The basket had wire wound leather straps over the top and Fraker was carrying it by the handle as he stomped down the cobblestones of the highway. He was still dressed in his street clothing, heading north from the gates of Novak-Eck as he had for the last two days. The sun was low in the sky, and he knew that there was an established camp area only a few hours further along the road.
"Stupid maitre d', making me wash dishes or he'd tell my Step-Mother. Stupid restaurant for making me pay the damages," Fraker grumbled as he stomped his way up the highway. "Stupid Peepers for..."
A chorus of chirps and hisses erupted from the basket, and the Peeper in his belt pouch popped up to chirp at Fraker with wide liquid eyes, looking hurt and vulnerable.
"No, no, not you ones. Those ones that ... uhh ... from the Tale of the Peeper and the Honey Pot," Fraker quickly lied. There was purring from the basket, and the one at his belt rubbed its head on his shirt and purred loudly. There were a few peeps from inside the basket.
"No, I'm not telling it to you again." Fraker laughed. "I told it to you yesterday." He thought for a second. "Okay, I'll tell you the Peeper and the Scorpion." He shifted the basket. "Once there was a Peeper, named Shassez, who liked to swim in the river. He caught fish, rode lily-pads, dug up sweet frog eggs to eat, but he had no pack-mates and was often lonely. One day a scorpion came to the bank, climbing up on a rock and sighing greatly as he stared at the far bank." Fraker kept up the story, smiling gently when the Peepers reacted with fear, then horror, then sadness as the scorpion stung poor Shassez and they both drowned. Peepers were normally sung the songs to teach them lessons, his Step-Mother had taught him that during his long childhood, and Fraker had a responsibility to teach them during the trek.
The tale taught the Peepers not to trust everyone they met, as the affectionate little reptilian predators liked other living things from the time they hatched, and it was not uncommon for a wild Peeper to adopt baby bunnies, little birds and other wild creatures they might normally eat on a whim. Kind of like the Peeper in his belt pouch had 'adopted' him.
That story finished, he began telling more tales, keeping the curious and energetic little things occupied as the miles vanished beneath his boots, his spurs ringing on the cobbles of the Wild Road.
When he reached the campsite, he set down the basket, removed the leather straps and set the lid to the side. Inside the Peepers all looked up at him, twenty-eight sets of eyes gazing at him with complete and unconditional trust. He reached in and brushed his fingertips down each little neck, starting at the back of the brainpan and running it all the way down to the mid-back. They all purred when it was their turn and pushed to get closer to his hand. After they were all petted, the bronze looked up and peeped curiously.
"All right, you can leave the basket, but when I ring the little chime you need to come rushing right back," Fraker told them, his voice strangely soft and gentle. "This part of the World Roads can be dangerous and I don't want anyone stealing you." Then he poked his finger at the silver one and then the bronze one to emphasize his next point. "And if there are any local tribes of your people, they'll step on the two of you if they see you, so don't stray far."
A chorus of peeps answered him and he grunted.
"Remember, if you hear the chime, run back to the basket as fast as you can and burrow into the sand," he reminded them. They peeped again and then swarmed out of the basket: some of them, the females, following the silver one, the majority of them, the males, following the bronze. Fraker saw the silver and the bronze were each holding the spice shakers stolen from the restaurant. They swarmed into a streppleberry bush and vanished, and Fraker knew they'd be digging burrows to spend the night.
A small peep from his waist drew his attention to the one on his belt. Fraker looked down and raised an eyebrow.
"Don't you want to go play?" the hero asked. The lizard peeped again, sounding sad. "I know it hurts to walk, but you know, you can't live your whole life in a belt pouch, you have to grow up sometime. You've been riding in there for..." Fraker's voice trailed off as he tried to figure out how long ago he had found the lizard. The lizard peeped again. "Really, six months? Shouldn't you be bigger?"
