He released her breasts as he nodded, then trailed his hands ever so slowly down her ribs.
"Instead of throwing me out in the night, you teased me."
He kissed her as he brought his palms to her belly, as he caressed the circle of her navel.
Melisse moaned as she felt an undeniable desire to part her thighs, to open her gates to him.
"And then," he said, "we did something else."
Her breath caught as she nodded.
"Yes. And I would very much like to do it again."
Again, his low chuckle that threatened to break her heart came to her ears.
"As do I, Melisse."
He pushed his hips into hers and she felt his member, rigid as a war spear, slip between her legs, but not inside.
Instead he drifted across that part of her that had become heat and desire, a thunderstorm about to break its bonds.
Melisse moved with him as he stroked across her apex. She knew she was wet with desire and she did not care.
All that mattered was that they share a moment like they had so long ago.
"I have lain with others, Melisse," he said. "Not always because I wanted to, but it was always with thoughts of you."
Her nipples stood out proudly, thickened and erect, as his thumbs continued to stroke over them.
Then it was Melisse who gripped the young man to her. Her own hands that dropped to his back, desperate to hold him, to guide him where she wanted him most.
"It was all a dream, wasn't it?" she asked with a heavy voice. "I don't truly matter in the real world, do I?"
The young man drew still, then he spoke again with a voice as steady as a mountain.
"This is the dream, Melisse. What is happening now and in that house are the illusions."
He drew his hips back from her, before dropping lower only to sweep inward and upward, sliding deeply inside her.
Melisse cried out.
She felt alive at last as she felt him slipping inside her. Her back arched and she struggled to hear, to understand well what he said next.
"Most of all," he panted, "You … matter … to me."
They moved against one another and suddenly everything felt right again. Together, they moved and breathed with two hearts beating in time, become one.
Together, they rode the cresting wave of their passion and all thought became meaningless. All that mattered was what they felt, the touch of their bodies locked in carnal embrace.
Then Melisse felt the young man shudder. She felt him hesitate as he drew breath to say one last thing.
"Now remember with me, Melisse. Remember what comes next and save yourself when this dream is over."
She did not understand what he meant.
Instead of saying anything more, he spoke with his body until Melisse panted with her rising passion just as he did with his.
She felt him grow as hard as iron inside her, swelling to fill her, and Melisse threw her head back as an inexorably growing tension inside her wound tighter and tighter until it could hold no more.
The young man rose up and up, then she felt his body hitching, his rhythm broken, becoming a staccato movement as his orgasm overmastered his designs.
It was that understanding that unleashed the avalanche deep inside Melisse as her muscles drew in tight then slammed outward, then inward, and back again. It was the memory of both of them in a hayloft as they orgasmed together that carried her over the brink of pain and into a place of pleasure that knew no bounds.
Melisse gulped for breath and her eyelids fluttered as spasms wracked her body.
She felt the heat they had created between them as pleasure continued to slip through her core to ricochet outward only to return, careening, like an endlessly repeating landslide.
Melisse reached out for the young man, to clasp him to her, but her hands found only empty air and rising heat.
She struggled then, she fought against the delight that thrilled her every sense.
Melisse searched for calm within a sensual storm as she forced her eyes to open and focus.
She saw him then.
She saw all of him, his face no longer in shadow, and she knew she had not been mistaken for his visage was as comely as his voice, his body as beautifully muscled as a wild stallion.
There were no shadows, not any more, for bright flames had come to take their place.
The young man burned like a torch as he looked back at her, imploring her with his eyes.
Remember, Melisse. Try to remember all of it.
She recoiled from what she saw.
It was horrific as flames rose over his body, crackling as they went, peeling away his skin, turning him to ash.
It was horrific because Melisse recognized the fire for what it was.
Then she remembered to look around herself, to see at last what had been hidden in dimness.
The shadowlands she had walked in her dream were not lands at all.
Melisse stood upon the palm of a monstrous hand. A hand of such gigantic proportions she had mistaken its lines and wrinkles for low hills and valleys.
This is the dream, she told herself, and this fire is mine.
Then the hand upon which she stood curled around into a fist like an earthquake under her feet.
It squeezed until Melisse could resist no more.
It squeezed until her fire went out.
Silas gasped as he broke away from the vision of the immense fisted hand in the cauldron.
He forced himself back and could not help but to look down at his body in search of flames that were not there.
The prisoner of a lonely, forgotten cell in an Estril stronghold took hold of himself and turned back to peer into the cauldron.
What he saw was a woman sitting up in the darkness of her bedchamber. She looked about herself, her visage merely puzzled and little else.
Silas felt rage at what he saw, and he threw all his will forward as he sent a last thought outward before sagging backward, his head in his hands.
The fire is real, Melisse. It's your fire and it's real. All the rest is the dream.
The servant woman sat up on her bed. It was still very late but she supposed she had dreamed a bad dream.
