by Noah Layton
‘Just show me the way.’
‘I’ll come too,’ Ariadne said. ‘I cannot have you getting yourself killed.’
Readied, we waded into the water and treaded for a little while above the light.
‘Stay close.’
Elera slipped beneath the surface of the water with a smile, not even taking a breath.
The nymph’s hand took my own, I took Ariadne’s, and together we dived below the surface.
For me it would have been a case of rapid kicking and wide motions to push me deep beneath the surface, but the moment we were underwater I found myself pulled into the depths at an incredible pace. As a nymph Elera could move at an incredible speed through water.
Elera’s hand remained clasped around mine, more pulling than guiding me through the blue world. We descended sharply to the base of the pool, but quickly the light vanished as we dropped deeper into the darkness along an unseen passage.
If Elera were to let go of my hand there was a decent chance that I would drown to death; I was too far down now to find my way back alone.
We moved horizontally along an underwater passage once we were far down enough. Elera whipped us sharply to the end - in water I couldn’t even fathom how strong she became – to where blue streams of light poured down through the surface overhead.
Arriving, we emerged from the water and into the air pocket, where Ariadne and I took gasping breaths of air. Elera was as normal as ever; she had been breathing the entire time.
The sub-chamber consisted of a small section of the air pocket with a low ceiling and a rocky embankment that led up to a higher point where the blue light emanated from, the source out of sight.
We clambered onto the embankment then waited in silence while I listened for signs of a threat.
From the glowing chamber there was a ringing sound, like a middling key on an old, dying pipe organ. It played constantly in an almost soothing tone.
‘There’s definitely something in there,’ Ariadne confirmed, her ears twitching. ‘I have never heard anything like it.’
‘Only one way to find out,’ I said.
After our skin had dried a little, as well as the fur on Ariadne’s feet and fox-ears, we dressed, equipped our weapons and climbed up and onto the ledge.
The passage proceeded ahead as the light became brighter and brighter, and we arrived in the final sub-chamber.
‘Holy fucking shit... That’s a power well, isn’t it?’
I had never seen one before - I doubted whether my companions had ever seen one before either - but if anything I needed them to confirm my disbelief, and the sight of the object itself told me in my bones that this was what the necromancer at Ichabod’s Cove had spoken of.
It was stationed in the centre of the small cavern chamber. A naturally formed, black rock edge formed the surroundings that kept the energy within held in place.
I approached the well and peered into its depths. From the innards, a glowing, sea-blue liquid swirled and formed, as if it was composed of a trillion tiny forces moving among each other.
The longer I stared, the more I wanted to continue staring.
The necromancer’s words rang in my head.
They are enticing to look at, but each power well possesses what is almost a… Mind of its own. They are unstable, and they can sometimes attempt to defend themselves so that people do not take from their sources of power.
‘Gods...’ Ariadne muttered as her feet struck something on the ground. ‘They’re everywhere...’
I dragged my eyes away and looked to the ground. All around us, scattered over the ground, were hundreds of human bones. They were sat above the remaining rags of clothes that had once covered their long-gone flesh.
I thought back to the hull of the Mossley, and what had caused the men to die in the first place.
‘You don’t think there are sirens around here, do you?’
‘We would have run into them by now,’ Elera said. ‘I have been making far too much noise down her for them not to find me.’
‘Too much noise?’ I repeated. ‘Who have you been talking to?’
‘No one, Tall-Man, but after the other night I have been so lonely down here. I had to find ways to amuse myself.’
Ariadne gave me a knowing smile. It took longer than I would have liked to admit for me to realize what she was talking about.
‘Lonely, huh?’ I said. ‘You said you were used to it after the Black Patch.’
‘I am! I just didn’t know how much I would miss you filling me up.’
I had long gotten used to how casually people spoke about sex in this world, but it still made me smile hearing it.
Okay, maybe this time I was smiling about the fact that this nymph had been craving me so much that she had resorted to pleasuring herself in my absence, but could I really be blamed?
‘All right,’ I said, pulling my power stones from my inventory. ‘Let’s see if this works.’
I tested the blue liquid first, dipping the end of my little finger into it. If this thing turned out to be acidic, I wanted to test it first.
All I felt was the cool sensation of water around my skin.
I leaned forwards with both hands, a power stone clasped in each and, holding onto them tightly, dipped my hands beneath the surface.
The feeling of satisfied desire hit me the moment I looked back to it.
Each of the stones were capable of carrying ten charges each, but were completely depleted. Above each of the stones a percentage counter appeared.
Quickly, they began to tick up.
But something was wrong. I didn’t realize it at first because of the gradual change, but it was real.
The higher the percentages moved, the heavier the stones became.
And then, just like that-
‘I can’t move my arms,’ I said, struggling to wrench the stones out of the well. I strained as hard as I could, but it was if the water was clinging onto me with an unseen, supernatural strength.
‘Perhaps it will release you when the stones are fully-charged,’ Elera said. ‘We will just have to wait it out.’
