by Jade Alters
“That’s why I’m here,” I tell him calmly. “To help you… if I can.”
“To hel- what is wrong with you? How can you trust me? I don’t trust me!” Darius growls, “They were right… all the people who called us monsters… hunted us for what we are, what we do. They were right. I’m the byproduct of those things, Emery! I’m an abomination!” Darius’ screams widen his jaw over mine. I feel his fangs graze by the outsides of my lips. I shudder, but not in fear. This is the most raw I’ve ever seen him, the most authentic. Was this beneath his mask all along? In all his shouting, Darius hasn’t noticed my fingers slip into his. But now he does. His astonished eyes shoot down to our joined hands.
“You’re more a man than anyone else I know, Darius Jecks,” I return the courtesy of lowering my own mask. “You choose every day not to give into urges that most of us can’t imagine. You choose to be a man. Every day. That’s why I trust you.”
Darius’ face lifts back up to mine. His wide eyes are full of water. His fangs are gone, tucked back up above his teeth where they belong. His mouth hangs open in shock, just the perfect distance for me to fit mine. We lock together, lips, then bodies. I don’t care that his skin feels cold against mine, when the chill of night is already on both of us. I don’t care that I can hardly feel his heartbeat through his neck. Mine beats hard enough for both of us. In all this time Hoster and Rock warred over my feelings, Darius warred over his own. He kept me out, thinking to protect me, so he could deal with this. He’s fought the Gray Fiends harder than any of us, starting with the one inside him. And, as I feel him against me, gentle, though I know what he could do if he wanted… I think I might be falling in love with him.
So, when I feel him harden between the legs, I slide down the rock wall. I unbutton my pants to let him slide up against my lips there, to see if he can handle it. It’s truly difficult for Darius to pull his mouth back from mine, but he does. He looks me in the eye, bewildered. Are you sure? He asks me with that suddenly innocent stare. I lower my eyes to give him a quick flutter of flirty blinks. The next thing I know, my pants are in a heap on the ground. Chilled hands slide my shirt up over the top of my breasts. I let my hands down so Darius can kiss my neck while I unclip my bra.
I feel the head of his penis poke up into me through thin layers of fabric between our legs. I take care of that while Darius’ lips graze the edge of my jawline. Hairs stand up all along the path of my spine. Then I feel his hands on my chest, squeezing, massaging. Every flick of my nipples when his fingers graze by sends a jolt through my chest. When he kisses them, my pulse quickens, but not from fear. I want him too badly to hold out any longer. I’ve wanted him since he walked out of that cell. We’ve waited for one another to be ready long enough. I slide my hand down the base of his cock and point it in the right direction. Darius sandwiches me against the wall with his hips between my thighs. He jams himself up inside me as far as my body can handle. I let my head down over his shoulder to groan as a signal that he’s hit the limit.
Darius pulls his head back to kiss me while our interlocked privates throb in adjustment to one another. I feel the shape of him in his body’s natural coolness. Then I feel it withdraw. Darius flattens my buttcheeks against the wall with a push. With how hard he’s going, just once is enough to make me gasp. He pulls out and shoves again. The shockwave pulses up through my body, into my breasts. Darius lifts me higher with hands around my waist. I cradle his head just in front of my bouncing chest. I don’t need to say a word to convey the message in my eyes. Faster. I plant a kiss on top of his forehead as he quickens the pace.
Darius’ pressed pelvis pushes me high up on the wall. He pulls out to pull me down on his cock. I clench his bony hips in my tingling thighs. He knows from my grunts and the dig of my nails - he can go as hard as he wants. And he does. Darius pushes into me as hard as either of us can stand, until his penis thrums out a warm shower. I scrunch up my legs as his own deep-breathing elation sends me over the brink. His last hard thrusts spark an explosion of pleasure inside me. I wrap my arms and legs tight around him while he pushes.
