by Loki Renard
“Lucy, mom…”
“I want another room,” she says, turning to Tanuk. “Can you give me another room?”
“Absolutely. It is only a few more chimes. Twenty thousand.”
“Oh! Great!”
“What is she talking about?”
“Lucy is using this place more or less as a child would a doll's house,” he explains to me quietly. “I have endless distractions for the simple minded.”
I don't know whether to laugh or be offended on Lucy's behalf.
“I’ll have the new room put in tomorrow,” he smiles at her.
“Tomorrow?” She pouts. “That’s so far away.”
“Well, we can always skip ahead.”
He clicks his finger and the sun spins in the sky, plunging the world into darkness before emerging again bright and triumphant.
"There we go,” he smiles. “Tomorrow.”
I am aghast. Time is one of the deepest magics there are. I have seen Ragnar and Helios perform certain miracles which I found impressive, but even Helios, who was once an actual sun to an entire world, never changed the progression of the hours themselves.
“What are you?” I try not to rasp the question with obvious fear, though that is unmistakably what I am feeling. He took the emergency call button from my pocket, but I put that down to sleight of hand. But this, this brazen, bold display of tampering with time itself frightens me, as it should frighten anybody.
Time must be left in place. Those who can manipulate it almost never do. The chaos caused by playing with it like a toy could ripple into eternity. Tanuk smiles cheerfully and does as he pleases with no regard for consequences whatsoever.
“Uhm, hey!?” Lucy pops her head down from upstairs.
“Yes?”
“I was just wondering, what is a chime?”
“It is a unit of currency. Don’t worry about it. I’m putting it all on Helios’ tab.”
“Okay, great, thank you!”
“Lucy. We need to go!” I call after her.
“Just one more room!” she calls back.
What is wrong with her? Lucy has always liked pretty things, but she has never been outright obsessed with decorating, and if she had been, there was ample outlet for it at the palace.
“What have you done to her?”
“People who come here like to become invested in their homes…”
“Bullshit. Lucy’s shallow and easily distracted, but she’s not this shallow and easily distracted. What have you done?”
Tanuk
This little demigoddess sees what others do not. She has seen right through this place in an instant. My little island is a distraction. A mirage. Most people fall into it without question. It keeps them quiet. But I do not think it will work on Raine. She is too bright a being to be distracted by shiny baubles and repetitive tasks which bring calm to those who are anxious, and amusement to those who are bored.
“I’ve done nothing besides create an environment where she can do as she pleases. Lucy will stay as long as she chooses. I have not bound her, caged her, made her my prisoner. She is here of her own free will.”
“No, she isn’t,” Raine argues. “You’ve hijacked her free will. You’ve cast your spell on her. This big doll’s house…”
“The human world was always this way,” I say with a smile. “It’s the human part which has her trapped here.”
“And this is what you want? To have my sister playing house with you while my parents fret? What did they ever do to you?”
“Now that is a question,” I say. “That is a question Helios has never bothered to ask himself. If only he were as intelligent as his beautiful daughter.”
“Don’t compliment me,” she scowls. “Give me Lucy now, or I’ll do something you’ll regret forever.”
Now I am intrigued. I like being threatened. “And what is that?”
She gets up on her tip-toes so as to almost, not quite, come nose to nose with me. “I’ll leave her here," she hisses. “I’ll leave her here and I’ll sail away and you’ll be stuck with Lucy forever. I won’t tell Helios and Ragnar where she is. I’ll keep it a secret to the grave. And you will have to keep her.”
“Tanuk! Can I get some more rugs?!” Lucy shouts downstairs. “Tanuk, I want a pink dining set. No. A white china set with… no. Okay, just pull out all the sets you have and I will choose one.”
“This,” Raine says with a smile I find delightfully mischievous. “Forever. Your worst nightmare.”
“We only just met. How would you know what my worst nightmare is?”
“You change time as if it is nothing,” she says. “You are far too powerful to be here entertaining the simple.”
Lucy appears just in time to take offense. “I’m not simple. I’ve just paired a white carpet with an off-white drape. You’re still wearing that black sack you call a dress. And your shoes. Your shoes!”
“What’s wrong with my shoes?”
“They have laces, Raine. You’re wearing lace up shoes with a party dress.”
“They're comfortable.”
“They're goofy.”
Raine’s temper sparks. “You know what, Lucy? I am going to leave you here. Me and my ugly shoes are going home. Good luck with this. Have fun being a captive. Peace.”
With that, she storms out of my home. I could stop her. I choose not to. I am enjoying this show immensely.
Lucy shakes her head and falls back under the spell as I place a range of dinner settings around the room.
I follow the sister I am most intrigued by back down to the beach. I am amused by her temper, and not all that surprised she has decided to abandon her sister. This is all too much for a young woman to take in. She is having to fight my magic with every inch of her being and sooner rather than later, I think she will succumb to it.
I find Raine down on the beach, tugging at the rope with which she secured her boat to a tree. It is stuck.
“What do you want?”
“Just to watch,” I smile.
