by Logan Jacobs
“I didn’t save Ferndale for a reward, I did it because of a prophecy-- ” I began.
“This is part of fulfilling the prophecy, Vander!” Lizzy interrupted excitedly. “The nice baron here will give you whatever you need to hand Thorvinius’ ass to him on a silver platter.”
“We need honey mead and gems,” Willobee asserted immediately.
“I could use a new bow,” Elodette spoke up.
“I am tired of wearing Nillibetian pink, I would like a new gown more befitting of my station and more becoming to my figure,” Florenia sighed.
“Be quiet, everyone,” I said.
“I shall provide gowns for the ladies, and weapons of your choice from the armory… and as much honey mead as you can all drink,” Lord Kiernan said with a smile. “As for gems, all the ones in this household belong to my wife. She wears them as jewelry and would rather not part with them, I’m afraid.”
“Qaar’endoth requires one other service of you,” Florenia announced.
“I do?” I asked as Lord Kiernan turned his attention to the hazel-eyed duke’s daughter.
“Yes. You require a magnificent temple to be built with an altar to host your statue,” she explained.
“Ohhh, actually, that’s a great idea, but it doesn’t need to be magnificent at all,” I corrected her quickly. I didn’t want the silver-haired baron to think I was as greedy as my friends were, and there was no reason for him to beggar himself building a flashy temple when I was pretty sure that basically any building designed and built for the purpose of a temple would do the trick. Hakmut’s wooden village one had worked, after all. It was the principle that counted. A god didn’t count numbers of spires or assess the artistry of mosaic windows. Those were flourishes for human benefit. “Just, ah, something modest, if you don’t think that would be too expensive to build.”
“That can be arranged,” Lord Kiernan agreed willingly. “I shall need to hire masons to repair the bridges that I destroyed in order to contain the ghasts. I shall have them erect a stone temple within my walls as well. A simple one, but durable. This castle lacks one currently. I am not a religious man myself and have never declared for any god, but I think perhaps my people would find a temple reassuring, and no other god but Qaar’endoth has ever saved one of my villages, as far as I know.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You saved my barony. It may not seem like it, but if the plague had spread over the river, everything might have been destroyed,” he replied. “This is my way of thanking you. I am not a man comfortable with being in another’s debt. Now, my servants shall escort you to your rooms, where there will be baths and new clothes available for you before dinner.”
Ilandere burst into tears.
Lord Kiernan looked over at the beautiful centaur with concern.
“She’s just happy,” Lizzy explained as she rolled her spring green eyes.
When the baron’s servants led us to our chambers, it turned out that he had arranged for a room for the two centaurs to share, a room for my three selves to share, a room for Lizzy and Florenia to share, and a room of Willobee’s own for the gnome. I was so exhausted from our seven days fighting Hakmut’s plague, during which I had barely slept, that one of me just went to crash in Willobee’s room for a nap.
But as for my other two selves? As soon as the servants left Lizzy came knocking on my door, and one of my selves left the room to go join Florenia.
Of my room’s furnishings, Lizzy said, “A place like this, it kinda wakes my old thieving instincts, till I remind myself I’m with you now, and I don’t need to do that no more. But any of my old crews would’ve creamed their pants to be let on the inside of this castle, and with no servants even with an eye out neither.”
Florenia’s remark on the subject was that the room, and the castle in general, were “a wee bit shabby, but serviceable.” She had been careful to withhold any complaints about the living conditions on the road or in the village, which had been many times rougher, but I guess she felt that a fellow aristocrat’s residence was more fair game for judgment, and the baron’s castle seemed to make her instinctively revert to the role of a duke’s daughter.
The most eye-catching feature in each room, however, was one large copper tub filled with freshly drawn water that was still steaming.
“It is time for your bath, my lady,” I told Florenia. “Allow me to prepare you.”
