by Dante King
“Justin,” Ragnar said, looking more Viking-like than ever, dressed as he was in animal furs and covered in blood, “what the hell are you doing here?”
I jerked a thumb over my shoulder and indicated Cecilia who was padding out from behind the cover of the boulder. “Cecilia is taking the time to show me around this beautiful, freezing deathtrap that she calls home,” I said.
Ragnar grinned that metal-toothed grin again. It was a knowing look. “I see,” he said. “I myself am hunting yetis. They are a nuisance in this land, as Miss Chillgrave will no doubt tell you, and they need to be culled every so often. The Chillgraves provide a not insignificant bounty, and a teacher’s wages don’t pay for all the proclivities of a man like me.”
I nodded. I was about to ask what expensive proclivities he might have, but couldn’t get a word out before he continue.d
“What’s more,” Ironskin said, “they provide some of the leanest, most protein-packed steaks that you will ever find. They’re tough certainly, but if you cook them right you’ll never taste better.”
“I’ll have to keep that in mind,” I said.
“You should,” Ragnar said. “They’re the perfect thing to eat on the evening before the War Mage Games. Speaking of which, you’ve only got a couple of weeks before the qualifiers.”
I nodded again. “As a matter-of-fact,” I said, “the fraternity brothers and I just sorted out some regeneration runes at our place, which means we’ll be able to train seriously now.”
Ragnar grunted with approval as he pulled the severed limbs and torsos of the yetis into a pile. “You just remember, Justin,” he said, “that if you want me to tell you where the White Staff lies, you’ll need to prove to me that you’re ready for it. You’ve got two weeks. Use them wisely.”
Ragnar pulled a portal stone from his pocket, activated it, then he and his pile of yeti shish kabob were enveloped in a shimmering haze and were gone.
Cecilia pointed toward the base of the tower that was just up ahead. The doorway was wide open, and I could just make out a gleaming glass stairway beyond it. We started forward.
“What was Ironskin on about? With the whole White Staff thing?” Cecilia asked me.
I held up my black staff in answer. “This belonged to my father,” I said.
“I know,” Cecilia replied. “I shared in that vision in the Gemstone Kingdom, remember?”
“Right,” I said. “Well, I think this white staff that Ironskin speaks of belonged to my mother. But he said he would only divulge its location if I could prove to him that I was ready to take on the responsibility. Where the hell is your vector by the way?”
Cecilia reached up and pulled the necklace that she was wearing up and over her head. On the end of the long, fine chain was a small icicle, no larger than my little finger. The elf woman held it in her hand for a moment and closed her eyes. Suddenly, she was holding a staff. It was the same staff that I had seen her use a couple of times before. It had a clear, bright jewel, which was about the size of a fist, set into the top of it.
“This,” Cecilia said, holding up the staff and running a loving hand down its length, “contains the soul of a very powerful Frostwitch.”
“Is that like a sandwich?” I quipped before I could stop myself.
Cecilia rolled her eyes.
“Hold up,” I said, pushing that terrible joke into the past, “are you telling me that your staff has a soul in it too? I am fairly sure that mine has a personality of its own too—perhaps even two.”
“Oh yes,” Cecilia said, “the ensoulment process was a secret and skilled affair taught only to a few. Most souls pass on from this world to wherever it is souls go to, or stay here in the form of poltergeists. The channeling of willing souls into vectors is now a lost art. There are now only a limited amount of vectors in this world, with no new ones being created.”
A bit like Bitcoin, I thought.
We entered the tower. The structure was only wide enough to accommodate the stairs that stretched up and up and up. After the fights I’d had that day, the thought of climbing all those fucking things was not one that I relished, however a tug of magic at my elbow made me look down. There was a panel set into the wall. On impulse, I touched the tip of my staff to this panel, and the staircase began to move smoothly upward, much like an escalator.
“Thank fuck for that,” I muttered, and climbed aboard.
The view from the top of the tower, when we popped back out into the night, was just as exquisitely stunning as you’d expect. After all, it was a view from the top of a tower perched on the summit of a mountain. The world stretched away forever; black and white and silver under night’s cloak.
Cecilia guided me over to a railing and motioned out across the stark country. As my eyes became more accustomed to the distance and height, I noticed a series of giant craters filled with shadow. There were also great swathes of blackened land that looked like they had been scorched by ravening fire, as well as the ghostly, deserted remains of villages and townships.
“What happened to the land and the villages?” I mused aloud.
Cecilia explained that the destruction that I could see, and more that was hidden under the snows, had been perpetrated during the Void Wars.
“This tower,” she said, “lies on one border of my parents’ lands. It was, apparently, a refuge where those who served the Dark Ones could lie up.”
“The Dark Ones being Zenidor and Istrea—my parents?” I asked.
Cecilia nodded.
“Pretty impartial nicknames they had there, huh?” I said sarcastically.
Cecilia laughed. “Anyway, you see that glimmer of light up in the hills on the far side of that valley over there?”
I followed Cecilia’s finger to a confection of white and silver in the very far distance. It looked like a palace along the lines of the fucking Disney Castle.
“I see it,” I said.
“That’s my family home,” Cecilia said.
