Norhill 715, aft Spring
Sprawl, a heap, an avalanche of humanity crammed in the wedge of pass between frozen peaks. Lydia poised on a garbage heap, one push away from ruin. Avalanche, earthquake, or the sheer press of people, perhaps. One jewel floated, effortless, above the mire: an island of magic, the Academy on the flattened top of a mountain, never touched by the frequent storms.
Glisinda arrived in the trade city a full month after Sebastian's death due to one part human hounding and two parts her own listless feet. She arrived at Roho's door, a sturdy home of rock and clay in the middle class that shoved for space between high Guildmasters and the slums below, carrying a king's ransom in forbidden knowledge in her sack.
The Carpenter family accepted her with more warmth than she deserved, giving her an attic to call her own and helping to steady her amongst the pace of Lydian life. A people obsessed with money, they churned through life as though it was soil in need of a plow. Roho's family, prominent members of their Guild, used extracted coal for their furnace and talked often of strange new mechanics that purported to replace the human hand with fire and steam. The human world struggled on the verge of a growth spurt, and these mineral-rich mountains fueled the first wave.
The nymph gazed out over the landscape and resolved to find a place for herself in this world. Here, the plants stayed calm in their ordered gardens instead of assaulting her thoughts for attention. Stone and plow obeyed. After realizing how little the Forest cared for even Kings who stepped out of line, Glisinda welcomed a new order. She forced her skin to stay a healthy human pink and kept her horns invisible, even when the effort gave her migraines.
A year passed for her in which very little happened. Time built on itself without asking permission. The nymph applied herself to a human job – where they paid in money, not barter – serving alcohol to the big-gut miners who stank of sulfur. She began to study Sebastian's arcane tomes, her Norhill weak at first. In time, the concepts began to brood in her mind, opening up shadowy possibilities for man and mana.
Resonance, reliquaries, charge, flow, taint. Heavy water, mana event, Havoc suppression. The work of Wizards shared more in common with engineering than witchery.
She dreamed echoes of Talia's imprisonment and quest in the Other, but the fragments shattered on each waking until only the loneliness remained.
Her life could belong to any human woman. Sometimes, she pretended as much. Human Glisinda had a simple life, no Wizard-assassin or King-killer. But then she would have to refresh the weave over her horns or slip in little ways – like descending from her attic for breakfast naked.
The Carpenter men sat at the table, chomping on bacon and eggs. A burly bunch, all four sons following their father into the trade. They smelled of wood chips.
Roho coughed, arousal obvious.
For the books, of course. Roho wouldn't be happy until they vanished. The Dryad agreed, mostly, since everyone in the house would hang for her possession of them. Still, she wanted to finish her treatise on ambient mana extraction...
The former Blade's mother, matron to seven, staggered when she saw Glee's bare breast.
Understanding tone if not words, the Dryad tromped upstairs. Back to those itchy cotton dresses, tied off with a plain sash at the waist. Madam Carpenter wore finer things, and the well-to-do women who never graced such meager streets danced about in clouds of chiffon. Clothes indicated social rank in a bizarre dance, and Dryads ranked a few hands above whores.
She considered.
Once full, the Dryad retreated to her attic to read away the daylight, flicking through an atlas and dreaming about Yandra's searing deserts, the fabled pirate islands of the Rainbow Sea.
Roho, downstairs, excused himself to dream of the Dryad's supple flesh and quicksilver eyes in the morning light.
Another day in Lydia, the rhythm of saw and hammer drifting in her window.
That night, a naked Glisinda pounced roof to roof. Her skin, a mockery of the star-lit sky, sang to shift with color again. Lydia loved the spring nights, dressed up in her torches, glowstones, and parties, but the Dryad slipped to poorer places – ones worked to the bone in the day, quiet at night. Ruffian gangs prowled the slum streets, eager for the next wench to rape.
She killed a pack, once. Saw the boys – too young to pretend manhood, all sex drive and cruelty – rip a girl's blouse away. Even younger than them, too young for the streets, the girl cried. Glisinda forgot the human mindset she wore like a cloak, descended on the boys furious and vengeful. Her mind saw monsters, and she did not stop until their red painted the walls. The girl ran screaming. She never mentioned the slip to Roho. Better if she imagined her carnage as a rescue, not an excuse to hurt something.
