The next two weeks passed in something of a blur as Lucian settled into a routine. He rose with the sun every morning to a hearty breakfast shared with his hosts, and after that worked on some task around the property. After he finished reorganizing the basement Devyn set him to cleaning the kitchen, and then mucking out the stables, and any number of other tasks to fill the time. Lucian was grateful for the work, if only because it meant he was occupied with something other than his own thoughts.

Lucian would return to the Seward home for lunch, and afterwards spend a bit of time exercising in the yard. Then he'd wash as best he was able. Usually around that time the women of the house would be done with their work for the day, and he'd go through the laborious process of treating Edith’s leg. Lucian was careful not to heal her too rapidly lest the Sewards find his abilities miraculous or otherwise unnatural, but his concern seemed increasingly unnecessary. To call the Sewards medically illiterate would be an understatement.

After her mother's treatment Lucian would adjourn to the dining room with Lysandra for lessons in her native tongue, which he learned was called Frysk. It was a strange language by any measure. It was slurred and stumbling and harsh, reminding him in some ways of the barbarian tongues of the far north. Yet the vocabulary was incredibly diverse. Though Lysandra didn't realize it, Lucian recognized bits of pieces of both the Imperial tongue as well as Sellinica, but other words drew upon roots wholly foreign to him.

The grammar was also odd. Frysk didn't have grammatical gender, but it clearly used to, or at least languages which it developed from did at one point. There was almost no notion of case, everything seems determined by context, unwritten rules, and customs. Frankly, Lucian hated it. That's not even getting into the writing system. He was fine with the alphabet, it was essentially the same as the Imperial alphabet, but as soon as Lysandra started stringing letters together to make words he was done with the language. It was all just complete fucking nonsense. Letters sounded completely different based on the other letters around them, and sometimes they weren't even pronounced! What was the point of even having an alphabet?

It was frustrating and confusing and also just disgusting on so many levels, but Lucian struggled through. At the end of his second week he felt comfortable communicating simple ideas to the rest of Lysandra's family in their native tongue, though his vocabulary was poor to say the least.

One afternoon after his lesson in Frysk his frustration with the language and the latent stress of being confined to the property threatened to overwhelm Lucian. "I need to get out of here," he confided in his tutor.

"In Frysk," she scolded him.

"I want to go outside," he muttered, gesturing to the house. "Nothing. Bored. I want to go to..." he sighed, forming his hands into a crude simulacrum of a hill. "Place. Dirt. Round."

"Hill?" Lysandra suggested. "You want to go to a hill?"

"Not a hill, the hill," he clarified. "Where I woke up. Something to do there. To see."

She shrugged. "Well, sure, we can do that. I can grab one of the guns out of the cabinet and we can go up there together."

Lucian failed to comprehend most of her reply, but he nodded anyway. Lysandra stood and left the dining room where the two of them adjourned whenever she tutored Lucian, and when she returned she was holding one of the long weapons he had come to learn were called 'rifles' in Frysk. Rather ingenious devices, honestly. Much more sophisticated than the simple hand cannons he'd struggled for half a decade to create.

He stood from the table and followed Lysandra out to the porch, where they both stopped to pull on boots. The Sewards had taken the liberty of getting a pair made for Lucian after he cut his foot on a rusted piece of metal in the stables. Thankfully they didn't ask too many questions when it was healed the next day. The boots were exceptionally comfortable, fashioned all from leather with wooden soles. Much more protective than the boots he was accustomed to.

Once he had his boots on Lucian began retracing his steps from the night he woke up. He found it more difficult than he'd expected, but as he walked the Seward ranch his memory slowly came back to him. Tracing his path grew easier once he reached the gate at the edge of the property, still held shut by the stone spike he’d ripped from the earth that night. From that point forward there were no more branches in the path, all Lucian had to remember was the point at which he initially joined the trail.

"What is this trail used for?" Lucian asked in his native tongue as Lysandra worked to shut the gate behind the two of them.