“Couldn’t have got something a little grander?” I asked, noting the spires and glittering turrets.
“Ha-ha, darling,” Cecilia replied. “I used to sit up in my room, gazing over this valley and fantasize about coming up this tower with my—with my charming prince.”
“And here you are with me!” I quipped. “I guess it’s not a bad runner-up prize.”
Cecilia turned to me, and there was a hot and hungry fire burning in the depths of her blue eyes. “So modest,” she said softly.
“Now, these fantasies,” I said, “what did they involve, if I may be so bold?”
“When I was younger… kissing,” Cecilia replied.
“You minx!” I said in simulated outrage.
“But, now,” Cecilia said, pressing her lithe body up against mine, “it’s been my desire for some time to lose my virginity right here, at the top of the world.”
We didn’t waste any more time talking after that. There was nothing that our words could say that are bodies couldn’t articulate more purely, more concisely, more clearly.
We kissed slowly and gently at first, before our need for one another became fiercer and more eager. She might have been a virgin, but there was no doubt in my mind that Cecilia Chillgrave knew how to kiss and was well aware of how to stoke up a man’s passions. Her tongue darted in and out of my mouth, thrusting against my own even as she ground her pelvis into the front of my padded wool coat. The touch of her tongue and the feeling of her fingers as they ran through my hair and grasped the back of the neck was the strangest sensation. The touch of her skin against mine was the somatosensory equivalent of menthol in the mouth: hot but cool at the same time.
The juxtaposition between her outwardly aristocratic and graceful demeanor and the obviously keen and filthy way that she was behaving was enough to turn my cock to concrete before she had so much as unbuttoned my fly.
There was a pagoda of sorts on the topmost section of that tower. A little gazebo filled with soft pillows and blankets which a
llowed visitors the opportunity to lie back, even on the chilliest nights, and gaze up at the star-strewn void above. To ponder their place in this great, wide, messy delight that we call a universe. To deliberate on the myriad worlds that might lie between the stars burning billions of miles away.
Or, to have passionate sex in the most secluded and intimate fuck-nest ever to be constructed.
Cecilia was as light and delicate as she looked. I picked her up easily as she unbuttoned the front of my coat and we continued to kiss. Her strong, agile legs came up to encircle my waist as I supported her, one hand cupping each of her buttocks. While we continued to tongue and lap at each other, I placed her on the bed and ripped back the furs and blankets covering the down mattress with one hand.
The removal of my coat was a hasty procedure at the top of that tower. If I had thought it was nippy down by the portal, it was doubly so up here. With languid grace, Cecilia kicked off her heels and slipped under the covers. I followed, after managing to kick off my shoes and almost losing one over the edge of the tower in my eagerness to be rid of it.
“Anyone would think you’d been looking forward to this, darling,” Cecilia said as she slipped her hands under my tux shirts and ran her nails down my muscled chest.
“Well, what can I say?” I said casually. “I’m fine with waiting, but as soon as the horse is out of the gate, there’s no getting him back in.”
Cecilia’s nails ran up my spine and pressed hard into the back of my shoulder. “You bad boy,” she scolded me.
“You just wait,” I said.
If this truly was her first time, and I had no reason to believe that Cecilia was lying, then I was hellbent on making this experience all about her. I wanted this to be her sexual awakening. I wanted it to be the erotic dragon that she’d be chasing every day from now on.
I kissed my way down her collar bone and slipped the straps of her dress over her shoulders. Then I continued to kiss my way downward, pulling her silky dress down to expose her perfect, nubile breasts.
Cecilia groaned as I took turns tonguing her nipples from my sanctuary under the covers. Once more, I received mild shocks of a sort of cold electricity through my tongue as I kissed and sucked gently at her tits. I assumed that it was the residual Frost Magic running through her. My imagination was already in overdrive, musing on what it was going to be like when I put my cock inside her. At that thought, I found myself getting very hot under the collar, which was unsurprising seeing as I was still in a full tux.
“How’s this for convenience?” I dissolved my tux so that I was suddenly naked and wearing only a cloak around my shoulders—Superman on vacation.
“Lose the cloak,” Cecilia ordered, her voice husky with desire.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, and pulled it off.
As I headed further south under the blankets, kissing my way down the elf’s wonderfully smooth stomach, I rucked Cecilia’s dress up around her waist. There wasn’t a hair on her, and her sex was as perfect and inviting as any that I had ever seen. Without waiting for a greenlight, I leaned forward and plunged my tongue into her velvety opening.
My tongue was met by a wave of her womanly juices, and I lapped them up as Cecilia moaned loudly and wrapped her taut legs over my shoulders. Shivers ran through her as my tongue danced around her clit. Pulsations of menthol-like cold swept through my body at the taste of her. Looking up from my work, I noticed frosty patterns emanating out from Cecilia’s crotch, like the sort of verglas motifs that were left by Jack Frost on window panes.
Cecilia was panting hard now, and I took this as a good moment to slip a single finger into her tight box. The elf women let out a long, “Yeeees,” of pleasure. She pulled my head hard against her so that I was licking her out while fingering her—slowly to begin with, but then harder and harder, to match the rhythms of her pelvic thrusts.
