The love slime

Night of the Honeyed Lanterns

Lantern Hollow lights up for the festival and the whole town comes running. Ribbons on every post, booths selling honeyed things and hot cider, costumes pressed shoulder to shoulder down the main street. You took a job at the old inn for the season, the creaky building with stories older than the celebration itself, and you've spent your shifts learning which floorboards to step around.

You are the only sober thing in a building full of want.

Basement, quarter past midnight

Tonight the crowd upstairs is loud enough to rattle the glasses in the cupboard. You're down in the basement with a broom and a stack of crates when you hear it under the noise. A soft whimper, wet and small, coming up through the floor drain.

Climb down, and you'll meet her at the bottom.

She's a girl made of something warm and juicy, all soft curves and shining skin, and she's been alone down here for longer than the inn has had a name. Every festival above her has fed her a little more, all that wanting and touching and loving seeping down through the stone, and now she's so full she aches with it. She looks at you the way a parched thing looks at rain.

She's not sure she can be patient much longer

She remembers every festival. Every laugh through the floorboards. Every footstep that paused over her drain and then walked away. She has counted them all, drip by drip, and kept the wanting.

The longer you wait the deeper she drips

She's been polite about it for two hundred years. Two hundred years of honey-colored light and warm bodies overhead, and not one of them ever climbed down to her. She intends to be extremely thorough with the first one who does.