She shrugged, fiddling with the stone spike to get it through the hooks in the gate. "We own a lot of this land, but just don't use it for much of anything. Too expensive to expand the land we already have under cultivation, and the grazing lands we already have are enough for our cattle. Still, we try to ride through every once in a while just to make sure no bandits have set up shop on our property."

"Huh," he grunted in response, surveying the sea of tall grass. It was tall enough to reach his chest. "Why not just let your herds roam, rather than keeping them fenced in? That's the usual method in my homeland - they're only rounded up once or twice a year for the slaughter."

"The breed of cattle we've got don't do well living feral like that," she explained. "Besides, there's all sorts of predators out on the plains. Wolves, wild dogs, and cattle thieves abound."

Once she'd finally secured the gate, Lysandra adjusted her rifle on her shoulder and the pair began to wander at a leisurely pace down the trail. "I must admit, I find it odd that you paint a picture of these lands as so lawless," Lucian commented absently, attention focused on the horizon. "Does your Queen not have enough soldiers to patrol her own territory? Are her vassals negligent in their duties?"

Lysandra sighed, shaking her head as she said, "A little of the first, a little of the second. A few decades ago, before I was born, there was a pretty widespread rebellion against the crown. Queen Marilyn, the Second I think, she hired on a bunch of mercenaries from the Old World to help beat back her unruly vassals. Then she refused to pay her mercenary army when the war was over, and they've been a real nuisance ever since. We've got bandit-queens squatting in old forts all over half the country."

"See, that doesn't so much sound like bandits as it does independent states which seceded from your own," Lucian noted. "What did your Queen expect inviting a bunch of mercenaries from overseas to fight her wars for her?"

"Well, see, that was the case initially but then Queen Evelyn, that was Queen Marilyn the Second's niece and the grandmother of the current Queen Marilyn, she staged a coup and seized the throne," Lysandra explained. "Then she embarked on this big campaign reconquering the lost territories and incorporating them into the crownlands. Problem is a lot of the mercenaries found common cause with the natives. It used to be the case that they weren't much of a threat, you'd fire off a few shots and they'd run off, but now they've grown a spine all of a sudden."

"You could always follow the example of Porphyrus the Slayer of Varconii," Lucian suggested. "There were a nomadic people, the Varconii, pillaging the northern provinces of the Empire. He met them in battle and destroyed their army, taking fifteen thousand of their warriors captive. Then he scooped out the eyes of ninety nine of every hundred, leaving the hundredth with but a single eye to lead the rest back home. It crippled their people, and within a decade they were made Imperial subjects."

Lysandra looked at him oddly after that, her confusion evident. "By Joshua, Lucian, what sort of terrible place must your homeland be to practice such cruelty?"

"It worked," he said with a shrug. "Varconium isn't exactly a peaceful province today, but whenever the locals stage an uprising they get slapped right back down."

The two of them lapsed into silence after that, a silence broken about an hour later when Lysandra whistled to draw Lucian’s attention. "Look here," she said, pointing out some trampled grass at the edge of the trail.

Lucian surveyed his surroundings. There were a few pretty large hills, but the largest drew his attention. "Let's check the view from that one there," he suggested, tapping Lysandra's shoulder and pointing it out.

She nodded, and the two of them cut away from the trail. It was difficult fighting their way through the grass, but the two managed it and within a few minutes they were climbing up the hill in question. At the top Lucian sucked in a deep breath of air, enjoying the crisp chill as a breeze washed over the plains. Admiring the view, even illuminated as it was by the midday sun, it was immediately clear that he'd chosen correctly.

"What an odd place to dump you," Lysandra commented. "The road is miles away still."

"Indeed," Lucian muttered, making his way towards the rough center of the hilltop and sitting down in the grass. It felt strange to be back, wrong somehow.

While Lysandra peered out over the plains, Lucian let his eyes slip closed. A pulse of deitas radiated from the palms of his hands, rolling through the dirt and allowing him a glimpse of what lay beneath the surface. At first he thought it was just a hill, nothing out of the ordinary, but then he felt something odd. A chamber, perhaps forty feet underground. It was crudely constructed using six large, flat boulders, and inside was an open space. Beyond that he couldn't tell what it might contain.