“You’re an asshole.”
“Careful,” I warn her. “You’ll earn yourself another spanking. Or is that what you came for all along? Did you want me to take you back over my thigh and turn you hot and red all over again?”
“You…”
Raine
He makes me furious. Not because he is wrong, but because he might be right. I have to get out of here. I’ll tell everybody what happened, to hell with the consequences. I know he’s not going to let Lucy leave with me anyway.
This goddamn rope though, it is stuck fast. “What have you done, Tanuk? Let me have my rope!”
“You’re the one who tied the knot, Raine,” he reminds me.
I’ll fucking gnaw the thing free if I have to. I am not going to stay stuck here on this isle of madness one more…
“RAINE!”
Lucy comes tearing down the sand. She is running at full speed, her lithe legs taking her away from danger and toward the safety of our vessel.
“Take me with you, Raine! Take me with you before I change my mind!”
My relief at seeing her is immeasurable. Somehow she has broken Tanuk’s magic and come to her senses. My spirits lift. We’re going to get away. This is going to be okay…
SWOOSH!
A great wave suddenly sweeps up on the beach. Large arms lurch out of the surf and grab Lucy, pulling her into the water with a short scream. There is nothing I can do. It happens so fast I barely have time to process it. One moment she is there, the next, the ocean has taken her.
“It would seem there was more than one debt to be paid,” Tanuk muses. “Oh well.”
“Oh well? Lucy has just been dragged down into the sea!”
“She will be fine.”
“She will drown!”
“Unlikely. Triton hasn’t drowned a damsel in a very long time. I doubt he would start with Lucy. He more likely intends on taking her to his underwater palace and making her his bride. That sounds traditional,
does it not?” Tanuk stares at me as I start to disrobe. “What are you doing?”
“I’m taking my clothes off so I can swim down and get her.”
“Raine. The purpose of your life is not to follow your sister around saving her.”
I don’t have time to listen to Tanuk. Instead, I dive naked into the churning froth of the ocean waves. Tanuk was right. Triton has taken her.
I can see him swimming away, his big, muscular body wrapped around Lucy’s tender form. He is so much bigger than her, his hair streaming in the ocean currents, green locks mixing with her pale blonde strands.
Why would he be taking her? What is going on? This is pure madness. I try to call out to them, but bubbles emerge from my mouth, the last of my precious air expelled in a hopeless attempt to save Lucy.
My chest starts to feel tight. There is pressure, the need to take a big, deep breath. I know I’m not supposed to breathe water, but the instinct is strong and I cannot fight it.
Forced to turn back to the surface, I see the sky through a lens of glassy liquid, many feet of which separates me from life. It’s too far. I’m not going to make it. I’m going to fucking drown…
Big hands reach for me and pull me from the water, gasping for the air I did not know I needed. I lie on Tanuk’s beach, nude and ashamed. Those dark eyes look down on me with unreserved judgement.
“You're mortal,” Tanuk says, stunned in the same way I am.
My mortality, or lack of it, was never put to the test as we grew up. Our parents didn’t try to kill us to see if we were capable of dying, and so we never knew. I assumed I was immortal, like my fathers, but I don’t think immortals drown one foot from the surface of the ocean.
“A mortal!” he laughs, but not in amusement.
“Lucy will drown!”
“I don’t think so,” he says. “Triton has his magic, as do we all. You, on the other hand, are in dire need of help, my hapless little mortal.”
He picks up my weak, nearly broken body from the sand. I do not have the energy or the will to resist.
4
Raine
I must have closed my eyes. I am exhausted from all that has happened. The party. My voyage. Nearly drowning. Discovering that I can die. Losing my sister to the god of the ocean. Waking up feels like a return to a nightmare.
“Where am I?”
“My home,” he says. “You’re safe here, Raine.”
I expect to see the cottage, but we are not there. This is a place beneath the earth, warm and round and deep, a burrow at the end of a long tunnel. It is only just tall to stand up in, and the ground is covered with a carpet of what I can only describe as shed fur woven together to create a surface soft enough to sink into. There is very little here, a pipe exiting one wall with water trickling from it into a earthen bowl which overflows down into a little fissure in the rock.
“This is where you live? It’s so…”
“Simple?”
“Primitive. And animal like. It hardly feels like a place a god would live.”
“You come from humanity, so you have a very human idea as to what intelligence and power looks like. The older humans, the ones gone for many thousands of years understood differently. They knew that there are deities in everything. Every blade of grass. Every tree. Every animal.”
“I’m familiar with the concept,” I say dryly. “You think my father didn’t tell me anything about being a god?”
My father did not tell me anything about being a god.
I tried reading, but Helios isn’t really a reader and Ragnar thinks that written symbols are blasphemy. It’s not that they’re stupid. Far from it. They have universal wisdom. Just no books.
My mother was my only source of real knowledge, but her memories of what she learned in her Earth pod have been fading since her arrival on Okeanus. The older I got, the less she remembered and was able to tell me.