Shaking off memories, the Dryad spied her potential buyer, a wiry man with stiff posture that ruined his costume of street rags.
-The thugs know better. A constable, a nut case, or a packman for one of the mafias. No good in any case.- She dropped to a sooty alley, unseen. Tenacious weeds under her feet complained at being crushed. She sucked them dry to sharpen her eyes and spot the buyer's back up, three bruisers set to cut off escape. They carried long, hollow metal sticks beneath their cloaks – guns. Only Wizards and their lackeys carried guns; she wouldn't recognize them except the notations in Sebastian's books.
Glisinda crawled away, suspicion confirmed. -The Eons haven't forgotten about me.-
Back to the attic. She crammed herself into the sultry little wenching costume. Human attitudes about sex, though no longer a mystery, irritated her to no end. The miners would rather see her in a costume than naked. In her opinion, they lusted after the costume.
Hardly in the mood for playful winks, Glisinda almost broke the groping fingers of the first miner to take his liberty that night. If not for her obligation to repay Carpenter hospitality with some meager income, she would break his arm and quit.
After a few rounds of splinter ale, gossip finally shifted from murdered Eons and the usual scandals. Word hit town of a new beastman migration to an undocumented mountain pass...
A beastman nation, teeming with brutes, a stone's throw north and ready to steal Lydian trade – might as well steal Lydian blood! No one really cared if a Wizard bit the dust, but lost trade meant empty bellies (and ale cups) for the working man!
Though she did not realize it, Glisinda witnessed the very grumblings that would enflame the entire world to war.
That night, she dreamed that Talia shouted her name into the wind, over and over, but the Other Glisinda couldn't find her feet or her voice to go answer.
**********
Norhill 716, spring
Sleeping Blademaster, Marcellus faced a fearsome shadow in his dreams. It snapped, growled, and howled in animal fury; he attacked it with the expertise of a master, cutting deep, yet the beast fed off the violence and swelled. With a terrific heave, the desperate mercenary crashed a hammer to the werewolf's skull, and the nightmare receded. He sank into the black of sleep, relieved.
Marcellus' eyes opened, blank for a moment. Then they narrowed, home to a furious intellect, and a growl escaped his lips...
**********
Ellswick felt hollow.
The sixty four year old vassal could not pinpoint the origin of this feeling. It creeped in like the winter molds, rotting anything left too far from the fire. His mind argued that anyone would feel depressed after such a staggering tactical set back.
He missed waking in the morning full of mana, empowered with energy more than a youth. The visceral thrill of feeding a dark god, defying the church which constantly demanded of him.
Yet the void seemed greater, a lead gravity that leeched colors and whetted his temper. He craved the isolation of his demense and the vices that waited within.
Business abroad proceeded poorly. The Empty Armies lay in ruins; Georgio, that sod excuse for a Wizard, strained for hours, unable to so much as conjure a candle light. Pah! Fools.
Two decades ago, Ellswick alone uncovered the Devourer entombed in the ice. Ellswick sacrificed his pack crew and foolish excuse for noble friends to the thing, the first blood sacrifices, and wrung out a very favorable deal. Unlike those fool pirates, blinded by religious fervor, the vassal bargained useful things: a permanent well of power for his Wizards, mana through his veins to keep him young, the gift of foresight. In return, he fed the cast-off bits of his new slaves to the dark god.
If the Devourer freely fed from foolish mortals who thought to outwit it as well, that was their own fault.
-What use is a god who dies? A waste of so many years.-
He scowled. His procession plodded, stinking of horse and leather. Fields of wheat trickled by, empty. The peasants were at noon worship, human and savage alike. Hard to muster the proper disdain, so close to home and rest.
In absentia, Donovan Ellswick performed well, crushing a revolt in its infancy. -The beastmen would shower in our blood with a chance. Good boy.-
At least hate brought a tingle to his cold fingers. Such wrinkled hands now, a geezer, ready to keel over. The only immortality he would know now would be through his sons.
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
As the worship bell sounded thrice, the farmers trickled from the nearby cloisters. Four fox-men and their burly handler stepped from the road to let the procession by. They cast their eyes down, flat pebbles. Safe. Broken and obedient. Nothing like the savage ones...