"Maybe magic brought me here," he suggested innocently, turning his attention away from the chamber deep beneath the earth.

Lysandra snorted amusedly, saying, "Sure, I'd bet a witch just swooped down and dropped you in the middle of nowhere. Probably needed your seed for some sort of love potion."

"Your people and mine have very different stories about magic," he replied, craning an eyebrow.

A subtle blush colored the woman's cheeks, a hand rising to cover her mouth as she cleared her throat. "I mean, we have others too. Legends about the great mages of the past who split the continents and raised the mountains, but it's all just metaphor."

"Are these figures which you worship, or just folk heroes?" Lucian asked.

Lysandra shrugged as she wandered closer, pulling her rifle off her shoulder and letting it fall to the ground as she sat beside him on the hill. "Both, I guess? They were the disciples of the the Once and Future King, Joshua. The stories say he created them from clay, and split his power among them to create the world. Then, once they'd finished with their task, he returned them to the soil from whence they came."

"You know, I can't really say I know much about your faith," Lucian told her, curiosity piqued. "Is it only this Joshua that you worship, or do you have other gods?"

Lysandra frowned thoughtfully at that, sighing as she explained, "Well, I don't really understand it that well, and my vocabulary might fail me, but Joshua isn't a god. We don't have gods, just a single God. Joshua is the embodiment of God on Earth, and he's," she trailed off, waving a hand searchingly through the air. "Of the same substance as God? So, he is both man and god, and those things don't conflict. There was this big war, ages ago, between different factions in the Church over essentially a single phrase in our holy book, but that's all been settled now."

"So how is your God different from this Joshua figure?" Lucian asked, delighted by the strangeness of their faith.

His companion scratched uncomfortably at the back of her head. "Like I said, I don't really understand it that well. God is this... pervasive force. He's in everything, everywhere, simultaneously. He's capable of anything. Joshua though was a man. You could see him, touch him, he had children, all that stuff. The Queen's family actually claims descent from him."

"What an odd religion," he commented idly, laying back in the grass to stare up at the clouds as they rolled past. It sounded, to Lucian at least, like their 'God' was the concept of deitas, but Joshua was their version of the Demiurge. Truthfully it wasn't a perfect analogy, but he could see how they might find acceptance among the peoples of the Empire.

Lysandra nudged Lucian’s foot with hers. "What's your religion like, that you find mine so strange?"

"Well, we have many gods," he began. "Hundreds, thousands, as many as you like really. However, they're all just archetypes of a core pantheon, sometimes fused and sometimes split apart, but basically all more or less the same. Now, there's a difference between how the commoners perceive their faith and what that faith actually is. Most people think of the gods as distinct entities, while learned men realize that the gods are all just emanations of the First Principal, but I don't want to bore you with all that philosophical talk."

"You won't bore me," Lysandra assured him. "Do your gods represent different aspects of life? I feel like whenever I learned about old pagan faiths there was always a god of death, a god of the harvest, and so on."

Lucian shrugged. "I suppose that they do. There's Vorsuta, goddess of death, the moon, the seasons, magic, and various other things. She was wed to her brother Ortus, god of the sun, of fertility, and so on and so forth. Ortus was killed by their brother Ligatus, god of war, but Vorsuta brought him back to life using her magic. However, to keep him alive Vorsuta must die and be reborn each new moon. So when the moon is waxing, Vorsuta is a child flowering into womanhood on the full moon. Then as the moon wanes that represents Vorsuta growing old and frail."

"Huh," Lysandra grunted, laying back in the grass beside Lucian. "Yet you call my faith strange?"

He nudged her with his elbow. "All faiths are strange, I suppose. That's why they're so interesting. We have many other gods besides, but now is hardly the time for a lesson in theology."

"Fair enough," she replied. "So did you actually want to come here just so you could lay out on this hill and watch the clouds?"

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"I had some vague notion that coming here would jog my memory, and maybe I'd recall more of that night when I first stumbled to your door," he lied. "Doesn't seem to have worked out."