We embrace in the height of orgasm, warmth trickling down our cold legs. Darius pushes into me until the last of my whispered moans dies down to elated breathing. He never puts me down, fully. Somehow, he sweeps me up in both arms. We zip up the switchbacks of a small rise in the cliffs. Just high enough to see the full moon glazing the canopy a perfect silver. We stand there on the ridge, letting the night breeze hit our naked bodies for longer than I remember. Until my eyes close against my will.
When I wake up, I’m back on a bedroll in a guest hut in the village. I can’t help but wonder if it was all just a dream.
The Forgotten City
Rock,
Six Rivers National Forest
I was just starting to worry over how long Emery and Darius were gone when they returned. I couldn’t help but notice him carrying her in both arms through the outskirts of the village. I leaped off my log to check on her, only to be stopped by the person I last expected.
“She’s fine,” Hoster told me. “Just asleep.” I guessed he could see it through the Blue Plane, somehow. He could see what I couldn’t. The intimate moment I almost crashed into, between Emery and Darius. The death toll for both mine and Hoster’s chances.
Yet, somehow, it doesn’t sting as much. Not with friends around the fire to cushion the loneliness. Not with Helena’s smile and laugh warming every conversation.
That all seems like so long ago already. The Totem Tower. The festival celebrating a success I don’t even remember. I wonder how Father will handle explaining to the people that we’ve taken our greatest strength - true mastery of form outside any constructs of nature - and demonized it? That Misforms are actually the closest to our ancient predecessors? But those things are out of my hands. They’re best left to the one who currently occupies the Chief’s chair. My job is to jump back through the Academy to Six Rivers by way of Tether Teleporter. To see Helena through her trial, along with the others, as they did me.
The brief time we spend in transit through the Academy feels like a dream of another life. The Adjustment Lounge and the halls feel alien. We’ve hardly spent a few hours here at a time since the Forbidden Shelves. And just so, we don’t stay longer than a brief pit stop at each of our rooms for clothes. The Council already knows about Heren and the Lotus through Sasoen’s message. But they know as well as we do that we can’t just stop. Not when we’re so close to assembling all the pieces of the Origas’ knowledge. When we might, at last, have a chance to stop the Fiends from unveiling the supernatural with their mass murder spree. We can’t afford to turn back because of one robed enigma with some anti-magic orb. Heren surprised us, while we were already weakened, last time. Next time, he - or she - won’t be so lucky.
A blinding surge of light beams us back down to the countryside of California, though in an entirely different region. It’s my first visit to Six Rivers. As soon as the Tether’s light blades shoot back up into their sheathe in the Academy high above, we’re embraced by an energy of peace. The place seems to glow in the late morning sun, illuminating every detail with a glamour that might be a kind of magic in its own right.
The sun shoots between gaps in the emerald canopy. Vibrant jade mosses pop out from the bark of every towering tree. Streams feed it all between boulders and pebbles that mark the path forward through the gently warm forest. Vines spiral up the faded, cracked stone pillars of the ruin the Six Rivers Witches and Warlocks once enchanted for transport to the Academy, so long ago. I run my hands along its surface. Like those in the Ahwahneechee Village, this might be one of the oldest supernaturally made structures. The people that built this might well have known everything about the Origas that we so crave to re-learn through the books they left behind.
“Helena,” sings a soft, warm voice from down the path before us. I turn my head to a woman that I almost mistake for Helena herself. The only difference between them are the subtle wrinkle
s and silver strands woven into a braid behind the woman’s head.
“We’ve missed you,” says yet another voice I recognize from years of diplomacy dinners. Graham Bartos clinks his way up the path alongside his wife in his mauve dress robe, decorated with small plates of armor.
“Mother. Father,” Helena smiles. She takes the front of our group with the short-stepped poise of a true Core Line Witch but breaks form just before she reaches her parents. She’s their daughter first, it seems. She spreads her arms wide to hug one of them in each. They hug her right back until she melts away, however, when Helena notices the others coming up the trail behind her parents. As she steps back, I step forward. A fist makes itself of my calloused fingers. I wonder if I could turn into a sword now? The ones who join us now… those are a few faces I’ll never forget.