His leathery fingers wormed to his collarbone, stroking the metal droplet there. A wondrous spell, charged into a bead of silver insulated by a pinky width of iron. Donovan was ready, a strong body with decades of vigor ahead; on arrival, Ellswick would pass the droplet to his son and smile...
The peons shuffled on. They grew wheat; he cultivated cotton. They prayed to Athos; he plotted for the throne. They -
“Havoc!”
Ellswick garnered two facts about the suicide attacker: black hair, broken teeth. Then the world spun, a centrifuge of fire and ice. He crashed onto the muddy edge of an irrigation canal, clawing at stalks for purchase. A field's length behind, his coach burned in a crater of lava, corpses littered around.
-Son of a whore...-
His ears rang, but he lived. Athos only knew what motivated this one – he stopped bothering to interrogate after the first dozen. Merciful or capricious, no god let the chaos have him yet.
A bare, ebon-black foot smushed into the mud beside his head, wrapped in tanned trousers. The figure wore a fur sleeve up his white arm, some kind of skinned wolf hide.
“Get me up,” Ellswick spat.
The man flexed his – No! That was an arm, silver and clawed! A face from younger days, another run away kitchen slave...
Primal heat broiled behind Marcellus' eyes. Lids pulled back, whites showing, pupils tiny and focused on the vassal's exposed jugular...
“Havoc!” screamed the nobleman. His hollow heart strained and ached from trying to flex a muscle too long missing. “Havoc!”
The Beast's face rippled, jaws growing forward and long. Fur coated its body, the same pitch black as its skin except for that stark white limb. Armed with a wolf snout full of yellow teeth, it bit down.
Gurgle. Crunch. Wet rips and tears.
An iron talisman rolled into the water, stained red.
**********
-No stranger to black outs.-
No older than Roho, a cocky little turd of a Blade named Marc accompanied two of his elders to the Cliff's Edge pub to wash down the night with tall tales and booze. Too foolish to tell the lies (most all of it) from the sordid truths (buried by rum), the boy sat enamored of their tales.
Old Tharsis had the rot gut; it ate all his toes, most his fingers, and whittled on his eyes. Mendicant was a simple drunk, the kind to be first in line for missions escorting grandparents which in retelling involved bandit hordes. If those two weren't warning enough, nothing would be.
The nightmares hung thick one night, an anniversary of some tussel that left deep marks on both elders, and they took to groping the serving girl and calling for harder drinks. Soon Marc ended up dragged in, and a gritty knuckle shoved a mug of splinterale in his nose.
Now, Marc knew splinterale. Doctors poured it on rot. If a man managed to keep his tongue away from his teeth, it was a surefire cleaner. Could also use it to destroy vermin infestations...
He drank. It burned. Not burned like a stiff whiskey, but literally burned until the young Blade expected his guts to turn molten and ooze out his belly button. Like swallowing hot coals.
He screamed, and the whole bar looked over.
“First splinterale,” Tharsis rumbled.
A few of the older men raised their beers in salute, half sadistic.
The splinterale hit his system, and Marc swelled like a balloon. Suddenly strong and handsome, Athos' gift to women and Lydia, he contemplated tromping down to beat the Pits out of a rival Blade who liked the same girl as he. Why bother moving, though, when the tides of gold started to roll over?
His next drink hurt even more. After that...no memory.
Marc woke the next day, naked beside the serving girl. No hang over, no recollection. No problem until he went to piss and the urine ran black with blood. Splinterale burned as much going out.
A couple days passed, waddling around wincing every time his shaft brushed breeches, before he asked how long splinterale sickness lasted. (About an hour.) He had the crotch rot, courtesy the wench, and would spend three miserable and humiliating months recovering. He hated the hedge witches then for charging such mad prices for basic healing, as if the whole ordeal was their fault.
Other stories trickled in about his drunken exploits, some so wild as to be criminal. Problem was – if he couldn't remember, then how could he sort the truth from lies?
He never found answers to the mystery and never admitted one further shame: until that night, he was a virgin.
