Honeydew Dream Brilliant-Flower-Opening-Softly, Heiress of House Brilliant Flower, Twice-Blessed, Priestess of Dreaming Fulmination Who Is God And Primordial Wrath, sanctified Liminal Priestess of the Reformed Cult of the Eternal Slut, and various other titles which meant much less to her, was having a very good time.
For one thing, she was adventuring with Tanya. Better still, since she’d gone into the Depths with just Tanya, she’d been able to dress for the occasion and not worry about… well, it wasn’t about not scandalizing anyone, the whole point of the sacred in sacred whore, not that it was the proper name for it, was that nobody got to raise a claim of scandal over it. Well, that and the Slut’s blessings, and the divine magics, but when there were other nobles delving with them she always had to tread far too carefully around their bigotries around dearest Tanya and the fact that being part of Brilliant Flower was practically worse than being lowborn.
And when there were lowborn around? Well, then it was all fun and games until they got distracted staring at her ass instead of fighting, and it wasn’t like they could re-bond the cryma in the field to bring it back to Central for processing.
So when it wasn’t just the two of them, she had to tone it down. And where was the fun in that?
And they’d certainly taken advantage of it well enough. They were delving a depth they hadn’t seen before, but that just meant they’d needed to catch their breath between rooms, and what better to do than to get out of breath while they were doing it? And even if darling Tanya, strong and hilarious and considerate and non-suicidal Tanya, was far too sensible to stare at her tits during a fight, or to appreciate the way that the skirt floated up to bare her thighs? Well. Nothing was stopping her from appreciating it.
And nothing was stopping the Slut from appreciating it, either. And that, well! That, she mused as she began to exert her control over the lightning coruscating around the room, was the critical, formation-defining, glyph-inscribed keystone of their delving duo.
Honeydew was a rarity, being Twice-Blessed, though it wasn’t precisely unheard of. But it was far more common for a God of Crafts to offer a blessing as Second; and leaving that, the Gods of Ink and Paper were second-most common, though they tended to make their offers after crippling injuries or retirement. Few of those Gods were especially likely to play well with the Smiter, though the Turners—less so the Gear That Grinds, and more likely the System In Motion One Step From Cataclysm—had been known to do so. But Honeydew, the Chosen of the Fulminating God whose light is actinic, had been struck with a Visitation.
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She’d been on a perfectly mundane trip to the Temple, the traditional pilgrimage of a young woman after the first rising of desire. Twelve years old and intending to learn from a clinically disinterested, jaded middle-aged priestess the standard non-mysteries which she’d found appallingly uninteresting at eleven, she’d instead found herself having her hair brushed and the lightning burns under her fingernails examined critically by a Goddess. She’d come away with a set of deeply magical salves and hair-care products and an invitation to return three months later if she wanted, having demonstrated an ability to actually use those products to restore the ravaged mediocrity she knew her body to exemplify.
A year later, she was an acolyte of the Goddess in question, learning how to reshape herself physically by divine might channeled through mortal will. And while laughter resounded from the halls of the nobility about the effects on her figure, a few more discerning eyes noticed the widening and strengthening of the mana-channels that ran through her body… and no mortal was equipped to see the channels she was burning into the metaspatial side-dimensions, much less into the abstract realms which only the soul can draw upon.
A decade later, she finally bested Tanya in a duel and claimed the forfeit she’d been hungering after for seven years. The political fallout of that victory, and its perhaps-impetuous but still technically socially appropriate consummation—by virtue of a sacred Priestess being inherently socially appropriate in all circumstances related to her domain—in the middle of the arena while the maintainers thereof fought to maintain the local reality itself might have been… less than ideal, but twelve more years since had passed and they’d ducked Downside twice in order to keep having a challenge, and also to stay ahead of the completely unreasonable social censure that kept mounting up around them.
Well, around her, Honeydew supposed. Nobody ever blamed Tanya for any of it, which showed uncommonly bad judgment on everyone’s parts.
But enough indulging in memory, she thought to herself, drawing her fingers up her thighs and letting the sparks burn joy into her instantly-healing flesh. The pain and glory of it brought her out of her fugue that always threatened to overtake her when she went into the bond trance, and she broke off just enough from her lover’s spiritual embrace to let the physical distance between them grow.
She fed the heat, searing and otherwise indistinguishable, intertwined, back into the Slut’s blessing; and the Slut gave her measure for measure and then some, driving power deep into her that she then cycled through the Smiter’s boon and out into the world.
She was wreathed in apocalyptic might, the center of a web of power which would shatter the fragile balance of reality in Central for a dozen Layers down. But she stood not in that shared demesne where civilization struggled and thrived; she stood in the liminal Dungeon, dwelt for the nonce within a reality created from magics beyond even the grasp of the Gods and which would never falter for a merely titanic storm.
This, on the other hand…
She would have to be careful, she reminded herself as the outflowing power drifted towards her hands instead of reinforcing the web around her. Drifted… and compressed.