She was about to lie back down, then she hesitated as she thought she heard someone calling out to her with a name that might have belonged to a stranger.
Melisse.
She listened, then hearing nothing more, she stretched out and sleep was quick to come and claim her once again.
This time her slumber was dreamless oblivion.
Chapter Ten — Raffiran
Deep in the woodlands, in a vast expanse of the country attached to a noble house known as Perene, there was one place where the woodsmen would no longer go.
For it was rumored to be inhabited by a witch, or worse, and that when the lifeless bodies of three men had been found, their fellow woodcutters turned tail without looking back.
They were mistaken about the witch.
They were not mistaken about the worse.
And if one of them had been foolish enough to ignore the rumors of evil in that place, he would have seen this day something far stranger and more deadly than he could have ever imagined.
In a low hollow amongst the trees, there where a number of them had been felled and left to rot, the air shimmered the way it does over slate roofed cottages under the midsummer sun.
It grew quickly from being a simple ripple to veritable violence as the air shuddered in place, then cracked in a jagged line through which blinding light slipped through.
Glowing hands appeared through the crack. They felt their way along it, then seized either side of it roughly before forcing it to open wider.
What stepped through was no man.
It might have stood upon two legs and had two arms that strained with effort as it passed into the realm of men. But this was surely no man.
His form was fluid, shot through with flames of colors ranging from dark red to b
urning orange and yellow.
His face was featureless with only faint outlines of eyes, nose, and mouth.
The being of flame stepped through the opening and as he let go of the rent, it slammed shut with no trace that it had ever been there.
He stood still, then with a shrug of his amorphous shoulders, his body lost its quality of liquid flame. The ebb and flow of his form grew hard and his body became that of a human male, one with enormous shoulders and thighs, while his skin was a perfect, burnished gold.
The being looked about himself, turning slowly, then like a compass needle he came to rest facing a direction in which he strode forward with no hesitation.
He bent down to the forest floor and swept the leaves aside before picking up an object hidden until then.
He hooked his fingers through its eye sockets as he turned the skull this way and that.
Low laughter sounded in the otherwise perfectly silent forest.
"You stood no chance against the beast, frail human," he murmured before casting the skull away.
"However, there can be no doubt. She passed this way and I have but to follow her trail. Mesrin will be found at its end, I am sure, and, once there perhaps I will have the chance to show whatever danger interposed itself that an Estril lord in the full of his power is no one to be trifled with."
He grinned a golden-lipped smile, then rose into the air as his body dissolved into a glowing sphere.
It hovered for an instant, then streaked away following the path of mournful destruction left in the wake of the feathered demon otherwise known as the Evangeline.
The sphere crossed many leagues faster than a bird flies.
The demon's path proved to be easy to follow, for the dead littered her trail wherever she crossed mankind.
Quickly enough, Raffiran found himself far to the south, the horizon delimited by a line of mountains that grew larger with each passing league.
It was then that he sensed something and the glowing sphere came to an abrupt halt.
There had been hints of it along the trail, but they had been too subtle and too extraordinary to be believed.
But here, along a river bank, the Estril lord was sure at last.
The unnamed adversary, that which had left the Evangeline in tatters once returned to the Estril realm, had left its scent in that place.
"Cursed race of scum," he said as his humanoid form grew solid once more.
He hesitated, then he dared the word forbidden to all Estril, "Donglin bastard."
Raffiran waited then, in silence, as if he expected lightning to strike him down for daring to utter their ancient enemy's name.
However, he understood that it was just as his wife had said.
Refusing to name their enemy was simple superstition and nothing more.
Still, it was something he would have never done among his fellow Estril. However, in the realm of men where the truce between their two races held no sway, it was a different matter.
Quickly his anger rose like an internal storm and flames licked down his arms.
"Insolent monster daring to intercede in the affairs of the Estril," he breathed through gritted teeth. "Now I know. All that I ask is that I be shown the way to it once I have Mesrin in hand. Then it will know true battle."
That was when he heard a voice.
The sound quaked and wavered, but there could be no doubt.
The Estril lord was being hailed by someone.
He followed the direction of the sound to see the silhouette of someone standing higher up the embankment and as soon as he saw it, the figure drifted backwards and out of view.
"Very well. If this human lived, then the Evangeline was surely distracted as she went by here. Doubtless it was the scent of our enemy that drew her onward with no time for such pleasures as snuffing out the lives of foolish human beings."
The Estril strode up the slope with determination in his golden eyes.
"I, however, will not hesitate once I learn what I need."
He crested the rise, then came to a sudden stop.
What he saw then was not one human, but two, and they were both far stranger than the human kept by his wife for a pet.
Instead of smooth skin and discernible faces, the humans standing close together across the road from him were covered from head to toe, not a single bit of skin to be seen.
He hesitated. It was — unexpected.