Thus, when Marcellus woke to moonlight and rocks digging into his back, an immediate sourness coated his tongue. -What did I do while I was out?-
His face tingled in wrong lines, teeth on edge, tongue too short. As if he should have a muzzle and hungry fangs. When he shifted, his bloated stomach protested, and his bowels called for immediate attention.
-What did I eat?-
As his world slowly broadened, sounds and smells trickling in. Wheat swished in the wind. Females, close by. Their musk trickled down his throated and straight to his prick. Ripe, willing bodies so close...
Yet underneath that, a hollowness, the smell of Wastes dust and bone dry air.
“He's awake!” one female exclaimed, as if a miracle.
“Really awake,” giggled another.
Dammit, where were his clothes? The tattered remnants of his new pants barely covered his calves. A few wisps of shirt covered a shoulder. No pack, none of his carefully planned supplies or tools.
“He wants to play?” a third asked. “What a big dick!” A line strangely rehearsed.
Vapid, familiar gossip. He remembered it. Vacant expressions and sculpted bodies.
-Athos' hairy balls, Ellswick's pleasure slaves!- The ones talking would be the smartest of the bunch, left enough intelligence to herd their catatonic siblings around. Dumb ones laid in bed, thighs askew, and never blinked. Other slaves hand fed them to keep from starving, and the damned dolls would try to rut the whole time because that's all their empty heads knew...
He jerked upright, growling at Arctic Howl's distant laughter, and the three girls jumped back.
Clad in clothes expensive and sheer, they jiggled nicely.
Tearing his eyes away, he growled, “What happened?”
“You saved us!”
“Yeah!”
“The bad wolfman killed Master and we thought it was going to eat us too but it just ate the guards and led us out here! Then it fell into some really tall grass and when we looked it was gone and you were sleeping here!”
-HOWL!-
Don't look at me, good sir. I told you not to repress yourself. It gives your shadow power. By the way...you ate Ellswick.
“I what?!”
The pleasure slaves scooted back, shielding their faces. Abused animal reflex.
Why snarl so? By doing so, you absorbed his heart strength.
“I am no cannibal!”
Of course not. Ellswick was human.
Marcellus deflated, fists limp at his sides. He found a signet wrapped around his right middle finger, rubbing into the fur there. Benjamin's seal.
-Of course. I'm on a mission. Put that first, old boy.-
Shoving his black thoughts into the closet of his mind reserved for war dreams and dead comrades, Mstood and turned to the slaves.
They obeyed, of course.
They always obeyed, even when a captive kitchen boy begged them for a name, a memory, any kind of refusal or resistance to the things they did for him like happy kittens...
**********
More like herding sheep than guarding a caravan, the ex-Blademaster's procession ambled through the Elsian country side. They passed huddled slaves on the road, the cowed beastmen never acknowledging the strange group. Marcellus bribed witnesses and the occasional militia patrol with the slaves' bodies, cursing himself to the Pits for it.
Sex was the only currency he had. It paid for their food and crude shelter, rough shoes and lotion for burned skin. -From Blademaster to crude pimp. Great.-
At one point, a field hand blackmailed his silence for two hours alone with one of the six boy dolls, a slender and feminine thing. The slave, near mindless, returned afterwards with a blank expression and bruises on his face. Marcellus felt the pinch of rage, and then he woke over a mangled corpse.
The longer you let this go, the worse it gets, Arctic Howl stated. Sooner or later, you'll be overcome, a true Beast.
-Like the slaves?- He snarled.
No. They are half-souls, no different than the lost People we pass in the fields. You will be worse than an animal, cunning in blood lust.
-I suppose you'll wander off to find a new Alpha then?- Churlish, more angry and childish than Marcellus acted in twenty years. His renewed body came with renewed hormones.
No. I will die.
He sighed, rubbing his neck, and forced the anger down. -It won't come to that.-
Release the death grip on half your soul, and I will feel more relieved.
He ignored the Totema. Athos willing, as soon as he finished the mission, he would join a monastery and devote his life to quelling the taint within.
At the same time, Marcellus made increasing use of his keen nose to evade trouble. It caught the whiff of trouble so he could hide his twenty-odd charges, and it recoiled at the reek of trickery from men who planned to accept sexual service and betray. He swam in a world of heightened smells, from the manure pills that gagged to the freshness of water. Always, closest, the limber and ready bodies of the slaves.
