sky. Not a cloud in sight. At least there wouldn’t be any rain making things worse.

Even so, the nice weather and the sounds of birds somewhere in the trees weren’t making anything any better either. The weight in her bladder spiked suddenly when one of the wheels on the cart hit a hole in the road, and Azhani tried to blink away tears that were starting to form, but they were just replaced straight away.

Her tail was waving furiously behind her as she leaned forward slightly, bringing one leg in with toes curled, and stretching the other out with toes splayed.

She felt like there was nothing more to her body besides the obscene volume of urine – the pressure was overpowering and there wasn’t a single thing Azhani could do to make it any better. Her entire body was starting to shake from the effort of actively trying to force herself to wet her pants despite the guard’s orders, or to force her bladder to just shut up for a while, or just do anything at all to make the pressure go away for at least a little while.

‘Come on, I’ve never asked for much before. I swear I’ll find a way to get some real sugar and do a proper ceremony and everything if one of you up there just makes me piss myself or if something happens and I can get away for just two minutes or anything at all, really. Just do something, please.’

And still no gods interfered. ‘Which one of you is it that likes watching me suffer, then?’ Azhani looked up at the sky with tears dripping down her face. ‘Is it Molagh? It is Molagh, isn’t it? Why? What did I ever do to you?’ Then she hung her head, squeezing her eyes shut and clenching her teeth. ‘What did I do to deserve this?’ She knotted up her legs as tightly as possible, hoping to relieve at least a little pressure, and after a minute relaxed only slightly, keeping one leg over the other and letting one foot paw at the other leg just to have something to do.

She took a deep breath and shook her head. ‘Don’t think like that. Sitting here bitching and blaming Daedra isn’t going to fix any of this. You’re a grown woman, Azha. Everything is going to be fine. Bladder’s going to give up eventually, when it gets too bad. Just have to deal with it until then. It’s just a bit of pressure. A lot of pressure. Apparently ten hours of pee is really heavy. But that’s all it is, just weight.’ With her breathing slowing down and her tail getting calmer, Azhani sighed. ‘It doesn’t hurt if I don’t panic. Just heavy and bloated and uncomfortable. But no pain. So stay calm, everything will be fine. Just five hours to the Imperial City, right? Halfway there.’

Her reassurances did nothing to stop her bladder from becoming agitated whenever the cart went over a particularly rough patch of road, and they certainly didn’t make her feel any less unbearably full, but they did give her a touch of much-needed confidence and faith in herself and her body. She could deal with the pressure for as long as would be necessary, and she trusted that no matter how impossible it was for her to force her bladder to drain itself, when the time came it would be able to do it on its own instead of letting her get hurt. No matter how uncomfortable she got, there was no way her body would damage itself that way, and Azhani wasn’t allowing herself to be anything less than certain of that.

The rest of the ride through the forest was just as rough on Azhani’s confidence as it was on her bladder. Every second felt like an hour, and every little bump in the road caused waves to crash into the walls of her bladder. For the last few miles she was doubting whether the forest would even end at all. It felt like she was trapped in one of those nightmares she’d have if she couldn’t find some grass to water at night, only worse; the Azhani in her dreams could go pee.

But then there was hope – when the trees finally thinned out, Azhani looked to the front of the cart and saw a titanic pillar rising from the ground in the distance. She kept her eyes trained on the structure as the cart turned to the left to follow the road. There was no mistaking it: White-Gold Tower. The heart of Cyrodiil was in view, and Azhani’s ears perked up. ‘There it is. We’re almost there.’

There was just one problem: The Imperial City was on the far side of a massive lake that surely couldn’t be as big as the one Azhani had been hauling around all day. But that wouldn’t necessarily have been too much of an issue if not for the fact that the only bridge to cross over to City Isle was still miles away. She would swim across if she could, if only because then the Rumare would serve as a massive natural toilet. She’d even go right to jail on her own if they’d just let her at the water. Whether she was free or imprisoned didn’t matter to her. All that mattered now was having an empty bladder.