I got the sense, growing up, that Helios and Ragnar did not want us to know too much. They planned for us to stay sheltered on their island forever. But that is not the way life works, not even for gods. Everything changes.
Tanuk settles in on the ground, cross-legged. He invites me to do the same.
“You are such a little fighter,” he says. “Such a brave princess. And what do you get for your troubles?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you ever have fun? Is there ever any enjoyment in your life besides the pale imitations you are allowed while existing inside your father’s womb?”
“I don’t think you understand how fathers work.”
“I don’t think you understand what I’m saying.”
“I don’t think you understand anything,” I snap back. He is making me feel stupid, and that I cannot stand. I can be the ugly twin, the disposable one. I can be the one that is ignored. I can be the mortal in the family of gods, but dammit, I will not be called stupid, even indirectly.
Tanuk smirks and my heart skips a beat. He already punished me once for my attitude. Now there is something even more dangerous between us. I can see it in his eyes, and I can feel it in my body. He calls to me, and I don’t know if I can help answering.
“Come here," he says, gently, crooking a finger at me in a gesture I find alluring and frightening at the same time.
“Uh… why?”
“Come closer, Raine.”
This is an invitation to something I should very much not be doing. I can see his intention in his eyes. There is darkness there, and something else too, something more like… lust? Does he want me?
“Let me give you what you need,” he purrs.
He is masterfully defusing my anger, turning it into confusion and curiosity. I like the way I feel when his voice lowers and his expression changes. I like the way he makes me forget about all my internal struggles and focuses me on what I feel.
“You have been untouched for eighteen years,” he says, his fingers tracing lightly over my cleavage. “That is not a long time for a human, but rather a long time for the divine side of you.”
How does he know? I suppose he knows many things, being a god himself.
“You thought your birthday marked a moment of freedom,” he says, still touching me in that intimate way which makes my nipples harden and stand to attention beneath the fabric of the dress which now seems very much in my way. “Did it feel like freedom?”
“No,” I whisper.
“Does this?” His fingers curl in the neckline of my dress and he pulls down, tearing the fabric apart all the way down to my belly. I am exposed, my breasts spilling from their confinement right into his hands. His skin is hot on my skin, his fingers cupping and caressing my sensitive flesh. And then his mouth is on mine in a deep kiss, his tongue toying with mine while his thumb pads gently toy with the nipples no man has ever touched.
The spell he casts is instantaneous and very powerful. I am like tinder, left to dry and ready to burst into flame at the smallest spark. I fall into his embrace without another thought.
His kisses intensify, as does the roaming of his hands. He reaches down and pulls the hem of my gown up, his fingers splaying to cup my bare ass. Again, his touch is like fire and I am consumed by it. This is what I have been waiting for. This is what made me so restless all those nights. My physical flesh has wanted a man, and being denied this touch has only made my reaction stronger.
“Little rebel princess,” he purrs, kneading my cheeks lightly and then slapping them with a swift swat which makes naughty heat go searing through me. My reaction to the pain is not as I would have expected. It doesn’t hurt in the same way it would were I not aroused. Instead of being a sharp distraction, it becomes part of the pleasure. It sends a signal to the softness between my thighs, my last bastion of innocence and purity which is now soaked with desire. I am so wet that for a very fleeting moment I think I might have had some kind of accident, but when I reach down and touch myself, there is a viscosity to my desire. This is a reaction for him.
&nb
sp; “Good girl,” Tanuk purrs, his eyes hooded. “Touch yourself for me. Show me how the virgin princess gives herself pleasure.”
Tanuk
She will not be a virgin very much longer. Her cheeks are pink with lust, a color which adorns her beautiful neck and her breasts too. She is showing every little human animal sign of desire.
I have missed this. I have missed her. I only met her this very night, but being with Raine fills me with desire and erotic nostalgia. Many years ago, I would deflower virgins. They would offer themselves to me, head down, hips up, their quivering hind ends presented like animals for my lust.
This is different. Raine is a princess with god blood. I am yet to make out her powers, but I know she has them. The more human she seems, the more I am certain that there is more locked away inside her now squirming body.
She is touching herself for me, her fingers toying with the soft folds of her sex as her pretty blue eyes dart to me for approval, then slide away in shame. She knows this is wrong. She knows that lying on the soft fur of my den with her legs spread akimbo, the secret little slit all women are expected to guard, on display, is some kind of wrong. Not the real kind of wrong, but the exciting kind of naughty which young human women always love to be.
I watch her with a growing sense of pride. She is beautiful, and she is mine. I know that before I have been inside her. I know that as well as any god can know anything. She wants my approval, her soft little whimpers of pleasure muted because she has not yet learned to give full voice to them.
This was not what I planned today. I thought I would toy with her and send her home. But there is something between us, something I learned long ago not to ignore because it comes so rarely and means so much.
She touches that wet, virginal pussy, and I wonder if I can take her without hurting her or harming her. It is easy to go slow physically and give her an introduction to the pleasures of the flesh. But it is what comes after that which will be unavoidably painful. She does not know what this means. I can see the lust glaze in her eyes. She wants to feel good at any cost.