‘I still do not understand how all of these people died,’ Ariadne said. ‘Wait, did anyone hear that?’
23%.
‘Hear what?’
‘That... Wait, what is happening?’
The clinking of bones upon the ground began to sound all around us. They shook and vibrated against the rocks, the violence of their movements becoming sharper and more pronounced until they began to form together.
It happened too fast for us to do anything about it. In seconds the bones rose up and merged together into skeletal beings that vaguely resembled humans. Bones were mismatched - femurs acted as heads, snapped jawbones crunched as they walked, and ribs swung limply from their shoulders, forming spearing hands.
They can sometimes attempt to defend themselves so that people do not take from their sources of power.
And suddenly I realized where all the bones had come from.
Every adventurer that had found the power well over the years had been enticed by its swirling blue mass. I had been partially hypnotised the moment I looked at it, and the longer I looked the more I wanted to continue looking.
They had sunk their hand in, power stone at the ready, and been held in place. Those earliest had probably starved to death before it, unable to look away from its enrapturing, hypnotic beauty, and those that had come after... well, their hands had remained stuck in place while they were ripped to pieces by the skeleton bastards now rising up from the ground.
But every one of them hadn’t had a dual-scimitar wielding fox-girl and an ice-firing nymph backing them up.
‘Oh, fuck...’ I muttered
‘Just relax,’ Ariadne said, drawing her scimitars. ‘These things should go down easily enough.’
‘Yeah, but there isn’t a whole lot I can do from here.’
‘We can protect you, Tall-man,’ Elera added. ‘Your fox-lady is rig
ht. Relax, and we will resolve this.’
‘I really wish you would both stop telling me to relax, especially when my hands are locked into this thing.’
Dragging my eyes up from the well, I scanned the room. They were everywhere.
I could only rely on my women to keep me safe.
Elera shot a blast of frost towards three of the closest skeletons that were closing in.
Icy shards exploded from her palms and wrapped around our assailants. They shuddered and jolted to a halt, and Ariadne exploded into action.
In a series of quick sweeps, my foxgirl sliced through them, shattering them to pieces. They returned to their original form, fractured parts of a whole, unmoving upon the ground.
But more were coming.
Ariadne and Elera made short work of them as the waves of staggering bones moved towards us, continuing their method of freezing and cutting any that got too close.
I kept calm, taking deep breaths and staring hard at the stones as they filled. This wasn’t a difficult fight for them in the slightest. The skeletons could hardly hold themselves together, never mind suffering the onslaught of the vicious fighters on my side.
The stones filled up in no time.
98%
99%
100%
The power stones suddenly felt as light as feathers.
I turned and switched to the Telekinetic Blast power stone using the move the necromancer had shown me. The Arcane Blast stone vanished, leaving me with a free hand to cast the spell.
‘Telekinea!’
BOOM.
A wall of translucent energy exploded from the stone and struck the remaining skeletons on the other side of the room. Their structures shattered and flew against the chamber walls. In an instant they were vanquished.
‘Why didn’t all the explorers who found this before us do something like that?’ Elera said. ‘I mean, I do not mean to brag, but that was a relatively easy fight, no?’
‘Because every explorer before me didn’t have you two backing them up. This thing is rigged to get you killed if you come down here alone.’
‘I see... Well, when the power stones run out of charges we can return here, but it may awaken these beings once again. We should rid the chamber of them.’
We did just that. With the three of us working together it took little time to gather them all.
The bones stacked into my inventory in piles of 50, with a little surplus being held by Ariadne and Elera. Lara had mentioned a while back that they could be used to create bone meal for the plants, and once they were out of proximity of the well there was no way they would come staggering back to life.
Ariadne and I stripped down again, and with Elera’s help we left the chamber the way we had come and returned to the embankment in the original cave.
I pulled my clothes from my inventory once more and was about to start drying off when Elera asked:
‘What are you doing Tall-man?’
‘Getting dressed. What does it look like?’
‘There is no need. There are no further embankments ahead. But do not worry. The current slows considerably up ahead. It will make for a leisurely swim.’
‘Maybe if we could swim like you.’
‘I promise it will be safe.’
Ariadne and I were already dressed in our underwear and elected to stay in them as we followed Elera into the water. By now I had grown used to its temperature; it was even becoming warm the further we went.
Elera was right. The stream of the current was hardly more than a vague push that I could barely feel. If she hadn’t told me about the current I wouldn’t have even thought it was there.
In the meantime, she literally swam circles around us. She dived beneath the surface and raced ahead, then returned and darted between our forms before resurfacing with a wider grin every time.
‘I love it down here,’ she sighed.
‘Don’t tell me that,’ I laughed. ‘I’ll feel terrible for making you come back to the land.’
‘I would love to come back to the land with you. Even if this potion of yours does work, though, it does not mean that I won’t return to the water when I desire it. It is a part of me.’