The two of them lapsed into a comfortable silence after that. Truthfully Lucian wanted terribly to rip the hill apart to discover the secrets hidden underneath, but he buried his curiosity. Whatever lay beneath the surface had likely been there since time immemorial. It wasn't going anywhere anytime soon.

At some point he must have dozed off, because suddenly Lucian became aware of a weight against his chest. Then he felt lips against his own, warm and soft and perfectly yielding. The kiss was brief and chaste, and when he cracked open an eye Lucian found Lysandra's face hovering mere inches from his own. She was sprawled out next to him on her stomach, one arm resting on his chest while the other was propped up in the grass.

Her face was already red, but as her rich hazel eyes opened and met Lucian’s that blush only deepened.

"Sorry," she muttered.

He didn't respond, not verbally at least. Instead he reached up and ran a hand through her silken hair, then gently pulled her face towards his own.

This kiss was longer than the first, and Lysandra responded with more than just the pressure of her lips. Her mouth opened to Lucian’s and her head tilted to the side. Her tongue brushed lightly against his top lip before retreating, then dipped back in again for another pass.

She tasted faintly of coffee, but Lucian didn't mind. When they finally parted the two of them were both a little out of breath.

"This is a bad idea," he said, more to himself than to her.

"Probably," she admitted. "But I don't care."

"I don't either," he said as she climbed onto his lap, her weight settling comfortably against his hips as she straddled him.

His hands found their way to her waist, and Lucian began pulling up the fabric of her shirt even as she leaned forward to join her lips to his again. He felt her fingers start toying with the laces of his shirt, fumbling to get the knots undone. He sat up, wriggling so that she could get his shirt off just as he liberated hers.

Then her hands were on his bare chest, forcing him back into the grass. Her fingers traced idle patterns over his pectorals and along the faint grooves of his abdominal muscles. She bit her lip as she looked him over, her eyes filled with desire. It was the look in her eyes more than anything that made Lucian’s cock twitch, a soft gasp escaping her lips at the sensation of his manhood moving against her.

Lucian felt her weight shift downward ever so slightly, and her hands found their way from his chest to the waistband of his trousers. It was a struggle to shift the fabric down far enough to free his erection, but after a moment of awkward fumbling the two of them managed it.

She stared at him like a foreign creature, her unbridled curiosity strangely innocent given the context. Carefully, tentatively, she gripped him with both hands around the base and began to slowly stroke. Her motions were clumsy and unpracticed, but nonetheless she was able to milk a bead of precum from his shaft. She spread it around his head with her thumb, and he sucked in a sharp breath as a bolt of pleasure shot up his spine.

Lucian reached for her, but she batted his hands away and shook her head. "Just... let me," she said, a hint of pleading in her voice.

Lysandra’s eyes flicked up to meet Lucian’s for a moment, gauging his reaction, before she sidled further down his legs and dipped her head towards his groin. Her hands guided the head of his cock to her lips, where just the very tip of him entered her mouth. Lysandra pushed her tongue underneath his foreskin and swirled it carefully around Lucian’s sensitive glans. Clumsy though she was, the sensation was incredibly intense, and he found himself clenching the grass in his fist to keep from writhing.

Lucian let out a shuddering breath as she withdrew, a thin strand of saliva connecting the head of his cock to Lysandra’s bottom lip. She smiled shyly at him and wiped her mouth, then dipped her head again. Her pace was agonizingly slow, but no less effective. With every bob of her head she took a little more of him into her mouth, until finally his tip brushed the back of her throat.

She gagged, pulling away from him, but it was only for a moment. She resumed her efforts as soon as she recovered, bobbing her head more cautiously. She couldn't take more than a few inches of his length in her mouth, but she diligently worked his shaft with both hands.

Lucian felt a familiar pressure building at the base of his cock, a tingling heat that coursed through him and made his muscles tense. "I'm going to-" he started to say, but the rest was lost to a groan as Lysandra squeezed her hands firmly around the base of his cock. She looked up at him with fierce determination, shaking her head.

