by Loki Renard
“You are the greatest god who ever lived,” a woman declares. “You are the most high!”
I hope Helios doesn't hear her say that. He wouldn’t like it. I, on the other hand, like it very much. I have exhausted myself to save Raine, to give her what she most needs, to fulfill her desire to protect humanity from the consequences of its collective actions. The woman’s admiration is a jolt of energy, a fresh burst of very necessary nutrition. And she is not alone. Many voices are raised in praise of me, more joining in with every moment. The little jolt of power becomes a surge, lifting me up quite literally.
I begin to feel better. I may have lost Raine to one of these men, but I will rule over the pitiful male who dared sully her womb with his seed. I am yet to discover which of them it is, but once I do, I will make his life a living hell.
Raine
I was hoping for some peace and calm. Seeing that he had left the island without me in what amounts to a second abandonment, I was hoping to not have to see Tanuk again for a few hundred years. Even thinking of his name makes my heart hurt. But I have no choice.
I find myself at the prow of the longboat, watching waves break around us as we plunge through the waves. Ragnar is at the helm. Helios is manning the sails. My mother and sister and daughter are back in the golden palace. Sapphire loves her family beyond words. Though she has never known them, they have shown her so much warmth and care she became attached to them almost instantly. It helps that Lucy likes to dress her up like a little princess, and my mother is happy to spoil her with all the sweet treats she could never have on Earth.
Helios and Ragnar have made it clear that this could be a voyage into war if Tanuk will not give the humans up easily. I am hoping for a peaceful resolution. My people know me. They relied on me for their survival for the better part of a decade. Their children breathe because I protected them, so whatever trickery Tanuk may have employed, I am certain I can reclaim them.
“Stay here,” I say when we make land. “If you come, then war may be inevitable. Let me talk to Tanuk.”
“And have him steal you away again? No. This time, we go with you,” Helios says. “I’m not sending you off on your own.”
“Good,” I smile. I have had more than enough of doing things on my own.
I walk ahead. They flank me. This is my mission. My return to the island where I lost my innocence, where all this chaos started.
There are people all over the place, enjoying the fruits of Tanuk’s island. They smile and wave as I walk past, giving me those happy glazed smiles which are common to those under Tanuk's influence.
Tanuk is not hard to find. I get the feeling he is watching us long before we round a corner on a mossy path to find him standing in a clearing, wearing his pale brown robes, holding an apple in his hand. The musculature of his arms and chest is exposed. There is nothing inherently indecent about it, but I have long gone hungry when it comes to carnal matters, and the sight of him makes me react in a shamefully physical way.
“And to what do I owe the honor of this shining contingent?”
Tanuk winks at me, and it is like old times. My heart skips a beat, and I become lost in his smile. If there is any creature more charming than Tanuk, I have not met it.
“We’ve come for my people. You shouldn’t have taken them.” I try to inject authority into my voice. I don’t want my fathers to see me swoon. I don’t want Tanuk to see that either. I refuse to make this easy for him when this has been so hard for me.
“Tanuk, we’re taking our people home,” Helios says.
“Your people,” he says, raising a brow. “Do they know that they are your people?” He turns to someone half-hidden in the bushes.
“Boy,” he says. "Come here.”
The ‘boy’ he calls is no other than Magellan. He is wearing only a loincloth, and the scars of Entity’s fires are visible on his body.
“Magellan!” I call out to the man who has been at my side all these years, the one who acted as father to Sapphire when she had none.
He looks at me blankly.
“What have you done to him, Tanuk?”
“Human memories do not last long on Okeanus,” he says. “Especially not once they start eating the fruit of the trees.”
“You’ve done this on purpose,” I growl, feeling immediately furious. He saw that Magellan was close to me and now he is using him as some kind of twisted revenge.
“I’ve done nothing but what you wanted. Saved and safe-guarded your humans.”
“I didn’t say I wanted you to use them as belief batteries,” I snap, impatient with the way he twists his words to make his actions seem innocent when we all know what he is doing.
“ENOUGH!” Ragnar’s growl cuts through the tension. I had almost forgotten he and Helios were here. “We are taking the humans. If you want a war, Tanuk, we can begin to fight it now.”
“No,” Tanuk smirks. “I think there has been enough in the way of war lately. Take your little humans.”
“Go,” I say. “I want to talk to Tanuk.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea…”
“I think it’s my choice,” I tell Ragnar. I am not in the mood to be treated like an infant again, especially not now I am looking into Tanuk’s eyes. “Take the people. And go.”
The humans are who Helios and Ragnar truly came for, so they do as I have strongly requested, mustering the people up and herding them back to the ship. I stay in the clearing with Tanuk. We have unfinished business.
“You didn’t even want the people, did you,” I accuse him. You just wanted my attention.”
“You know me so well,” he smiles.
“Knew,” I say, emphasizing the past tense. “I knew you so well.”
His eyes soften for a moment, and his voice changes tone. “Why are you so angry at me, Raine?”