I slipped two fingers into her when she was good and warmed up, and she bucked all the harder against my hand. After a while, she said, “I’m—I’m ready.”
“You’re sure?” I asked—I sure as hell knew that I was.
“Mmhmm,” came the reply.
“All right, but you’re going on top. This is all you, okay?” I said.
I came up into the light and felt the breeze blowing around my face once again. I slipped a hand under Cecilia’s slim waist and flipped her over on top of me. For a little while, we kissed, while the head of my dick rubbed teasingly up against her moist slit.
Then, with careful and delicious slowness, Cecilia reached down and took my throbbing, rock-hard prick in her hand and guided herself onto it.
We groaned together as I entered her. Cecilia was insanely tight, but she wasn’t about to let a little something like a hymen get in the way of a good time. She pressed inexorably downward until, with a soft grunt of delight, we were pressed up against each other, our crotches slick with Cecilia’s wetness.
Then she began to rock backward and forward, building up her momentum. There wasn’t much room to maneuver under that blanket. Yet, somehow, that made the whole experience all the more intense, all the more intimate, hot and sweaty.
Cecilia’s lithe body moved with animal instinct against me, her icy blue eyes half closed and locked on mine. Occasionally, they would roll up into her head with unadulterated pleasure, and she would begin to whimper. For my part, I let her take the reins. I cupped her breasts and toyed with her nipples and, when she leaned back with her hands pressed against my thigh, I thumbed her clit in a way that had served me well with many women before.
It wasn’t too long before Cecilia was practically bucking up and down on me like a drunk chick on a mechanical bull. It might have been funny had it not been for the fact that all this was taking place on the top of a fucking mountain, that she was a virgin, and that it was one of the sexiest things I had ever witnesssed.
With a cry of animal pleasure, Cecilia came. Her thighs, belly, and ass shook with orgasmic convulsions. The whirling patterns of hoar frost shot out from her crotch like silver tattoos, all over her body. To my great surprise and extreme delight, these patterns overflowed onto me and wrapped me in a feeling of buzzing, menthol warmth, which drove my libido off the pleasure cliff like Thelma and Louise driving into the Grand Canyon.
I rose up against the tight bodied young elf, and we writhed together, climaxing as intensely as two people probably ever had, while around us the wind whipped the dormant snow up from the ground and swirled it around the Tower of Argenti.
Chapter Seven
I woke up the next morning in my own bed. I was feeling tired and a little sore in the muscles but elated. Now, that had been one hell of a date. It was about as far removed from the old Netflix and chill as it was possible to be. Cecilia and I had sated each other’s lust—which had taken quite some time—and Cecilia had tried out all the positions that she had heard about and been fantasizing about. Once we were done, we had headed back down the magical revolving staircase. There had been a rack of enchanted sledges inside an ornate cupboard, which had been carved out of ice, inside the tower. When we hopped onto one of these, we were whisked straight back down the hill and straight to the portal porter’s cabin. This bit of high-speed tobogganing had capped the evening off quite nicely, in my opinion. Cecilia and I hadn’t got back to Nevermoor until just before dawn.
Now, I stretched, closed my eyes again, and allowed myself the luxury of running the evening’s highlight reel through my head one more time. Yes the sex had been… Well, the sex had been fucking magnificent, but there had also been the thrill of dodging those ice harpoons too. Then there’d been the sheer majesty of Chilaria. I’d visited stunning places back on Earth, taking trips with some of the richer kids in my dorm to their holiday homes in the Rocky mountains and such like. The view from atop the Tower of Argenti though, that had been seriously epic. A view that stretched to the edge of the world and back, not marred by a single electric light or bit of smog.
I had a full day ahead at the Academy a
nd should probably get up. Some days, it was hard to drag myself out of bed but, this morning, the memory of Cecilia Chillgrave naked and on top of me acted as a triple espresso and a handful of Dexedrine.
Despite my positive frame of mind, I only had time to grab a quick cup of coffee from the kitchen. None of the other boys had surfaced as of yet, which didn’t strike me as particularly strange. I had found Igor sleeping inside a suit of armor in the hallway when I had arrived home in the early hours of the morning and, despite my best efforts, I had been unable to wake him. I made a mental note to check said suit of armor on my way out the door, just in case he had finally succumbed to all those chemical dainties that he’d been shoveling into his head.
I sat with my cup of coffee and pulled out my spellbook from my pocket. There was a steady rain pattering down outside. It looked like the sort of patient precipitation that was girding itself to settle in all day. Absentmindedly, I touched my jacket, and a hood materialized at the back of it. I was really starting to love this cloak that Igor had provided for me. It made changing clothes an absolute breeze. I did wonder if the thing would ever need to get laundered, or if it’d simply magic away any dirt.
I flicked through my spellbook until I came to the page that listed my Frost Magic spells. It had been empty the last time my fingers had gone walking this way. Now, though, it was not. I took a sip of coffee and swirled it around my mouth, savoring the taste and savoring the expansion of my magical abilities. On the page in front of me were the words:
FROST SHARDS
Shoot five sharpened icy projectiles from your vector.