It took everything in him to hold back, the feeling building to a crescendo within Lucian before it finally passed. She released her grip and slowly lifted her head, dragging her tongue up his shaft as she went. She wiped her chin and smiled down at Lucian, licking her lips. "Was that good?" she asked.

He nodded, struggling to get his breathing under control. "Very, though I would have liked to finish."

"You will," she assured him, rising to her feet and undoing the buttons that secured her pants about her waist. She shimmied the fabric down her legs, revealing a thatch of blonde hair between her thighs, then she stepped out of her pants one leg at a time. Lucian propped himself up on his elbows to watch as she bent over at the waist to pick her trousers up. Intentional or not he was afforded an excellent view of everything from her puckered rosebud to the tight, wet folds of her slit. Then she stood straight, apparently oblivious to the show she'd just put on, and quickly but neatly folded her pants.

The pants ended up tossed gently into the grass beside Lucian’s head as Lysandra reclaimed her spot straddling his lap. She leaned forward, pressing her lips to his and bearing him back down onto his back. Lucian could tell she was nervous. She kissed him with a desperation that her earlier affections lacked. Her pulse was pounding, her hands gripped his shoulder's tightly, and she practically flinched as his hands found their way to her hips.

"We don't have to," he told her as the kiss ended. Gods knew he wanted to, with every fiber of his being, especially after she robbed him of the pleasure of finishing in her mouth, but he wasn't a savage.

"No!" she blurted out, a little more forcefully than she'd probably intended. "I mean, I want to! I'm just," she sighed, reaching a hand up to a stray lock of hair and curling it around her finger. "I've never done this before, I'm worried I won't be any good at it."

"You've been great at it so far," he reassured Lysandra, sitting up to capture her lips in his again. Except this time he bit down on her lower lip, scraping his teeth lightly against the flesh as he retreated. "Just do what feels right and it will work out in the end. It's not complicated."

She smiled, nodding rapidly as she took a steadying breath. "Alright."

He laid back in the grass, and with her hands on his chest for support Lysandra raised her hips. Lucian reached down, carefully guiding the tip of his manhood to her entrance. Then, with agonizing slowness, she began to take him inside of her. Inch by inch he watched himself vanish, until with a shuddering moan Lysandra's hips met his own. Lucian could feel the head of his cock nestled gently against her cervix, and her fingernails dug into the flesh of his chest as the tight walls of her sex coiled tightly around him.

"F-fuck," she whimpered in her mother tongue, leaning back until she was sitting upright in his lap. Lucian felt her clench as he shifted inside of her, a shudder running up her spine.

"Does it hurt?" he asked, resting his hands on her taut abdomen and running them slowly up to cup her breast. Her puffy pink nipples stood proudly, stubbornly erect in the cool afternoon air, and Lysandra twitched as he flicked a finger across one of the sensitive little nubs.

"No," she assured him, "It just feels strange. I'm so... full."

After allowing herself a few moments to catch her breath, Lysandra leaned forward again. Her hands pressed into his chest as she raised her hips, sliding him halfway out before gently lowering herself back down. Lysandra’s head rolled forward as she started to find a rhythm, her chest heaving in great, panting breathes as she picked up speed.

Lucian laid back in the grass, admiring his lover as she rode him. The gentle sunlight of the late afternoon bathed her body in golden light, accentuating every curve of her beautiful figure. She had her eyes squeezed shut and her lips were parted, her soft moans carrying over the plains with every thrust. Her hair fell like pale rain around his face, and Lucian raised a hand to gather it into his fist before dragging her lips to his.

There was a ferocity behind her kiss that he hadn't expected. Her tongue wrestled against his, and she bit at his lip as she rode him harder. Lucian matched her intensity, digging his fingers into her hip with enough force to leave marks.

"Harder," he growled, and she bit his lip again in response.

Lucian felt the pressure building within him as his balls drew up tight against his body. For a moment he was afraid to move in case he lost control. However, with a pulse of deitas, he felt the pressure ease. Using magic was probably cheating, but he wanted to enjoy this.

