A Sweet Demise

"Just a little taste..." Vincenzo Rotella had thought to himself.

As he looked at the black pool before him, he knew how stupid that would be, especially given current circumstances. The traveling swordsman had run into a bit of bad luck lately: Jobs were drying up at the Exploration Guild, and what little they had didn't exactly suit his expertise. Fed up with the lack of work and running out of money to keep fed, the dark haired fox had decided to strike out on his own, hitting up his connections in the capitol until he struck a lead that had suited him.

Now here he was, deep under some hill in the countryside, well inside of one of the treasure vaults of the infamous Lipomancer of Bitemarsh, and he was thinking, quite absurdly, of taking a sip from this pool. Vincenzo might have been brash at times, some might even call him foolhardy, but he was no idiot.

"Yet still..." He sighed, drool beginning to fill his maw as he looked at his own reflection in the perfectly calm, black substance. He might have thought he were looking into a mirror made of the purest obsidian, had he not seen objects submerged within the liquid's surface, had he not scented that sweet, tantalizing smell filling the cavernous hallway.

"No, Vincenzo, do not give in..." He sighed, placing his paw upon the hilt of his sword, as he always did when faced suddenly with overwhelming temptation. Usually though it was something more carnal that pulled at his desires, there were many fine ladies in Bitemarsh he had found, but he had resisted his cravings always. His fingers traced the finely wrought filigree upon the pommel of his sword, shaped into the symbol of the order he and so many other Fervosian fencer belonged to, The Order of the Tangled Thorn. It was there, at its fortress in his homeland, that he had pledged himself to their service, and in particular to the service of his Lady, the fair marchessa Delfina Guererra...

A smile found a place upon his lips as he thought of her, and he nodded, now resolute. Lifting his paw from the pommel of his sword, he proceed forwards. He still had to cross the pool, the cistern that the black liquid filled having taken up nearly the entire width of the hallway, but he knew now that he could resist his temptations, if only he remembered his oaths, his purpose for living, for being here. As he drew closer to the pool's edge, he drew his thin rapier from its sheath, still wary of some sort of trick, and carefully dipped its sharp tip into the still, flat surface.

The pool barely rippled, the substance seeming much thicker than the swordfighter had expected, and dripped sluggishly from his blade as he lifted it to his eyes. The smell was stronger now, so very sweet and tempting, but all Vincenzo had to do was stare down the length of his sword to its intricately decorated hilt to be reminded of his duties.

"I am no glutton!" He snorted, flicking the sludge from his sword with a razor-quick slash before re-sheathing the blade, "And I will NOT be tricked by the trap of a dead sorcerer!"

Now satisfied that the sludge wasn't some kind of slime creature laying in wait, and held no enchantments beyond whatever it was that made it seem so damnably appealing to his pallet, Vincenzo stepped into the cistern and began to wade through to the other side. The pool was much more shallow than the fox had anticipated, his body only sinking in up to his waist at the deepest, central part of the cistern. Even so, the sludge was horribly thick and wading through it felt worse than trundling through mud, clinging stickily to his red fur.

Even in the literal thick of it, the fencer was able to maintain his focus well until he suddenly bumped into one of the objects he had seen half-submerged in the sludge earlier. Looking down, the male caught sight of a fine silver goblet, gleaming in the torchlight as the ooze dripped languidly from its curves. The bowl was ornate, inlaid with sparkling rubies on four equidistant points, but it was the stem of the chalice that caught Vincenzo's eye. Where a normal, featureless stem would be on any other goblet, there instead was a figure carved from the silver, a wolfess both corpulent and voluptuous. Her generous, naked curves were reverently wrought by whoever it was that created the drinking vessel, the artisan naturally integrating the wolf woman's form into the goblet by having its bowl appear to be carefully balanced upon her swollen, globular and bared buttocks. Watching the tar-like fluid drip down the wolfess's curves as he lifted the goblet out of the pool, Vincenzo smiled. The figure reminded him of a woman he knew from the Exploration Guild, though with cellulite and blubber where her toned musculature would be. An unexpected sense of arousal filled the fox as he looked over the curvy wolfess, but he found himself smiling for another reason altogether.