She stood still while I peeled off her layers of vestal’s robes and revealed her willowy golden body with its elegantly proportioned curves. Then I lifted her onto the silk-sheeted bed. She perched on the edge and watched me eagerly.
“Lie down,” I told her. She settled down on her back, and her breasts rose and fell with her excited breathing.
“Spread your legs,” I commanded, and she spread her slender legs so that the lips of her sex parted. I knelt between her thighs, hooked my arms behind her knees, and pulled her across the bed toward me to bring her entrance to my mouth. First, I flicked her lightly with my tongue, then I started pushing deeper until she moaned, and her thighs clenched around my head.
“Qaar’endoth, I want your cock,” she gasped after she came down from her climax.
I threw all my clothes off as quickly as I could. Then I picked up the quivering woman, carried her over to the tub, and climbed into the steaming water with her. I lowered her onto my lap so that we were both submerged to about waist level, and she braced her hands on the edges of the tub in order to work one leg over to the other side of me so that she could straddle me. The combination of her wetness and the water allowed me to slide into her tightness with relative ease, and she threw her arms around my neck, nibbled at my ear, and pressed her breasts up against my chest to bring every possible inch of us into contact while she rode my cock blissfully. In the water, we were semi-floating, and everything we did felt more graceful and effortless. We did not get out of the tub until the water had grown cold without our noticing.
Meanwhile in the neighboring room, Lizzy had promptly flung off her own clothes and jumped in the bath. She noticed me staring at her, grinned, and arched her back to thrust out her already extremely prominent breasts. Then she dove fully under the water. While still submerged, she reached up a clawed hand for the little copper ledge protruding from the tub where some soaps and oils had been left in colored glass vials, and with one swipe knocked them all into the tub. None had been stoppered, so the room filled with various floral and herbal perfumes as the contents swirled through the water and the emptied glass vials clinked gently to the bottom of the tub.
Lizzy burst to the surface coughing.
“Hell, that’s strong stuff,” she gasped and spat some out of her mouth. Then she plunged back under and through the multi-colored iridescent haze I saw her work her fingers furiously over her scalp and down to the ends of her hair. Her claws appeared to snag on all the tangles, but after a minute of this hair-washing, the crusted knots had either softened themselves out, or she had torn through them. She surfaced again and started rubbing the soapy perfumed water under her arms, and then through the tawny fur on her hind paws. When she had worked her way up her legs to start rubbing the patch of hair between them, she looked at me mischievously, but I was actually equally mesmerized by the sight of her face.
I had seen Lizzy’s face countless times before of course as we had spent every day together ever since I stopped her from robbing Willobee on the road. Her bright grass-green eyes, her faint freckles, her pert little nose, and her lips with their feral curve were all familiar to me.
Yet all of these features had always been surrounded by a cloud of shaggy dust-coated light hair. Now that Lizzy’s mane was completely slicked back and had acquired a darker toffee color from the water that soaked it, which left only her long pointed ears standing upright, her features were transformed from being impish and cute into being striking and exotic.
I realized that her human eyes had a very slight upward slant at the corners, like wolf eyes,
that I had never really noticed before. Her tanned skin glistened instead of being matte with dirt as usual, which highlighted her cheekbones and jawline and made all of her features look sharper. My ragged bandit woman suddenly looked more like some kind of mystical queen, and as I stared at her face in awe, she rose up and exposed her full nakedness to me. Then she shook herself like a dog which both splashed and sprayed water all over the baron’s expensive carpets. Then she jumped out and started tracking soggy pawprints across them as she headed for the other side of the room.
I was painfully erect from watching Lizzy bathe while my other self was licking Florenia in the other room, so I had every intention of grabbing the wolf-girl and throwing her on the bed as soon as she emerged from the tub, but she looked so purposeful that I was curious to see what she would do next. What she did was go to the wardrobe and paw through it until a dark red material caught her eye. She took out that gown, threw it on the bed, and looked at it.