‘So close…’ By now there was no way Azhani would be able to sit still. No matter how hard she tried, there was always some part of her body that just had to be moving. If it wasn’t her knees repeatedly knocking together, it’d be at least one leg furiously shaking or bouncing, and if not that then she’d be incessantly shifting and wiggling around in her seat. And of course nothing was going to stop her tail from thrashing – even if she managed to grab it the tip would just wag violently.

‘So very far…’ What little optimism had come to Azhani when she first saw the Imperial Palace faded quickly. It had inspired a brief burst of confidence but now reality was starting to set in again: though the capital was indeed very close, that distance was measured as if in flight, and Azhani was no bird.

In truth, they had only covered about half of the total distance between Castle Skingrad and the Imperial City Prison. Being out of the woods now meant they could move faster, so they would reach Weye in no time at all, but that was merely where the bridge to the City met the mainland. As Azhani understood it, the prison was on the eastern side of the island, and the sole bridge was to the west. The ability to move faster to Weye would mean nothing due to the need to slow down again while crossing the bridge and navigating the streets. And if what she’d heard of the population of the Empire’s capital was true, the sheer volume of other people going about their business might very well slow them down enough that just getting to the prison from the bridge could easily take as long as the entire rest of the trip up to that point.

The worst part, as far as Azhani was concerned, was that as time dragged on she became less and less sure that her bladder would give in before she hurt herself. Already she thought she could feel her ocean boiling, and there was a weak burning sensation in her exhausted muscles that should have given up five hours ago. She was certain she looked as if she were with child, and in this moment she thought she could empathize with the feeling of getting kicked from the inside.

And yet despite it all, it still didn’t feel like this was her absolute limit just yet. Somehow it seemed that Azhani could still hold more than this. Her bladder could still find room to stretch, though it already stuck out well beyond her breasts – which she had to admit wasn’t a very impressive feat, and indeed this had been the case since early on in the forest – and felt as if it could get no larger without tearing her skin. She could think only of relief and the absence of any means to achieve it. Some frantic part of her mind was throwing away all logic and presenting her with any ideas it could pull together in the hopes of easing up the pressure even a little bit. Anything that might result in her being able to let out a single leak, a one-second squirt just to take the edge off, though the sensible part of her knew that would only make it worse and she needed the privacy to relieve herself completely.

But that part was dying. Logic and calmness wouldn’t save her now. She needed radical new ideas if she was going to get out of this without exploding. She even seemed to forget that she hated the guard in the cart with her, and was strongly considering the possibility that they might leave her alone for a while if she helped him in the same way she would help Baandari pedlars in exchange for safe passage. It certainly wasn’t anything she wanted to do, but just like with the Baandari, if it was what she needed to do, then she could convince herself to do it. If only her bladder could behave the same way, she wouldn’t even be considering the option.

Azhani let out something of a whining groan and felt the fur on her cheeks getting wet. ‘If you’re not going to let me pee, at least let me die. Fucking feels like I’m going to anyways. So just kill me now and get it over with, huh?’ Deep down she knew she didn’t mean it – she’d been fighting to survive for the past four years, and she wasn’t about to throw it all away over a few gallons of piss. But at the moment her clouded mind could only think of two ways to end the pain in her bladder, and the one that involved causing a flood seemed to be entirely out of reach.

She growled and trailed off into a Ta’agra obscenity that she’d voiced quite a bit louder than intended. Following up with a string of more such colorful terms, she just barely noticed the guard in the cart head over to the front and lean over to talk with the one at the reins. When he sat back down, she thought she could see a hint of concern in his face, but quickly dismissed it – surely she was just imagining that he would be more sympathetic than he really was. After all, Azhani was looking for anything that might lead to a bit of relief, so it wasn’t too farfetched to assume she’d started hallucinating.