Fraker laughed when the Peeper cut loose with a few quick chirps. "Really? You're just not going to grow up? That's all it is? You're going to live in my belt pouch until the Last Battle and be the same size the whole time?" The lizard sounded off again and Fraker chuckled and shook his head as he dropped his heavy pack to the ground so he could pull his bedroll off the bottom and take it from the sealskin sack it was wrapped in. The lizard kept chattering at him, Fraker nodding and answering in monosyllables as he laid out his bedroll and tapped a runestone dug out of one pocket against a small rock. An opaque white half-bubble appeared over the bedroll. Fraker nodded in satisfaction, then turned to making a fire, a task that only took a few moments since the rocks were set up, a bed of ashes present, and there was plenty of firewood only a few paces away.
While Fraker roasted a bunch of rabbits he had killed earlier in the day, the streppleberry bush quivered and shook, and several times the weird high pitched war cries of the lizards sounded out, bringing a grin to the massive man's ugly face. He knew they were play-fighting over the best spots, invading each other's burrows, and stealing berries and other trinkets from one another. The silver one would be digging a burrow she could hide things in and defend from others while the bronze would be trying to figure out how to get into it and take all her goodies.
He had just begun eating, feeding little strips to the lizard that was still mostly hidden by the belt pouch, when he heard a sudden silence drop over the clearing. The Peepers in the bush went completely silent and the one in the belt pouch pulled its head in quickly as Fraker's hand dropped to his boot and pulled out an unadorned straight blade with a deep blood groove in it. He froze in place after cocking his head slightly, listened for a long moment, then stood up and turned around in one smooth motion, the other boot knife appearing in his hand as if by magic, his eyes raking across the clearing until they locked onto the person stepping out of the waist high ferns and into the clearing.
She moved like silk in a warm breeze, her long blood red hair bound in a braid, bright green eyes with pupils like a hunting cat, her skin the color of oak, and dressed entirely in linen. She wore a plain brown linen dress with blue flowers embroidered onto it, belted at the waist with a blue linen belt as wide as a child's hand with brown wheat sheaves embroidered onto it. Her boots were Von Lon Imperial Legion, the tops covered by the bottom hem of the simple dress, and Fraker knew that a pair of jackal-man fighting daggers would be tucked into them. The woman sat down on the ground, keeping her hands away from her waist and open, showing Fraker that she was no threat. She was beautiful, liquid sex-appeal, packed with grace and energy, her breasts small and firm, hips wide and buttocks a bubble of perfection. Her face was flawed only by a small scar on her cheek that enhanced her beauty rather than diminished it, and her eyes were full of sharp predatory intelligence.
"Hello, youngest brother," the lithe redhead said, leaning back on the mossy log and smiling at Fraker with a mouth full of sharp teeth that showed her inhuman heritage.
"Eldest and most loved sister," Fraker replied, dropping to one knee and bowing his head. He sheathed his daggers in one smooth motion. The little lizard pushed up the lid of the pouch with the back of its head so it could look out without exposing its snout, and Fraker heard a soft susurration of fear. The redhead came to her feet like someone lifting a piece of cloth, a smooth motion that made an observer think of how the woman would feel skin to skin while she moved. She gave a flawless curtsey better suited to a throne room than meeting in the woods, then returned to sitting down while Fraker stood back up, walked to the opposite side of the fire, and knelt down facing the young woman.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
"Traveling alone?" he asked. The woman laughed, a sparkling laugh as clear as a silver bell that danced around the silent clearing. In the belt pouch, the lizard whimpered again and shivered.
"As do you," she replied, folding her hands, her eyes sparkling with mirth. "The great Fraker the Axe, destroyer of nations, deflowerer of legions, renown warrior, Stygian Legionnaire, Survivor of the Valley of the Stacked Skulls, slayer of the Lich King Zubek, Iron Legionnaire, founder of the Brotherhood of the Axe." Fraker's eyes narrowed at the dark mirth filling the words, and did not even flinch when she finished. "Relegated to carrying a basket of Peepers through the World Roads." She laughed again.
"True," Fraker admitted, reaching out and tearing free a strip of rabbit and feeding to the Peeper in his belt pouch.