“Hmm,” she said and reached down to tear the neckline lower with one of her claws. Then she pulled it over her head. The dress had long flared sleeves and a white inset in the middle and was trimmed in silver. Once Lizzy cinched the laces tight across the front, her large round breasts bulged precariously out of it thanks to the lowered neckline, and her slim waistline was clearly outlined. I reflected that this outfit showed off exactly the assets that the ill-fitting leather surcoat had mostly concealed, although it did cover her previously bared legs in exchange. I wished she hadn’t put it on quite yet though.
“Like it?” Lizzy purred at me. Then she pinched the hem in her fingers and twirled wildly, which exposed her strong legs in their full length and her generous ass. I realized that I didn’t, in fact, need to unlace the elaborate dress to gain access, and I was too impatient to go to the trouble of unlacing it right then. So in response to Lizzy’s question I lifted her on top of a decorative table in a seated position. Then I kicked my pants down to my ankles, hiked Lizzy’s red skirts up over her hips to get them out of the way, and with both of us still half-clothed fucked her so furiously that the wooden table started cracking against the stone wall.
Several hours later when servants came to summon us all for dinner, I saw that Willobee had removed his chainmail in order to better show off his new violet suit of velvet clothes, similar in style to his old red one. His favorite cap with the ostrich plume, however, he had retained.
Ilandere and Elodette continued to wear their usual translucent pink blouse and short leather breastplate, respectively. Ilandere explained that the shirts the baron’s servants had left for her had been too large to fit, and Elodette scoffed at the idea of wearing “human” clothes, although her breastplate looked like it was made in a human style to me. The centaurs were, however, rosy, wet-haired, and gleaming from recent baths, and Ilandere excitedly described the tub that had been brought to their room, which sounded exactly like the two I’d seen, except much larger. I wondered why the baron’s household would even have a need for a tub of those dimensions, but I guessed it was fortunate they did, since it would have broken Ilandere’s heart if she didn’t have the chance to try out a long-awaited bath in this castle.
Florenia wore a gold dress only a few shades darker than her skin, laced tight across the front like Lizzy’s outlining the shape of her torso.
When we sat down to dinner with the baron and his family, I realized I was glad that Lord Kiernan hadn’t gone through with his original idea of offering me one of his daughters, since the two of them were only eleven and thirteen years of age. Their names were Lily and Rowena, and they were transparently besotted with me and chattered throughout the whole meal about subjects like the names and personality quirks of their pet birds and the new embroidery techniques their nurse had been teaching them recently.
Florenia engaged Lord Kiernan in an intense conversation about the political dynamics between the most prominent noble houses in the region which I mostly could not follow at all since I had only been taught about other important temples. His wife, Lady Alice, listened in and smiled and nodded at vaguely appropriate moments, but she contributed so little that I got the sense she didn’t understand much more of their conversation than I did.
Willobee got progressively drunker on goblet after goblet of what he called the finest honey mead he’d ever tasted, which caused his accounts of his heroic adventures as my indispensable right-hand man to spiral into ever-increasing levels of implausibility.
Right after Willobee regaled the table with such a compelling description of how we had almost been captured as sex slaves by a vicious school of river sirens that I myself almost forgot that such an event had never occurred, Lord Kiernan exclaimed, “Willobee of Clan Benniwumporgan, you are welcome at my table for as long as you and I both live!”
“We should stay here forever, Master,” Willobee said to me hopefully.
“Well, we could use it as a base for now, from which to launch raids on nearby temples and gain more of you, Qaar’endoth,” Florenia suggested.
“I’m not going to raid the temples of any gods that have done me no wrong,” I said immediately. “That would make me no better than Thorvinius.”
“Ah, The Devourer,” Lord Kiernan remarked. “Yes, I have heard of him, and the reports are troubling indeed.”
“You have?” Florenia asked worriedly. “He is not attacking secular strongholds now, is he?”