And even if it were just her imagination, what was wrong with that? Her imagination was the only thing keeping her sane right now – pretending that it wouldn’t be long until she finally got a taste of relief kept her from giving up. Not giving up on holding her bladder, oh no, she couldn’t do that anyways; giving up mentally. For as hopeless as her situation seemed, she absolutely could not allow her spirit to be broken. It was gravely wounded, sure, but she was keeping herself together for now.

Every bump of the cart against the pavement stones was a knife to Azhani’s bladder and to her willpower, but she was surviving. And, more importantly, the closer to the Imperial City they got the better-maintained the roads were, which meant those bumps weren’t as severe or frequent as they were out in the woods. Azhani had that to be thankful for, at least, but even so she still wasn’t sure how much longer she could last before she got hurt. The sorts of pain her mother had warned her about – as part of a lecture when she and her sister returned home dancing after a day out, having failed to find anywhere in town they could pee; a lecture delivered before either of them got a chance to take their mother’s advice – hadn’t appeared yet, but considering just about every other part of Azhani was hurting, she figured whatever wasn’t in pain yet would be soon.

Soon. That was her favorite word right now. They’d be in Weye very soon. Maybe they’d even decide to stop at the inn, and if they did Azhani might soon have some time to herself. Otherwise, they’d be crossing the bridge into the Imperial City soon. Soon the streets of the capital would be the only thing standing between Azhani and her much-overdue and sorely-needed relief. She would get to pee soon.

Really, she would. Weye was reached in no time at all, and though they kept moving right past the town’s inn that she had hoped they’d visit – and she spent but a moment wondering if the guards might appreciate such a break themselves – it was a straight shot across the bridge and to the City gates. It was the longest bridge Azhani had ever seen, and though the lake was mostly standing water there were still some very uncomfortable sounds coming from below, but they still seemed to be making good time. Sunset was upon them when they stopped briefly to check in with the doormen before passing into what Azhani had read was called the Nobles District – a place that her books noted was once Talos Plaza, now bearing its name from before his day due to the criminalization of the God-Emperor’s worship. That always seemed to her like banning the Mane.

Not that religion was at the forefront of her thoughts; just a distraction, since the heavy evening traffic of this upscale neighborhood had forced the cart to slow down again, even with people moving out of its way. Heading straight down the main road towards the Tower was a mixed blessing; it would get them to the opposite side of the city much faster than going around, but at the same time this was the most active road in the district. Being faster than the alternative didn’t mean it had to be fast.

It really wasn’t helping on the privacy front either – the most active road meant plenty of people watching her. She tried to ignore them, but she could tell that the people they passed were shooting her looks of disgust or pity. One man even stared at her for as long as he could. Her own eyes were trained on her feet, looking past the absurd distention in her abdomen and her hyperactive legs to watch as her toes alternated between being fanned out or curled up and scratching at the floor. Or tried to watch, considering her vision at the moment was blurred by water that could find no other exit manifesting as tears.

‘Moons…’ Azhani twisted herself left and right at the waist in an attempt to fight against the rope binding her wrists. The extra movement was more torture for her bladder to endure, and her hands were no freer for it. «I’m going to burst,» she whispered. «This is too much. So close… But my bladder is just going to explode before we get there, I know it.» Taking in a shaky breath, Azhani tipped her head back and closed her eyes. «One of you please just let me pee myself before that happens…» For once, someone seemed to be listening, and Azhani actually felt herself get a little wet down there. But she groaned when it turned out to be nothing more than a bit of pitiful dripping. «Wow, thanks.»

By the time they crossed into the palace district, Azhani had stopped paying even the slightest bit of attention to her surroundings. Every fiber of her being was dedicated to her overwhelming need to empty her bladder. It didn’t matter where or how, so long as she did it now. Even at this point she still wasn’t sure what would happen when her body found out that now wasn’t possible. A vague hope returned that if her need was this great, then wet pants were surely imminent. But it was still very possible that her body was simply teasing her; making vague promises that she needed to piss immediately or else, but never actually giving a real indication of what “or else” would entail. Whatever it was, there was no doubt by now that it would be happening soon.