One of the humans kicked the other in what was probably its shin, although it remained difficult to be sure for how fully covered in rags they were.
"Oh … yes," the kicked human said, and Raffiran recognized the voice from earlier.
"Be welcome, O great Lord of the Estril."
The quavering voice dropped to a mumble until the other human kicked it again.
"We cower before your greatness, we kneel before your nobleness," said the voice, and while it was higher pitched than what he might have expected, Raffiran understood that it was a man who spoke.
The other human spoke, and there was no doubting that this time it was a woman.
"We bid you our most humble welcome, Lord. Command us and we shall do your bidding until our very last breath."
Raffiran paused. The wheedling sound meant that the two before him were likely quite aged and whatever services they could possibly offer him would be short-lived at best.
"Your servitude to one such as me would be less than worthless," the Estril lord replied, his voice deep and resonant.
"Yes, Lord. Of course, Lord … ow!"
The last syllable of the old man swaddled in rags was due to yet another kick in the shins.
"I beg you, Lord, forgive my foolish husband. His tongue gets the better of him almost every time he opens his mouth."
The two strangely-clothed humans bowed down to him, although their stiff old spines made the gesture a rather halfhearted one.
"Silence," Raffiran boomed. "Tell me instead if you have seen someone such as me pass by here."
The two humans furiously shook their heads before the woman spoke again.
"No Lord, if another Estril had come this way, I would not have missed him. Your race's beauty as described in the legends falls far short of the reality. One such as you could not possibly have come this way unnoticed."
Raffiran nodded.
"And can you say the same for other creatures such as one adorned in white feathers, or another in scales that slithers along the ground like the worm it is?"
Neither of the human nodded nor shook their heads.
Instead, the woman spoke in her shaking voice again.
"Aye, Lord. Both the Evangeline and the Donglin warrior came down this road some months ago."
The Estril lord hissed and flame erupted in a corona around his body.
"Tell me now, where have they gone?"
His voice echoed and despite themselves, the old couple took a stumbling step backward.
"We know not, Lord," the woman said. "The Evangeline came after the Donglin and its companion, a redoubtable swordsman. As to their destination, I did not think to divine it."
The fire crackling around the Estril's body relented and with a quizzical tone, he asked, "What do you mean 'divine it?' And how have you come by knowledge of these demons' names?"
Raffiran could not believe what he was hearing.
Old and obviously foolish human beings could not possibly possess such knowledge.
"Aye, Lord. They are known to us as is the history of your people, the mighty Estril. My husband and I were scholars in our youth and we traveled far and wide before settling for this little piece of land to be our home."
This time it was Raffiran who took a small step backward.
None of the Estril in living memory knew their own history. All of it had been lost in the ceaseless warring with the Donglin. Countless generations had fallen and with them, so had their own past.
At first Raffiran was shocked, then immediately thereafter he knew doubt.
"You lie. You seek to divert me so that you might save your lowly lives."
"No, Lord. I would not dare mistruth with one such as you. Your people's history is written in the waters of time, and if you so will it, I will show it to you."
Raffiran hesitated. The woman's tone had changed. Her voice no longer quavered quite so much.
"I can divine it, if you wish. I have a vessel within which I can see the past, among other things."
This time the Estril lord did not hesitate with his response.
"Yes, you will show me. Then you will also show me the whereabouts of my kin in this world."
The old woman replied, "Yes, Lord. As you command."
The old woman turned brusquely around and bent down to the ground to retrieve a small black cauldron.
She handed it to the old man and said, "Mind you, Nestor. Keep it still and for goodness' sake, don't drop it."
"Yes, beloved Wife. I shall do my best," the old man replied with a voice muffled by the rags covering his face.
The woman turned to the Estril.
"Lord, you must approach, for the things I shall describe will be shown to you from within the cauldron. It requires that you look within."
Why does this suddenly feel like a ruse? Raffiran wondered. But that thought was just as quickly followed by the notion that these frail, old humans could not possibly harm him.
He came toward them and the old woman practically shouted as she said, "Lord, I beg you — your flames must be quieted, lest you destroy us before I can show you your history."
With a mere thought, the power of the Estril drew inward and while his presence was like being next to a well-stoked fire in the hearth, it was bearable for the time being.
"I thank you, Lord," wheezed the old man holding the cauldron.
"Look within, I beg you," breathed the old woman, and Raffiran leaned forward as colors swirled within the cauldron.
"Now see," she said.
Images whirled and resolved in the vessel. It became a tempest, a cyclone of image after startling image that transfixed the Estril.
Then the woman spoke.
"So long ago that almost none save the gods themselves remember it, the Estril were named the Elyldan. They were but one tribe of many, all of which made up the race of beings known as the Luz Mala.
The Marechal Chronicles: Volume VI, The Crucible: A Dark Fantasy Tale Page 11