I don’t know many of their first names, but I remember them from the Heritage Ball. I know their family names from the same dinners I’ve met the affable Bartos’. I’ve had no such pleasant experiences with these status-mongers. The Gorshens. The Harumans. There are a few more that aren’t worth remembering, too. Parents and children line up like a parade of jesters to greet the great and powerful Helena Bartos. Some of them are the very ones who cornered her in the Prismatic Ballroom. The worst part of it all, as they parade up from the Grotto to greet us, is their faces. Every last one of them wears this ridiculous smile for Helena. Like they care. Like they’re proud, even.
“Blood of the Origas, is it, now?” the patriarch of the Harumans says, at the bottom of a deep bow. Helena’s cheeks flush for a moment, before she remembers herself. When she remembers what they did, she manages to put out a neutral scowl while her color returns to normal.
“Still just Helena,” she tells them with the most tasteful spike of contempt. Just enough for everyone to notice. It inspires an awkward silence that every last one of the Core Line leaders deserves. It’s only broken by Graham clearing his throat.
“We’re so happy to see you, but… we understand that this is a time-sensitive visit,” he announces. “Let me show you to the site we believe to hold the last piece of missing knowledge.”
“The Forgotten City,” Helena’s mother tells us. Helena crosses her arms, an eyebrow cocked with the same thought as all of us standing by, behind her.
“Doesn’t the whole reason we call it that make it impossible to get to?” Helena poses. It’s the leader of the Haruman line that answers. At the first note of his voice, he shrinks a step back from the solidarity of the ASTF’s heavy glare.
“The… the location of the city is forgotten only by most. There is only one who knows its location,” the Haruman leader manages to get out, despite our judgemental scrutiny. He clears his throat, which does little to stabilize his shaky voice. “It’s a secret shared only between retired Sorcerers and Sorceresses. But, in light of our current situation, Cain has shared the location with us.”
“Follow along, dears,” Helena’s mother sings, to offset some of the aggression mounting with each word from the Haruman leader.
She and Graham take us around the Tether Teleporter, instead of down the trail to the Grotto. A path, in the most loose adaptation of the word, winds down through the moss to a dense wall of branches. Beneath it is a stack of blown-down trunks, rotted hollow and bleached in the sun. This appears to be some sort of marker to Graham and his wife. They share a nod, then move their arms outwards in opposing arcs. They repeat the process several times until the leaves blocking our path begin to shimmer.
“Whoa,” Hoster whispers to himself. For once, I can’t help but agree. The branches peel back from one another, as if being pulled by hundreds of tiny, invisible hands. They bend in such a way as to make a small hallway of twigs through the thick brush. On the other side is a much more open part of the forest. Graham urges us to head through before them.
Two-wide, we funnel through the magical tunnel of trees, using the dead ones as steps to higher ground. Helena’s parents follow us through last, walking backwards to ease the branch-wall back into place. Every step deeper into the forest makes a distinct tap now, with the same faded white stone as the Tether Teleporter beneath us. Cobbles mark our path through a deep valley in the rolling, rocky hills that hide beneath the lush forests of Six Rivers.
It’s a place touched by man briefly, only to be returned to its wildness. Our cobbled path takes us down a deep slope, alongside criss-crossed, frothing brooks. Minor signs of civilization peek out from the hillsides in the form of caved-in doorways or fractured mill-wheels. A few faded stony bridges still cling to a few of their stairs. For the most part, we have to use large boulders to cross the shallow streams that tumble down, down, deeper into the valley.
“It’s called the Forgotten City,” says the Haruman patriarch, and instantly, a few bitter faces turn back to scowl at him. “But really, there’s just one building left that’s intact. That’s where... we’re heading.” He’s hardly able to finish his sentence before our combined distaste shuts him down.