The only question that remained was whether she’d be in jail when the time came to find out what that meant. Whether she could hold out until she had some privacy, or suffer whatever consequence her bladder was threatening her with. It didn’t seem that she had particularly favorable odds on that front, and she was ready to surrender to the reality that within the next few minutes the ocean imprisoned within her would stretch her bladder too far; that her body would be unable to cope with the pressure.

And then she felt the cart stop moving.

Her ears were ringing, but she could still barely make out a command to get to her feet. So Azhani forced herself to stop wiggling, replacing that movement with full-body trembling, and she carefully rose out of her seat and stumbled off the cart on her own. For whatever reason neither of the guards with her laid a hand on her until her toes hit the stone path leading to the prison, and more importantly to her salvation. Only once she was standing as upright as someone in her situation could did a hand grip her arm and lead her forwards. It was faster than she would have liked, and each step hurt her bladder more than the last, but that didn’t matter anymore. Even the torment of climbing the short set of stairs to get to the prison itself almost felt tolerable now.

But there was a problem.

Once they got inside the prison, they stopped, leaving Azhani to dance in place. Couldn’t they just let her run off and pick a cell on her own? They could do whatever paperwork they had to do in the meantime, and she would be waiting for them to make her imprisonment official. Sure, if they left her to her own devices now, she could escape, but what benefit would there be in that? She didn’t need freedom. She needed privacy. She needed relief. Trying to escape would just attract more attention and force her to wait even longer before she could get a taste of that most wonderful feeling of setting free the liquid gold she’d accumulated over an entire day. It would be nothing short of raw ecstasy, if only she could get to a cell right away.

But, no. She knew damn well it didn’t work that way. Before anything else could happen she had to survive the process of being written into the Legion’s records. And so, with what little strength she had, she quietly answered what the warden at the desk asked of her, using only as many syllables as necessary to conserve energy that she’d need in the immediate future – “Azhani”, “Rimmen”, “Fourth, one-seventy-nine”, and “no” four times seemed to be satisfactory, which was rather impressive given only two questions were yes-or-no: if she was a citizen of the Empire, and if she knew the exact date of her birth. The other two were where she lived and by whom she was employed.

Then, rather than being led down the stairs to the one place she most needed to be right now, she was guided to stand with her back to a wall. She was hunched over, her legs were knotted up, and she couldn’t stop herself from swaying back and forth. The guards didn’t seem to like any of that, and one of them commanded her to straighten up.

In an effort to comply, she untied her legs and made sure both sets of toes were touching the floor, though her legs themselves remained inseparable. These she straightened as well as their structure would allow, then she pressed her bound hands into her back and tried to straighten that up as well. But the effort of doing so was too much, and she fell back into her hunched position with a bit more bend to her knees. A whining growl came from her mouth, but it seemed the guards were short on sympathy.

Two of them together forced her into the position they wanted her in, pulling her up so that her legs, though shaking, were as vertical as they would be were she standing naturally, and one of them even got a foot in to force her legs slightly apart, and all the while her tail thrashed as a demonstration of her discomfort and disapproval. Then she was pushed such that her back was straight, the pain this caused her bladder forcing her to utter a wailing meow that turned into another growl and a hiss through clenched teeth. Fortunately, she wasn’t made to stay like this for too long – one of the guards touched something to the top of her head, then brought it away not even a second later. And once he’d written down his measurement of her height, she was released, stumbling forwards before tying her legs up again and furiously bouncing. After that ordeal she could swear she could feel her urine right at the edge – absolutely ready to come out, but unable to due to this accursed block of hers.