"I'm close," she panted, tearing her lips away from Lucian’s.

He didn't respond, not verbally at least. Instead his hand trailed down to the point at which their bodies met, his fingers running through the coarse hair crowning her mons until one found the hardened nub of her clit. He pressed against it as she bounced up and down, rubbing it in small circles as she gasped.

"F-faster," she stammered, her voice faltering as her breath caught.

Lucian obeyed, quickening his pace as the muscles in her legs began to tense. He felt her body grow taut as a bowstring, and she bit down hard on her bottom lip in an attempt to stifle her voice. A few more flicks, and she was spasming wildly around his length. Her arousal trickled down his shaft, and Lucian grit his teeth as he fought to hold on.

As her orgasm finally subsided, Lysandra slumped forward against his chest. "I can't... I need..." she panted.

He didn't need her to finish that sentence. Lysandra yelped as Lucian wrapped her tightly in his arms and rolled to the side, carrying her with him. Her legs wrapped reflexively around his waist as he thrust into her from this new angle, and she bit down on the flesh of his shoulder to stifle a moan. She was still sensitive after her orgasm, and Lucian had every intention of taking advantage of that fact.

His teeth found her neck, biting gently into sensitive flesh as he forced himself in and out of her. Her fingers were biting deeply into his back, and he could feel his own release coming on fast.

Instinct warred with his better judgment. Lucian knew that a child would do nothing but complicate the circumstance he found himself in. He knew that pulling out was the wiser decision. Yet it was the tiny, reptilian part of his brain demanding that he breed which shouted the loudest. So it was with a final, powerful thrust that he hilted himself inside Lysandra. His cock twitched against the entrance to her womb as he painted her walls white, and he felt her legs squeeze tighter around his waist as the pleasure of being filled pushed Lysandra over the edge a second time.

Lucian wasn't sure how long the pair stayed like that, locked in one another's embrace. Eventually he felt his erection flagging, and reluctantly he extricated himself from his lover's arms. Lucian reared back onto his knees and slowly drew his half-flaccid manhood out of her well-fucked slit. Then he sat back on the heels of his boots to admire his handiwork.

Lysandra was still gaping slightly open, and a mixture of Lucian’s spent seed and her feminine juices was dribbling down the crack of her ass into the dirt. Her body was slick with sweat, her hair a wild tangle as her chest rose and fell in great, heaving breaths. She was panting, eyes closed, a slight smile on her face as her hands slid down to rest just beneath her navel. She looked completely, utterly content. A sentiment Lucian shared, despite the greater concerns threatening to ruin his afterglow.

He tucked himself back into his ill-fitting trousers, hiking them up to his waist before crawling forward to lay beside Lysandra in the grass. She rolled languidly onto her side, propping her head up on one hand while her other came to rest against his chest.

"It seems like you enjoyed that," she commented idly.

He sighed contentedly, dragging his arms up to rest the back of his head against his hands. Truthfully what he needed in that moment was a nap, but with the sun beginning to set that probably wasn't wise. "I could say the same of you. Did the real thing meet your expectations?"

"Yeah," she said, trailing her fingernails lightly from his chest to his hip and back again. "Better than I'd hoped, honestly. In all the books it's," she shrugged. "Bloodier, more dramatic. The men are usually a lot more demure and bashful about it, but I didn't mind. I kind of liked it when you got on top."

Lucian craned an eyebrow at that. "Is that unusual here? For the man to be on top, I mean."

"I wouldn't say that it's unusual," she said, plucking a piece of grass off his side and flicking it away. "It's just not what I pictured, I guess. In a good way," she was quick to clarify.

Reaching out he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her closer. She was more than happy to cuddle up against his side, and the two of them laid there in comfortable silence, watching the sun dip towards the horizon. After a few minutes Lysandra pulled away, standing up and brushing herself off as best she was able before collecting her pants off the ground.