“Because you abandoned me for a decade! You left me on Earth…”
“Not by my choice. They pulled me, and left you. If you want to be angry at someone, be angry at the gods who didn’t think about what they were doing because they were too busy trying to demonstrate their power to me. Ragnar and Helios are nothing but bullies.”
“They are my fathers, and they have done their best to protect me.”
“Including leaving you alone in enemy territory.”
“I’m not alone.”
“Sorry, there’s a bird. Of course. As we all know, the one beast I cannot counter is a small, hollow-boned flying rat.”
The raven caws in an offended manner. I hadn’t noticed it there. My hyper-vigilance is already beginning to fade. It’s making me lazy and stupid. I have to keep my wits about me.
“You seemed to make yourself at home down on Earth,” Tanuk says. “You had a family. You were happy.”
“I was not happy. I was fighting for my life, and my daughter’s life. I was trying to save those around me as best I could. I saw horrors you can’t imagine, Tanuk, and now you steal these humans away, put them on your island, use them, just as you used me, for your amusement!”
“You were never just an amusement, Raine,” he says, his voice softening to a low purr. “And I would never have chosen to leave you alone anywhere. That choice was taken from me by your own dear fathers. Rage at them, if you must rage at someone, but please, I beg you, forgive me.”
“How can I forgive you when you're not even sorry?”
I don’t know when the madness begins. Perhaps it is when I reach out to shove him, but instead he catches my hand and pulls me close into a rough, passionate kiss. Or maybe it is when we send the raven screaming for the sky as we fall into an embrace there on the ground, surrounded by bushes which fail to hide the nudity of our bodies from the sun above.
“No!” I push away from him, sitting up on his body, my hands on his strong chest as I fight the same impulse my teenage self always gave into.
“What?”
“No! I’m not just going to fall into your arms, fuck you, and act like that makes e
verything okay.”
He reaches up and cups my breasts. Once that would have been an act of pure carnality, but now after having breastfed, the support actually feels good too. Tanuk has become my heavenly hand bra.
“What do you want to do to make everything okay?”
I can feel his erection pressed along the seam of my pussy. It would be so easy to lift my hips and slide down and send myself into erotic oblivion all over again.
“I don’t know.”
He smiles with patient amusement. “Well, I can stay here like this for as long as you like.”
“I bet you could, filthy man.”
“Not a man," he reminds me, with just a spark of jealousy. Is it cruel to let him think what he will about my time on Earth? Perhaps. But if it is torture, he is torturing himself.
Tanuk
I want to reclaim her. I want to pound away any hint of a mortal hand or more. But I can be patient. She has been patient after all, or at least, she has been forced to wait and that amounts to the same thing.
I am never going to get Raine back by charming her. She almost always saw through that, even when she decided to fall for it anyway.
“Not a man,” she agrees. “A god, with all that entails.”
“And what does that mean?” I shift my grip on her warm, heavy breasts and simply enjoy having her here with me, talking to her, touching her.
“You’re a bad god.”
“Do you mean I’m bad at being a god, or…”
“I mean you’re a bad god,” she repeats. “You’re jealous, venal, vengeful. You love only what personally appeals to you, you have no interest in the humans who spawned you.”
I imagine she has been working on this little speech for the better part of ten years. I decide to shut up and let her deliver it.
“Well! What do you have to say for yourself?”
“Nothing,” I reply. “You’re right. Of course, you’re right.”
Her expression shifts. She’s still beautiful. Actually, she’s more beautiful now. I like this grown Raine. I like her maturing features. Twenty eight is not an advanced age. She has lost some of the roundness and fullness to her face, but that has brought out the fantastic bone structure of her cheeks. She’s stunning. My cock throbs at the seam of her sex as I hold back every filthy impulse I have to let her say what needs to be said.
“It’s no fun if you just agree with me,” she says. “I don’t feel like you really mean it.”
“You wish for me to join in the self-flagellation? Tell you that I agree with you? That I was never worthy of you, but claimed you anyway because I was a broken god, wanting only revenge?”
“Is that true?”
“It is as true as what you said, but there are other truths too. Like the truth that I fell in love with you upon our first meeting, that I took your sister, and not you, because if somebody was going to be hurt, I didn’t want it to be you. Everything I have ever done since meeting you has been calculated to allow me to have more of you. I love you. I will be by your side wherever and however I can.”
She slaps me. Suddenly. Sharply. Without warning.
I grab her wrist too late to achieve much of anything and glower up at her as she sits atop me. My cheek stings in the aftermath of her impertinent swat. It wasn’t hard enough to attempt to do damage. But it was intended to provoke.
“For old time’s sake,” she smiles through what I think might be happy tears. It is hard to tell with anybody who has even a hint of mortal inside them. Their emotions are like the tide, ebbing and flowing and occasionally storming the beaches and sweeping away structures.
I think that was her way of forgiving me without forgiving me, of resetting our relationship to the very beginning. The moment she slapped me was the moment we truly began.
And now we begin again.
I kiss her, as if for the first time. I wrap my arms around her, embrace her tenderly, show her with my body how much I love her with my heart.