Azhani didn’t care what was going on around her anymore. Her need to be emptied had taken over all of her senses, leaving her deaf and blind by mere virtue of ignoring everything that she was seeing and hearing, and mutilating beyond recognition her ability to detect the passage of time. Maybe it was a minute, maybe an hour, but at some point she could feel something vaguely like a hand grabbing her arm again and pulling her forwards. She could do nothing but follow along and hope her feet would find where they were meant to be. Judging by the number of times she tripped up going down what she assumed to be a flight of stairs, they weren’t doing a good job of it.

After walking for an hour or six or maybe even ten minutes or just two, she stopped and forced herself to hear again. The familiar sound of a metal door being thrown open. This was it. She had to wait but a few seconds more. She felt hands on her own for a moment, then the constricting pain in her wrists left her, and immediately afterwards she was shoved forwards, stumbling past the open door and into her cell.

Now she forced herself to see, and with her hands now free one was immediately shoved into her pants to press hard against the opening there, and the other hand went to the steel ball in her belly in hopes of soothing it a little. As she had hoped, there was nobody else in the cell, and more importantly there was a bucket right in the middle of the floor. Not that she needed a bucket specifically, but if the option was there she would at least try to avoid doing her business on the cold stone ground.

Azhani hobbled over to the bucket, and upon reaching it she turned around and brought her free hand to her waist, getting a grip on her pants. She started using this one hand to tug those pants down as far as she could get them while she watched through her cell door for the guards to leave. They weren’t looking in at her, but they were there, and she was praying that they’d wrap up whatever conversation they were having so she could let go.

This prayer, of all the ones she’d tried over the course of the day, was the one that got a satisfactory answer – Azhani pulled her hand out from between her legs and bent her knees in a half-squat just in time for the last glimpse of the soldiers to disappear from view, her bladder in that very same instant surrendering completely.

Her entire body shook, and she closed her eyes and opened her maw in a silent scream. Tears were running down her face, her tail was as vertical behind her as it could get while shaking uncontrollably, and she wasn’t sure what to feel. Everything still hurt, and the lingering pain in her bladder was overpowering any relief she might have felt, but…

She’d done it. She hadn’t broken anything, and was now expelling countless hours’ worth of liquid waste from her body. Just by the sound of it she could tell that this particular pee break was more intense than even her most desperate of alley runs. The sound of a great torrent striking wood was drowned out almost immediately by one beyond that of a mere stream hitting a puddle. This was the sound of an obscene volume of highly-pressurized water crashing into yet more water, and it gradually changed as Azhani’s relief continued – the bucket filling up could clearly be heard, and before long the sound of excess flowing down the sides was clear as well. But even if Azhani cared, there was no way she would be able to stop now. Not until she was well and truly finished, and if she had to fill the room up to her ankles, then so be it.

Only now did the feeling of relief begin to set in. With a puddle forming on the ground and threatening to wet her toes, Azhani dug into her thigh with her left hand, her right still holding up one side of her pants with such force that she had no doubt torn a new hole in them. From her wide-open mouth came a strained and ragged sigh, followed by deep shaking breaths while her chest heaved and the tears streaming from her eyes became those of bliss, not pain.

When Azhani’s breathing finally stabilized, the jet of liquid surging from her nethers had not let up even slightly. Her toes were certainly wet by now and the puddle she was leaving was starting to threaten the sack of grass on the floor that was supposed to be a bed, but she showed no signs of slowing down nor could she stop even if she wanted to.

She brought up a hand to rub at her eyes, still breathing heavily, now through her nose. That entire arm fell limp when it was no longer needed by her face, and she gave a little sigh. Every part of her was sore. Her legs were starting to feel too weak to hold the position, but she forced herself to stay as she was. Even though her lake on the floor already covered a respectable area, she still didn’t want to risk moving and spraying down the entire cell while she tried to get comfortable. Even dropping into a proper squat would, she figured, change her aim enough that she’d be peeing into the hallway, or else soaking the floor near enough to the bars that the puddle there would spread to the outside.

