Strife & Valor: Book II of The Rorke Burningsoul Saga

by Regina Watts

  A vision of Gundrygia rolled through my mind.

  Why that phantom appeared just then, or why she rattled me so, I could not explain. Perhaps it was because Gundrygia had excited me so sharply in sepulcher…or perhaps it was something else. I tried not to ponder what that could have been and committed myself to kissing and caressing Branwen. My hands followed the familiar smooth curves of her body to tickle along her backside, down her thighs, in between her legs. While Brawen moaned, I made more than one noise of my own pleasure—first beneath the unearned suckling of Valeria’s lips, and then the slight weight of her body as she mounted me with a rolling groan of my name.

  “Oh, Branwen! Isn’t he such a fine man…” Taking to the rhythm of riding me at once, Valeria slithered in my lap and smiled as the sight of my cock piercing dark labia made Branwen moan. “Yes, oh, why, he’s such a gorgeous stud that the sight of him fucking someone else is nearly as exciting as being fucked by him. Let me watch him spill his seed in you, high elf…oh, I can think of few visions as sweet as that.”

  Branwen’s body grew soaked beneath my fingers at that plea. “How could you want to watch a thing like that? Don’t you feel jealous at all? Oh, Anroa, I’ll be so exposed…”

  “That will make it all the sweeter, to have the coupling witnessed. Oh, yes! Yes, Burningsoul…Rorke, this sword of yours, oh, by Roserpine, I could fill myself with it all day…”

  The dark elf leaned back to work her hips up and down upon my throbbing shaft. I groaned, the sight of my hard manhood sliding in and out of her dusky flesh and that valley of pink in between enough to make my head swim with bliss. Branwen also seemed quite taken with the sight, crying out as my fingers slid inside to work her over properly. She offered her mouth to me, her cherry blossom lips falling open, her tongue coaxing into action the eager playing of my own. My fingers moved faster as her body tightened. Seeing this, Valeria hastened the pace of her riding, her body tipping into an ecstatic orgasm that tightened her core and made her flutter wildly around my length.

  “Yes,” she moaned, her hands tangling in her long plumes of white hair, “yes, yes, oh, Burningsoul, yes, yes! Soon you have to fill me with that seed of yours, Paladin…yes, oh, soon I want to feel your cum dripping out of me again! But for now…”

  The dark elf dismounted me and smiled as I bobbed with yet more desire. “Go on,” she urged, caressing my cheek. “I want so terribly to watch.”

  Happy to oblige her, I turned to see Branwen’s face and found her every feature ablaze with lust. Seeking to cool her with my kisses only worsened her fever, and, moaning into my mouth, the high elf soon sprawled upon her back to offer me total use of her body. I slid between her widely splayed legs and drew her hips toward me, a pillow fitting beneath to provide an extra bit of leverage. Then, with Valeria watching intently and my eyes often roving over to hers, I aligned myself to the sweet pink ripples of Branwen’s oozing ocean and, one inch at a time, pushed home into her.

  “Oh! Rorke! Rorke—oh, Anroa, you always feel so big, but especially at first. And, now—”

  Her scarlet blush had reached the tips of her high pointed ears. She glanced through streams of blonde hair at our bedmate, who watched with one cheek propped upon her fist. Valeria’s other hand slid down to hold Branwen’s, and somehow this sight was erotic to me in its own right.

  “There, now, I know you can take it, Branwen…I see how much potential you have to be an eager little slut for Rorke, for me…if only you’d let yourself.”

  “Ah! Ah! Ah! Oh, I can’t believe—this is all so strange—”

  While I drew her thigh a little higher to pound her all the more deeply, Branwen nearly wept with pleasure and gripped the headboard in her free hand. As I gave it to her, still thinking reflexively as I did of her face at the moment of her betrayal, Valeria lowered her head to kiss and nuzzle and occasionally run her tongue along the edge of Branwen’s surely sensitive ear.

  “It only feels strange because it’s new, friend, rest assured…why, soon I’d wager you’ll be comfortable with Indra and Odile playing along, as well. Just wait until you see how hard Odile likes it! Oh, it’s almost frightening…I love to see it.”

  Branwen gasped abruptly, her body contorting up toward mine. “Rorke!”