We have mated many times in the past, but this is a new time, a new kind of connection. This involves forgiveness and renewed vows of adoration and love.
“You know what happens when you slap me, don’t you?”
“I hope I do,” she smiles wickedly.
She wants to feel a little sting with her kisses. She wants to know if I am still the god who lured her, seduced her, made her his own. Hiding behind her strength and independence is a fiery little thing who wants nothing more than to be shown strength.
I cup her shapely rear, then slap it. Hard.
“Ow!” she complains.
“Mercy is for good goddesses,” I inform her. “And you are not good.”
“I’m not?”
“No,” I say, slapping her haunch once more. I love the way her curves feel beneath my hand. She’s soft, but she’s strong. “You’re bad. Like me.”
“Nobody is bad like you.”
Raine
He lifts me up, his hands strong on my waist as he takes control, just as I wanted him to. We could argue forever, he and I, but at the end of that argument would remain the fact that I love him and only him.
Tanuk sheathes himself inside me with one long, satisfying stroke.
I am impaled on his cock, his palm landing against my ass over and over as I ride him with increasing enthusiasm, letting go of the painful past as I embrace our future in paradise.
This, as everything I do with Tanuk, is wrong.
But there is something between us, a passionate fire which cannot be extinguished by time or hardship. I think I still hate him for leaving me, even though I know it was never his fault. Anger flows through me, but it is not only anger I feel. It is lust and need and longing. It is the love that never left me, and which made it impossible for me to ever fall in love with anybody else.
I wind myself around him. I give myself to him. I take him inside me and consume him. This is a meeting of flesh and heart and mind which has taken far too long.
He lifts me up and pulls me down, guiding me along his hard flesh, making me take the path of most resistance every time. My clit grinds against him on every downstroke and is then denied that particular pleasure until I rise and fall again, giving him the molten core of me.
Tanuk punishes me sweetly, and makes love to me roughly. He slaps my ass, and he pulls at my hair, and he uses his teeth on my neck as he drags me down to lay atop him, my thighs spread lewdly wide as he hammers inside me.
I have needed this more than I could admit to myself or anyone else. I need his possession. I need the reassurance that he wants me, that nobody else will ever do for him but me.
Words to that effect would mean little, but I hear the vows of his eternal fidelity in the snarls and grunts which accompany the ravaging of my pussy, every thrust branding me deep inside, claiming me entirely until I am trapped in orgasm, writhing and spasming and moaning for mercy I do not deserve, or even truly want.
“That was amazing,” I breathe in the aftermath.
“Does this mean you forgive me?”
I look up at him, and see the hope on his face. It makes him look younger, almost human. One never really knows what Tanuk is thinking. He is a trickster by nature, but I hear the earnest question in his voice, and I feel the pain too.
“It was never your fault,” I finally admit out loud. “It was an accident. If it was anyone’s fault, it was Helios and Ragnar. They took you away from me.”
“I took you to Earth in the first place. I put you at risk.”
“Tanuk,” I smile slowly. “Are you taking responsibility for something?”
“Yes,” he says. “For you. I have loved you from the moment I first laid eyes on you at the buffet, scowling at those gods who underestimated you. I felt your energy. I saw your soul, and I wanted you for my own. But I have never known how to claim anything I want directly. So instead of waiting for you to leave your parental nest, I came and claimed you, and instead of standing up to Helios, I fled with you. I was a coward, and I ma
de you be brave because I did not want to be. And now you have lived what feels like a lifetime away from me. I have lost years of you to my own selfish greed. I cannot say I will change. That is the problem with an eternal nature. But I can tell you that I am sorry, and that I will love you from now until the very end of time. There is no time, no place, no planet you could be where I would not love you.”
There are tears in my eyes as he speaks with rare straightforward honesty. There’s no pretense, no suave smirking. There is just the pledge of love coming from a god who cannot stand the thought that he might have lost me.
“I forgive you,” I tell him. “With gods, nothing is ever simple. Our love was always destined to be cursed, but it has been blessed in equal measure.”
I lie back in his arms and enjoy the simple feeling of being with the one I love.
“That really was incredible,” I sigh.
“Better than your human lovers?” I think I detect a note of jealousy in Tanuk’s tone.
“I never took a human lover.”
I say the words with my eyes half-closed, my chest still heaving with the effort of orgasm. Sex has made me stupid, because I do not bother to consider the consequences of that little truth. I have forgiven him, but there are, or rather were, still secrets I had from him. A secret, rather.
Tanuk, however, does not miss the significance of my words. There is a silence, which I largely miss as being significant until he speaks again.
“If you did not take a human lover then how….”
I open my eyes and tell him what I should have told him in the first place.
“Sapphire is yours. She was born nine months after you were taken from me. We must have conceived her just before you were stolen.”
“Sapphire,” he repeats. “Is mine?”
He looks stunned, and I start to feel rather guilty for not having told him.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t see how you missed it. She has your eyes.” My answer is defensive, but also true. Sapphire is Tanuk all over. I thought he would know her the instant he saw her, as Ragnar did, but Tanuk has tunnel vision when it comes to me.