With a sigh Lucian climbed to his feet as well, and the two of them got dressed. It was a simpler task for him, all he needed to do was pull his shirt back on, so while he waited for Lysandra to finish he grabbed her rifle. Lucian had been meaning to inspect one of their 'guns' as they called them, and that seemed as good an opportunity as any.

It was an interesting weapon, fashioned of polished wood and blackened steel. He thought it rather elegant, really. Pushing down the lever underneath the metal body which housed the firing mechanism caused a hatch in the top of the rifle to slide open. Revealed was a single brass cartridge loaded in the chamber. It seemed quite small to his eye, about the size of his thumb.

He pulled the lever up, shutting the hatch and securing the round, just as Lysandra finished tucking in her shirt. "Do you want to shoot it?" she asked, struggling to get her hair under control.

"I'd be lying if I said I wasn't curious," Lucian admitted. "It's quite different from the," he trailed off, searching for the word.

"Firearms?" she asked.

"Right, the firearms that my people use are more primitive," he told her. "We don't have this loading mechanism, you just shove the ammunition down the barrel."

"We call those 'muskets', and it wasn't so long ago that we were stuck using them," she admitted. "I don't know what the word for it would be in the old tongue, but we call that a 'falling block' design. It's a pretty recent invention."

"So how do you shoot it?" he asked, offering Lysandra the gun.

She took it from him, and Lucian watched as she pulled back an awkwardly bent arm on the top of the rifle until it clicked. "This is the hammer," she told him. "You should always pull it back to what's called 'half-cock', basically the first click, before loading or unloading. Then, once you're ready to shoot, you pull it back to 'full-cock'."

To illustrate, she pulled the hammer back until it clicked again. "Now it's ready to shoot, so you'll want to handle it carefully. Put it up to your shoulder," she did so, though truthfully she braced it more against her collarbone and the top of her chest than her shoulder.

"Then you've got two 'triggers' down here," she said, pulling her right hand away from the gun to point to the two tiny, curved spikes positioned between the main body of the rifle and the lever which controlled the ammunition hatch. "The one at the back, that's called the 'set trigger'. If you pull it, it means you won't have to pull the front trigger nearly so hard to actually fire the gun."

She depressed the set trigger, then peered down the top of the barrel. There was a ring at the end with a metal spike in the middle. Lucian wasn't sure if it was decoration or if it had a practical function, and before he could decide there was a thunderous crack. A pillar of smoke erupted from the end of the barrel, the bullet rendered little more than a blur. It wasn't even a half second later that he heard wood splintering.

Peering out over the plains, Lucian couldn't tell what she'd hit at first. Then she tapped him lightly on the shoulder and pointed out a ragged stump of a tree branch. "Got it in one. Want to try?"

"Very much so," he replied. "Can I try loading it?"

She nodded, handing him the rifle and then digging into a pouch on her belt to grab a cartridge. Lucian gently pulled the hammer back until it clicked, then pushed the lever down to open the breech. The spent round came tumbling out with a few shakes, and then he slotted in the fresh cartridge. He pulled the lever flush to the body of the gun, sealing the chamber, and then dragged the hammer back to full-cock.

Running through a mental checklist, Lucian tried to decide if he'd missed a step. He glanced in Lysandra's direction, and at a nod from her he braced the rifle just like she had - against his chest and collarbone rather than his actual shoulder. Aiming at the tree she mutilated, Lucian squeezed the set trigger. It clicked, and then much to his surprise the very moment he rested his finger against the firing trigger the gun went off.

The recoil shocked Lucian more than the noise or the smoke. It felt like getting punched quite firmly, hard enough to hurt at least. His shot flew off towards the horizon, missing his target by miles. The disappointment he felt must have been obvious, because Lysandra rested a hand comfortingly on his shoulder. "That's alright, it takes some getting used to. Believe me, I nearly put a hole through my sister's foot when she was teaching me to shoot."

"Now come on," she said, reaching that same hand down to give his ass a squeeze. "We should try to get back before my mother sends out a search party."

"That's probably wise," he agreed, handing back the rifle. She reloaded it with another cartridge from her pouch, and then the two of them set off down the hill.