But the tension doesn’t have long to mount. It’s only about a half-mile hike down the white stone walkway to the building we just heard of. How it’s being held up is a mystery to all, but the magnificent marbled building sits atop the glassy mirror of a pond hidden so deep in the forest. The waters are somehow a perfect blue sheet, despite all the current feeding into it from the streams we followed here. The only intact bridge we’ve come across so far is the one that crosses from our mossy banks to the tall front doors of the temple-like building. It has a few horizontal windows high up, just below its steep, triangular roof. Its rocky overhangs are held up by ornate pillars, carved with twisting murals of fire and water. From the front door hangs a dry fountain bed, much like the one that marked the entrance of the Totem Tower. It awaits its first drink in millenia. Helena shares a nod with each one of us as we near the bridge to take us there.
“We’ll take it from here,” she says to her parents in particular, out of the group that led us this far. She turns immediately to lead us across the still waters. All that stops us is the last voice we want to listen to.
“Wait, please,” calls out the leader of the Haruman Core Line. Helena stabs her heels into the rock to wheel about. Her face makes plain how she feels about waiting for him. My ears do, however, perk at the genuine notes that play from the man’s tune. “My son, Ferres… he’s terribly sorry about the things he said at the Heritage Ball.”
“Then why doesn’t he tell me?” Helena cracks back instantly. The ferocity in her tone is unlike anything I’ve heard leave her lips before. It makes the girl that smiled and laughed by the fireside with me seem like a stranger. But, at the sound of her accusation, the young man in question does, for once, step out of his father’s shadow. His long, blond hair is pulled back in a ponytail to show the shame in his wrinkled forehead and deep brown eyes.
“Words are what hurt you in the first place... I’d like to show you. If you’d have me,” Ferres has the balls to say. He takes a few uneasy paces out from the protective shell of the other pompous Core Line families. He steps out onto the bridge with us, creatures from all walks who have actually fought for whatever standing we have. “Your group has several members from outside the Origas’ descendants… from what I understand, these sites don’t care for magic from other Realms. I thought to offer you the magic of another Warlock. To help you complete the trial.”
“You thought of it?” Helena digs in.
“Helena,” her father and mother coo at once. We all hear what she means in words unspoken. You thought of it? Not your parents, trying desperately to mend a burned bridge with someone more powerful than them?
“It’s alright,” Ferres surprises us. “Whatever suspicions she has of me are earned… if you’d let me,” he faces Helena with true plight in his eyes, “I’d like to earn some degree of forgiveness.”
“You know what? You’ve got alot of-”
“Emery, wait,” Helena stops her guardian Magician about tw
o trudging steps from snapping Ferres into a dimensional void. She bears down on Ferres with two eyes of intense scrutiny. “You understand that, if you walk through that door… this is my trial. You’ll be my tool, to do only what I say, as I say it?”
“I understand,” Ferres nods, despite the indignity of it. I cross my arms, wondering how good of an actor he might be. He certainly sounds like he means it.
“Then stay behind us and keep quiet,” Helena orders. Ferres moves into position immediately. She has to turn away to hide the satisfaction in her grin from the other Core Lines on the far side of the bridge. “Fey Deller,” she calls out. Our green-skinned friend joins Helena before the fountain at the front of the door. A slice of her thorny nail is enough to color the bottom of the thirsty fountain.
Thick, ruby paint shoots through the glassy designs in the door, shimmering its mural to life. We see it in all its glory for about five seconds: a calamity of fire, lightning, ice, and stormwind. Then the two stony halves of the door slide apart.
As soon as Helena is bandaged up, she leads us into the darkness of the Forgotten City.
Trial of Blood
Rock,
Six Rivers National Forest, The Forgotten City
The stony doors that let us in scrape closed behind us almost instantly.
“Those who seek the ancient knowledge locked within must be willing to sacrifice all else they came with,” the voice of the City rattles the very rock beneath our feet. With the pressure off of me this time, I wonder if what we’re hearing is a spell, or a disembodied spirit of the Origas themselves? I mean, with the powers of a Magician, Witch, and Shifter combined… who knows what they could do?