It was like travelling back in time. I closed my eyes and embraced her, letting my hands wander along her face, her skin was so smooth. I explored that mouth I missed so much with my tongue, and every detail was in its right place. Her tongue was as warm and playful as it had come to be during our year together. How could illusions imitate that which the words of men coudld never describe with such mechanical precision.
She smelled like the cologne I had gifted Abeline on her last birthday, one that claimed to smell like tulips and prairie, acquired in a local market of Northeast Simaritan, from a man that barely understand what was asking for, but knew the language of money better than any. We kissed like we had done back in that winter night, outside the piers of Chiscania, when she wore a green scarf she had bought with her reward from the last quest we had undertook. The other two, whose names the time and the mistreatment have erased, the big burly swordsman with more puns than blood in his veins and the small ball of hatred and alcohol we had for a ranger and friend, those two, they were gone, maybe drinking, betting or hiring prostitutes. Or buying cookbooks, what do I know, I didn’t care back then, much the less I can care now.
That night, at the piers, while we looked at the sailboats come and go along the horizon, travel over the full moon’s reflection on the tranquil sea, she kissed me with the same passion. There was an intruding seagull watching us, and I drew a small explosive sigil over a coin I threw high into the air so the sound would drive it away to give us some privacy. Her hair smelled like salt because she had taken a bath in the beach earlier, and I didn’t care. Abeline, for you I didn’t care.
We did not make love, we couldn’t not there, not before marrying each other and sealing our eternal love. Despite our age, we were like a pair of silly teens, having been denied our previous experiences, mine because I never tried to impress or even approach a woman before her, and hers by the rules of her parents on Earth, and of the abbey where she had trained as a priestess on Bengia.
That night, that should have lasted forever, we counted stars while resting on the sand, And I even joke a love like ours would end up with both of us dead in a suicide pact, because it would be too perfect otherwise. She sat, inclinerd her heard over her arms and let out a small jiggle.
“Make me a favor and let me die first,” she joked before luging ofer my face and kissing me again.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“I have a better idea, Abel-abi: we could die at the same time, hand in hand would be ideal.”
“I think that is a fantastic idea, Fra-fran,” she told me, and then nested her head on my chest as I caressed her long, blonde mane. I felt we could stay like that for an eternity, that being mummified in that position would be a blessing for both of us.
Reality came back to me with a whiplash, intruding the illusion by sound alone. Laughter, mockery, parody instead of waves, calm breathing, seagulls.
“Ha! How does human mouth taste, dear? Is he seeing the noisy thing whose name he doesn’t stop calling out, like a dumb child calling for mommy?” Asked Gadorprims, who couldn’t help but enjoy himself while watching me kiss his partner as if she was the woman I so much love—because to put the verb in the past tense would be a denial of reality bigger than all of those I have incurred so far lumped together.
With the face I love dispersed into thin air, I tried to plunge my nails into Scarreladai’s eyes, but her crystallines seemed to be protected by a thick glass instead of a normal cornea. Her long, cylindrical, foul, despicable, nefarious tongue still explored my mouth, so I instinctively bit into it with all my might. That made her hit me with one of her claws on the shoulder, throwing me off balance, making me fall over the other one, sending a spike of pain through my body. Nothing physical broke, but, in that moment, I believed something did. I tried to reach for Jillsenbane, and my hand got intercepted by Gadorprims’ paw, barely avoiding the meat mincing claws.
“What, exactly, are you planning to do? Tsk, tsk, tsk,” he said, and shook his head, faking disappointment. “She was just playing with you, son of man.”
I began to feel sick, with heartburn crawling up my chest and my head spinning. I felt dirty, more so than when drinking blood or cannibalizing a corpse. I threw up, and my vomit collected in a depression of the floor that hosted a couple of gold coins.
“Gadorprims, let him go to his room already. I got careless and broke him, it seems,” She said, with a voice full of weariness.
He released my hand and I scrambled to my feet, quickly recovering Jillsenbane and rushing for the nearest corner, where I trenched with the sword extended in direction to Scarreladai. A dirty, defiled, desecrated man I was. I needed the madman. I need the madman, why give me a taste of a madness so beautiful, yet so frail? I despised it and wanted more, like a rat trying to eat electrified food because she is starving. I loved it and I wanted never to touch the dragon again.
Gadorprims was very interested into the small puddle of vomit. He looked at it, then at me while tilting his head to a side.
“This looks perfectly edible still. Aren’t you going to eat it back?”
That alone made me throw up again.
“More for us, love.”, commented Scarreladai.
“So it seems, dear, so it seems,” he agreed and began licking the vomit.
And, as I crawled away and came back to write this, they laughed like aristocrats.