“No self-respecting god would,” I replied. “Orders might use the resources of secular strongholds to sustain their members, but gods do not attack mortals that have nothing to do with them. Only other gods, and the mortals that serve those gods. Or their own mortal servants if those servants displease them.”
“So gods do attack mortals,” Lizzy said huffily.
“Only as they relate to gods,” I tried to explain.
“Well, they don’t attack secular strongholds,” Florenia said. I wondered if she had noble friends whose safety concerned her.
“No, not even Thorvinius that I know of, but my brother-in-law writes to me that three temples bordering his domain have fallen to Thorvinians in the past month, and he had friendly relations with those temples,” Lord Kiernan sighed. “They were critical to the infrastructure of his earldom, not to mention the morale of his subjects.”
“Where does your brother-in-law live?” I asked. This could be a clue to the whereabouts of Thorvinius’ temple. His slaves were rampaging across the entire countryside, yes, but a concentration of attacks in one particular area meant there was likely to be a concentration of forces there too.
“Come to my study,” the silver-haired baron invited me as he stood up from his chair.
“In the middle of dinner, my lord?” Lady Alice objected.
He smiled at his wife. “This is important to our friends, my dear.”
“Very important,” I agreed.
The baron led me and my team to his lavishly appointed study. I re-assimilated into one body so that Lizzy, Florenia, Elodette, and Willobee would have room to stand with me around the vellum map that Lord Kiernan unrolled across his desk for us to look at.
It was elaborately detailed with terrain features, and the borders of various domains were outlined, and marked with the crests of the houses that held them. Tiny ornamental monsters of every description also frolicked across the landscape-- trolls and goblins in mountainous areas, sandworms in the desert, krakens in the seas, dragons around the borders and wherever else they pleased, and so on and so forth. Absent from this illustration of the Kingdom of Ambria was any notation of temples or gods. It was clearly designed by secular cartographers for the benefit of secular audiences. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t be of use to me.
Lord Kiernan pointed to an earldom that was practically on the opposite side of the map from his barony. I wasn’t sure how accurately the map was drawn to scale, since it certainly took liberties with the size of the monsters, but it seemed certain that his brother-in-law’s seat lay hundreds if not thousands of
miles to the east. I was shocked despite myself. How could Thorvinius’ reach extend so far? How could his supply lines possibly traverse the entire kingdom?
“Thorvinius must have two temples,” Florenia whispered. “If not more.”
She was right. I had thought those days were over. Once, only one god had reigned in Ambria. Luma, who had walked the earth in a human incarnation, like me. But that was a thousand years ago. Then his younger brother and rival had been born and started impregnating mortal women with gods and demi-gods faster than a dandelion could spread its seeds. The godly squabbles for power that ensued had prevented any deity from truly dominating the people since, and fewer and fewer had even gained enough worshippers and resources to sustain more than one temple.
“Well, did your brother-in-law mention the order in which the temples bordering his domain fell?” I asked the baron. “And where were they positioned, exactly?”
“I don’t know exactly, but he did describe the sequence,” Lord Kiernan replied. “He said the Temple of Dartmus, to the northeast of his earldom, was first… and then the Temple of Arvinius, which sits upon Lake Lortimer, here… and then the Temple of Ayla. That was the greatest blow of all to his people. So, it seemed that Thorvinius’ forces were moving in this general direction, circumventing the earldom itself.” He traced his ruby-ringed finger across the map, around the border of his brother-in-law’s domain, in a vaguely western direction.
I moved my eyes back over to the side of the map we occupied currently. “Ferndale is here, and Oakdale is here?” I pointed.
“Yes, just about.” The baron corrected my estimates by just a few millimeters.
“The Temple of Nillibet would be right around here,” Florenia pointed. “We were moving south…”
“And the Temple of Qaar’endoth, here.” I stared for a long moment at the completely unmarked spot on the map, beside the mountain range and the forests that I recognized the shape of, where all the friends and teachers of my youth had perished in one night.