A hand drifted over to her belly, poking curiously at the tender skin that had spent so long stretched out so far. Even now it was still sticking out somewhat, though with her bladder draining the bulge it had made was actively shrinking. Azhani kept her hand there while her waterfall finally started to die down, rather quickly and unceremoniously reducing in strength to a weak trickle and a last few spurts by the time her abdomen returned to its normal non-distended state.

Now Azhani groaned, falling backwards and landing seated awkwardly in part of her puddle, legs conveniently positioned so that her pants would avoid any harm, and she brought her knees in to slide her pants the rest of the way off before tossing them over in the direction of the bed. It didn’t truly matter to her whether or not they got wet, since they were practically garbage anyways, but with how worn out every last muscle in her body felt Azhani could tell her bladder control would be non-existent for some time. Even if her pants were garbage, she still wanted to avoid the discomfort of constantly leaking and dribbling into them. If the price of avoiding that was a little nudity, then so be it. She could already hear the crude jokes people would no doubt make as they passed by her cell – always something about a pussy with her pussy on display. Assuming anyone would notice, anyways; it was getting dark, the twilight coming through the bars in the wall behind her giving an awkward shine to her spill.

With the last bits of energy she could pull together, Azhani dragged herself into a corner that was yet untouched by her golden ocean, leaning back and slouching with a sigh. She made sure her legs were spread enough to keep her fur out of harm’s way, then closed her eyes and surrendered to the exhaustion. The last thing she heard before her senses faded was the hissing of a weak trickle of pee that had either been left over or hadn’t reached her bladder before then.

The cell was lit by the last light of the moons just before dawn when Azhani pulled herself out of sleep, just in time to avoid a disaster. In her dream, she had been in Rimmen, in dire need of a place to relieve her aching bladder. Nobody made any sense when she’d begged them to tell her where she could find such a place, and all of the signs that should have marked public bathrooms were illegible and had in truth led her to temples, shops, and Thalmor offices, and in none of these places could she find so much as a cup.

So she had to run through the streets to find anywhere she could go, anything that she might be able to pee into. When she stopped during her sprint to get her bearings, a little burst of urine squirted out of her and got her wet in a very strange way – the fur on her butt and a bit of her thighs got wet, but her pants were spared and there was no sign of wetness on her front beyond her lips.

Then, by some miracle, she saw ahead of her a structure she recognized as an outhouse that would suit her needs perfectly. But when she ran up to it, the door refused to budge, and when she pounded on it the voice of her sister came from the other side, the only voice that spoke clear, telling her to be patient, for big sister had only just sat down, and had been actively having an accident while she got her pants out of the way.

So Azhani had shamelessly performed a dance that she knew all too well from her adventures as a cub, whining and wailing at her sister to hurry up or else she’d pee her pants. But the door stayed locked and dear big sister only said that she would be done in but a minute.

But Azhani knew she had not a minute to wait, and pulled at the door yet again. This time, somehow, it opened, and somehow there was no sister seated within. Azhani didn’t even bother taking her pants off – she just sat down and started peeing.

And that’s when she woke up, forcing an escaping trickle to stop. Her bladder burned almost like it had the day before. She jumped to her feet and immediately forced both hands between her legs, her knees practically stuck together and her toe-claws anxiously scraping at the floor. It took a moment for her to figure out where she was and why she had no pants, and a moment more to identify the bucket into which she was meant to relieve herself.

But the bucket was full, and there was a massive puddle on the floor, and of course the powerful scent of urine was omnipresent. Groaning, Azhani turned around and simply dropped into a squat. As soon as she removed her hands a thick stream came out and splashed against the corner of her cell, but it turned into a trickle and then to dripping in a matter of seconds. Then Azhani gave herself a little shake before standing up and running her tail between her legs to make sure she’d cleaned up all the excess. She took careful steps to a different corner which was yet dry, then sat back down and groaned.

She had a long day ahead of her.

[Lindzthe angel]

That was a fantasmic story and a really enjoyable read