"How the mighty have fallen." She giggled as Fraker grabbed a strip of meat and shoved it into his mouth, "I'm sure ballads will be sung of this great deed and the bards will compose poetry and plays to this event, and virgins will swoon over this courageous tale of delivery of a basket of babies."
Fraker swallowed the mouthful of rabbit meat. "Our Step-Mother bade me to complete this task," he rumbled.
The woman's eyes widened and she looked around, wiping her palms on her dress covered knees. The mirth vanished from her eyes to be replaced by fear as her hands slid down from her knees to her ankles, disappearing under the edge of the dress.
"Do you require or desire my assistance, beloved youngest brother?" the woman asked, her voice small and trembling at the name Fraker had invoked.
"No, Aveliene, I am sure our Step-Mother has tasks for you," Fraker answered. The woman, Aveliene, nodded slowly, casting one final look around before sliding her hands back up to her knees.
"Rabbit?" Fraker asked, and Aveliene nodded, scootching closer to the fire.
"I almost didn't recognize you outside of your armor," Aveliene said, and Fraker knew she was teasing. She'd known who he was before she had ever even seen him.
"Yeah, I get that a lot," he answered, shrugging.
"So what did you do with it?" she asked.
Fraker went still, his brow furrowing. "You know," he answered softly, "I honestly don't know where it goes when I don't need it, I just know it appears when I need it."
"A gift from our Step-Mother, our Mother, or from Father?"
"Step-Mother and her wife, the Forge Lord," Fraker answered. "One of their many gifts." Aveliene nodded and cracked open a bone to suck the marrow out.
"So what brings you to the World Roads?" Fraker asked. The Peeper stuck its nose out of the pouch and Fraker fed it a tidbit of steaming rabbit meat. Aveliene looked at the pouch and raised an eyebrow but Fraker shook his head and she nodded.
"Someone needs killing," Aveliene replied simply. "Our Step-Mother bade me to do the task, so I shall."
"Anyone I know?" Fraker asked.
"Just some minor nobleman in Novak-Eck. Not sure why she wants him dead, but I'm supposed to make it look accidental, his own stupidity, or the fault of his own little known vices." She sighed and shook her head. "Whatever caused him to come to the notice of our Step-Mother, it's pretty urgent. I'd managed to infiltrate the high levels of the Von Lon Imperial Army command, most of the intelligence and troop movement data moved through my hands, and she barely gave me time to fake my own death and get out of there."
Fraker raised an eyebrow in surprise. Usually their Step-Mother was much more careful, making sure that insertions and extractions of her children could be handled without any danger of blowing the operation after the fact; for Aveliene to have to fake her own death quickly and abandon a task was a rarity.
"Tell me about it. Oh, and get this, after I kill him, making sure it's as painful as possible, I'm supposed to wait a month, then make a personal visit to his survivors." She laughed brightly again. "His surviving family members get a personal visit from me, in the flesh, to tell them that if he had not died before I arrived, I would have been forced to slay the entire family, and to congratulate them on handling the insult to my Step-Mother's name."
"I hate politics," Fraker rumbled.
"That's because Step-Mother never taught them to you," Aveliene laughed, pulling free one of the rabbit's leg and nibbling at it with her sharp teeth. "See, when you kill someone, they only die once. In politics, I can kill someone over and over for years."
"That makes no sense," Fraker grumbled. The setting sun of the World Roads plunged beneath the horizon and the shadows grew.
"I love you sometimes, you know that?" Aveliene laughed. "So uncomplicated, so direct. You're a breath of fresh air in my murky life." She stood up and wiggled out of the dress, standing in the clearing stark naked. A swirling mark swept down her left side, starting on her shoulder, sweeping down her back, breast, stomach and hip, before winding down her leg to her knee. Fraker could see that the runes had grown in the two decades since he'd last seen her naked. Tattoos etched into her skin by the hand of their Step-Mother for deeds done in her name.