-We will reach Cove and present these...these...things to the Crown Princess if it kills us!-
The slaves thrived on two hours of sleep a night. While Marcellus nabbed four to six, they filled the extra time in orgy. For the empty ones, that was the only time they acted on their own accord, wiggling through routines that seemed erotic until he realized they were rehearsed. Training or a reflex, the appearance of desire and volition from a doll with neither.
The smell of musk and rhythm of grinding bodies invaded the mercenary's dreams. Athos' balls, the things that floated to the surface at night. Frantic, feral rutting. Disgusting and so very tempting.
Well into aft spring, their progress slowed as the party entered the royal highway. Here, a constant audience, pestering questions, and too many close calls. Marcellus began to search for a place to leave the slaves while he traveled into Cove. Hard enough to worm his way in with a beastman arm, much less to do so with a circus of whores.
He bought a bungalow from a crippled pirate, wedged into a miniature slum of seasonal laborers and degenerates off the edge of the highway, for three hours pleasure. Perhaps this domicile would do. He could quickly teach the smarter ones how to sell their services to keep a roof over their head and be back inside a week. Not an entirely safe plan, but far better than knocking on Cove's gates.
They slept like a pack of dogs, the hollow dolls in the center behind a perimeter of their smarter ken. Marcellus curled outside the pile, sleeping beside the door. Red was to his left, tangled up with Raven. He never meant to name the smart ones, but somehow their traits became nicknames. Red, probably the smartest, with her fiery hair. Raven, her second in command, the black hair like silk. Salt and Pepper, nubile twin boys. He scolded himself for attributing personalities to the whores, attaching a semblance of soul to them.
-I need a good day with a whore.-
Surrounded by whores. Waking in twenty minute intervals, fog-headed and burning.
Red curled over, her thigh draped over his, and the Blademaster snapped. He seized her into a kiss, a hand on her breast. Her eyes popped open, the shock within her most expressive moment to date, and the fight began. They kicked and rolled, bit and clawed, snarled like fighting dogs and panted like winded horses. Something primal erupted in them both. They hit the thin bungalo walls and woke the neighbors; they trampled the dog pile in a frenzy of nails and shed clothes.
Their bodies joined, and changes rushed into Red. Rust fur exploded from her pores, and stubby claws pushed out her finger nails. Agony, ecstasy, as her teeth sharpened, ears pointed, spine curved into a bushy tail.
Marcellus felt the Beast rise. Surfing the primal need, he didn't care. -Let it come and try! I don't care!-
They crashed towards climax, bruised, scraped, and writhing. Arctic Howl poured seamlessly into both, weaving in between their souls, and howled.
Marcellus and Red tipped back their heads together, chins touching, and howled along, every barrier given to the fire. They came together. They became together.
As they collapsed into the dog pile, the ex-Blademaster admitted that he would never thrive as a monk. Too full of fire, too used to the taste of death passing. Human nations would brand him the worst sort of heretic for helping – somehow – spread the beastman curse, but that was a damnation for the dawn. He sank into warmth and the press of bodies, at peace for the night.
Red joined him. For the first time since Ellswick damned her to the half-life of pleasure slave, a body at the whim of tempest need, she dreamed. Wonderful visions of loping through winter woods and the musk of a pack. Ancient, Totema wisdoms trickled into her lupine ears, smoothing over the lost pieces, and she was once again whole.
**********
Shame in the noontime light far outweighed the night's ecstasy. Marcellus ground his teeth and cursed Arctic Howl from the sun to the moon. -You beast! You whore! You lead me to temptation and starve me until I drink! May Athos crush your children to dust and send you to the darkest Pit!-
The Totema ignored him.
Twenty six new beastmen stretched as they woke from the pack pile. Changed bodies, blend of wolf and man, and renewed souls. Gone were the hollow dolls, replaced by a promising emptiness, like the eagerness of a child. Red's gift, spread to her brothers and sisters.
His evidence, his mission, transmuted into a beastman tribe and ruined.
-I will return to Lydia, a failure. The Guild owes me enough to fund a life of solitude, deep in the mountains, where no one will ever see me or the things I have wrought again. Holy Pits, how will Athos ever forgive me?-