‘This seems like the perfect spot for it,’ Ariadne said. ‘It’s peaceful. Secluded. You couldn’t ask for somewhere more pleasurable.’
We followed her until the stream collected into a rocky pool. Just beyond it, the water headed out in a series of trickling streams that spanned off in different directions, heading into the forest.
The water became shallower as the altitude of the land rose slightly. We rose up above the surface to waist height.
‘I could not detect this water when we departed the land in the night because the streams were too small and divided, as well as being below ground,’ Elera remarked. ‘The crashing force of the waterfall was the largest thing that my body could sense, but now that I know this is here it makes life so much easier.’
‘This is truly a haven,’ Ariadne said, smiling and shaking her head in astonishment. ‘Who would have thought that such a beautiful oasis would be hidden so close to the land...?’
I couldn’t disagree. The larger pool where the power well resided was a nice spot, but this smaller pool that allowed an exit into the forest was a small paradise. The swim had been exactly what I needed, but this was the kind of place that I could come to relax, somewhere that nobody outside of I and my wives would know about.
The water was a crystal-blue, shimmering in the light bursting in through the exits to the wilderness ahead. Hanging vines covered the exit copiously, allowing enough light in to illuminate the walls a little – and revealing the missing ingredient that I needed.
I crossed to the damp, rocky walls on the right side of the cave and ran my hand over a patch of a green-blue moss that clung to the rocks. Looking around, there were many other patches just like it.
I pulled away a small section of it carefully and opened my inventory, dropping the item in.
Mermaid’s Breath x2
‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘We’ve got everything we need. I can’t believe this place was right here under my nose.’
‘I know,’ Elera said, crossing to me in the water and placing her blue hands on my chest. ‘I am ever-grateful for you rescuing me from that pit forsaken by the gods. I am blessed that somebody like you would come along and save me, never mind go to the trouble of helping me to survive not only in the water given forth by the land but upon the land itself. I look forward to walking on grass and sharing a bed with you.’
‘That’s what I do for my people, and for my wives especially.’
‘Your… Wives? You wish for me to be your wife?’
‘Of course I do. If you want to, that is.’
‘I… Have never thought about it before.’
‘He is a wonderful husband,’ Ariadne said, undoing her bra and slipping out of it to reveal her perky breasts. She wrung the water from it as she spoke. ‘He takes such good care of us. He rescued me from slavery single-handedly, he promised to help find my people… Not to mention his manhood is to die for.’
‘That I already know,’ Elera smiled.
‘You do…’ Ariadne grinned, looking over at me. ‘It has been days since I felt him move in me.’
‘Don’t mind me,’ I said, rubbing water over my body and cleaning off the last of the dirt that remained after our fight that the swim hadn’t got. ‘I’ll just stand right here and pretend I’m not listening.’
‘Of course you are listening,’ Elera said, nodding to my waist and then turning to Ariadne. ‘Men are so predictable…’
I looked down from the edge of the pool and saw how hard I had grown again.
These two were a force to be reckoned with – they teased me, left me, got me into fights and then brought me straight back to the start again.
‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘I’m not falling for this again.’
‘Falling for what?’ Elera said innocently from the
water.
‘This whole teasing me and then running off thing. I’m not falling for it this time.’
‘I had no intention of teasing you. I knew there may have been something dangerous down there. If you had exhausted yourself with us there would have been no energy in you to fight.’
‘It was you two that did all the fighting.’
‘True, but how was I to know that?’
She grinned at me devilishly and moved to Ariadne, standing in the water and running her wet hands up her toned torso and over her perky breasts.
The nymph stroked her hands over Ariadne’s neck, then gently raised her head to face her.
They both smiled and began to kiss.
I thought back to the cove when I had first had Ariadne and Lara together, and this was a force to match it.
I didn’t think it was possible for me to grow any harder than I already was as I relaxed on the edge of the pool, but I did. My length throbbed with desire for them, desperate to be satisfied, but the more I held back the more excited I became.
My foxgirl and my new wife caressed each other’s wet bodies in the dim light of the hidden cave, kissing passionately before Ariadne took the reins.
Ariadne took her hand and guided her to me. They sank down in the water before me, kneeling either side of my legs. Ariadne took my cock in her hand and raised her tongue to me, looking me intensely in the eyes as she ran her tongue from the base of my shaft right to the tip.
Elera watched her feverishly the entire time, a look of fascination on her face. It wasn’t the act itself, it was the sight of Ariadne doing this to me.
She moved forward greedily, pressing her tongue to my shaft and wrapping her lips around the side of my length, gliding her mouth up and down on me as Ariadne took the head of my dick into her mouth.
The sensation of their hot tongues lapping at me was incredible. We were alone in this secluded spot, the only sounds being those that emanated from the forest and the light splashing of the water as my wives shifted, moaning against my manhood as they pleasured me.
I could have stayed there all day and let my wives fuck me with their mouths, but the sight of them both taking me like this was driving me wild.
I had to have them now – both of them.