Naked she was the picture of the patron goddess of lust: rich brown skin, bright red hair, and a body that was deliciously firm in the right spots and lusciously soft in the others. Her slightly more than a handful breasts looked just as firm as Fraker remembered, dark skin capped with chocolate, her legs still as thick and muscular as they had been the last time Fraker had seen her like that, her stomach flat with a thin layer of softness hiding the hard muscle beneath and no bellybutton to mar its sweet expanse.
"Know my favorite thing about you?" Aveliene whispered huskily. Fraker shook his head, his mouth dry. A normal woman Fraker would already be jumping on, but normal women weren't Aveliene, and Aveliene was nothing like a normal woman. "You know me, and you don't recoil when I'm naked." She stretched, her rib cage crackling and shifting as the ribs vanished to be replaced by a sheath of interlocked cartilage. "You don't look away from me."
She wasn't even human.
"You don't fear my touch, I can be unrestrained without hurting you," she continued, unwinding her blood-red hair from its braid with fingers that were visibly longer than they had been a moment earlier. "I still remember the first time I took you, how I wept for more." Her green eyes were glowing emeralds without a bit of white in them.
Not even as human as Fraker was or had been in his youth.
"Let us feast on these rabbits, and then on one another," she growled softly, licking her lips with a serpentine tongue, the sharp, predatory, inhuman planes of her face rising out of the human softness she normally clothed herself in.
She was a Wraithkiller, one of the last of a race nearly exterminated during the Elder God War. The blade of their Step-Mother, hidden dagger of the All Powerful IV, Queen of the Six Worlds, one of the daughters of the Blossom of Death. She was one of the best, the Sterile Queen.
"Run for me." Her voice was hungry. She reached out and grabbed the last of the rabbit with her sharp taloned fingers as Fraker quickly took off his belt and set it aside, the Peeper inside chirping worriedly.
"It's okay, little one, I won't hurt him more than he asks me too," she reassured the Peeper. Fraker could smell her, a wild feral smell, and it sent his senses reeling as he quickly stripped away everything and stood there naked before her in the light of the fire. Her eyes roved over the hard muscle, the tattoos etched by the same hand as hers, the scars gathered over eons of warfare.
"Run, male, for this stragurt is hungry for meat other than rabbit," Aveliene whispered, shifting to a crouch, one hand reaching out and wrapping around a rock.
Fraker ran into the wildlands of the World Roads and Aveliene followed.
* * * * *
A sharp rapping noise caused the opaque dome to disappear and Fraker stood up, fully dressed, from where he had been sitting after tightly rolling back up his bedroll. The redhead was nowhere to be seen, gone as if she had never existed, and Fraker glanced around while he was dropping the runestone into one of his belt pouches. Satisfied that she was actually gone, he withdrew a small chime and tapped it twice with a cracked and chipped fingernail. The ring shimmered in the clearing and the streppleberry bush rustled as the little lizards poured out of it in two packs, one following the bright silver one, the other following the bronze one, both merging and flowing into the basket to roll around in the sand, snapping and hissing playfully at each other.
Fraker stood up, wincing as he came to his full height, putting a hand to his lower back and grunting.
"Every time. I should know better." He groaned. "It's like rutting with a silk pillowcase full of giant pythons and hot coals." There was a chittering from the belt pouch as he gingerly made his way over to the basket.
"Yes, that's probably when she wrenched my back. Those legs are a lot stronger than they look." He looked down at the pouch. "What were you doing sneaking looks anyway?" There was more cheeping, this time sounding somewhat ashamed. "We do not get covered in slime! It's sweat!" Fraker protested, laughing as he picked up the basket, then groaning slightly as his back cramped up for a moment. The Peeper started up again, this time joined by a few peeps from the basket. "That's not true, where do you little ones get such bizarre ideas?"
As he began walking down the highway of the World Roads, he sighed and shook his head.
"Okay, let me explain the dance of garden faeries to you. When there's a female, those are the ones with the big round bumps on their chest..." There were more peeps. "No, he was just fat. Be quiet. Anyway, when a female likes a male enough and is stronger than him, or can bewitch him well enough, or sneaks up behind him with a rock, or has more sisters than he has sisters, or can get him drunk enough, she decides to..."