  The tone of her voice, the sight of the women nuzzling against one another, the way they held hands while I laid claim to Branwen—it was all such a peak of stimulation after Gundrygia’s teasing and the rest of our journey into town that I groaned, giving into the rapid squeezing of the high elf’s tight body as her orgasm attempted to inspire one of my own. Pleasure bolted through me like lighting, racing from my groin to my skull and through every inch of my suddenly electrified body. Branwen gasped to receive my seed; Valeria moaned just to see such a thing. Everything slowed and, for a few sweet seconds, my mind was at perfect ease. Indeed, my mind was no mind at all.

  And then, nearly soon as it came, the climax faded. I gasped myself to consciousness. Branwen still shivered beneath me; I admired her face somewhat blearily while she was wracked with her own pleasure. When her body finished this celebration of joy, I kissed her, then drew myself from her flooded valley.

  “Isn’t it lovely to feel him inside you even now?” Valeria’s tone, though sleepy, was sensual even still. Shyly blushing, Branwen bit her lip.

  “It is a rather exciting sensation,” the high elf allotted stiffly while I, chuckling, stretched out along the side of the bed nearest to the door. “I’d ought not to, since if he were to give me a child my adventuring days would surely be at an end…but it’s such an intoxicating feeling, and oh, I love to have him so deep inside me…ah!”

  Valeria had sat up. Now, to Branwen’s surprise but not quite so much to my own, the dark elf drew apart her surface cousin’s thighs and examined the shining flesh beneath. “You really are so frightfully shy, Branwen…but you like to be looked at, don’t you.”

  Whining, writhing, the high elf gasped while Valeria lowered a fingertip to that sensitive nodule of feminine desire. After a few little passes, the durrow’s fingers caressed lower, lower, and soon slid just within Branwen’s tight body. While the high elf moaned, so did the durrow, enthusing, “Ah, Branwen! How sweet, I can still feel his semen in you…how wet you are with it!”

  Laughing, Valeria drew her fingers from Branwen’s quim and admired the contrast of my white seed upon them. Then, working this into the supple skin of Branwen’s pubic mound, Valeria continued teasing her clitoris until the druid erupted in a new, far sharper orgasm.

  “I know you just love his cum,” Valeria said approvingly, settling down between the two of us with a look of nearly feline contentment. “So do I…and I don’t mind sharing if you don’t, Branwen.”

  Now that was the real trick!

  GUNDRYGIA’S FIELD

  THE CAREFREE SELECTRICES attending Weltyr have never slept half so well as I did following that little bit of celebration. After our escape from El’ryh, our battle with Al-listux, our rescue of Branwen and our treacherous journey through the Nightlands, I was simply happy to be alive. Happier, still to have the affection of so many beautiful women. Happiest of all that I dreamt no more terrible visions. In fact, even Valeria seemed unplagued by her usual troublesome nightmares.

  Yet still she was a very sensitive woman. Branwen sprang out of bed a few hours before nightfall, shaking me awake to demand directions to the bathhouse.

  “Why don’t you go ask old Erdwud,” I teased her. “I’m sure he’d like to think of that.”

  She slapped me in the side of the face with a pillow and demanded the directions again. Once I yielded the information, she sprang out of bed and was gone, leaving me alone with Valeria. The displaced Materna had been awoken by the good-natured quarrel between myself and the high elf. When we were alone, she turned over to face me, her body stretching along mine.

  “Good bloom to you, Burningsoul,” she said in husky tone that fired my blood anew.

  “Good morning,” I t
old her, glancing at the curtains. “Or evening, rather.”

  How soft, those privileged fingertips! She had well and truly never worked a day in her life, Valeria; not with her hands. I exhaled and drew them to my mouth from where they trailed along my chest, their fragrant skin like silk against my lips.

  “There is certainly something different about you,” she perceived softly. “I can’t divine what it is…”

  “Strange dreams,” I confessed to her. “Tonight was the first night in some time that I have slept well and not been plagued by a disturbing vision of one sort or another. First upon waking once Al-listux escaped, then while we slept in the bandit’s den.”

  “Perhaps that was the fault of the Nightlands…it must be disruptive to your mind to have the cycle of glorious sunlight taken from you. Oh! Burningsoul, even with the curtains filtering it, it’s so bright…how can you stand it?”

  “Just made for it,” I told her, my hand trailing over her cheek. “I want to find a solution for your eyes…maybe when I go bother that smith again—ah!”

  The dregs of sleep drifted away to leave, with sharp clarity, all the memories of yesterday. I sat up slightly, telling Valeria, “Hildolfr—he paid for a suit of armor for me.”

  Her lips parted in confusion, Valeria had to actively parse my words before understanding them. “The old man? But why would he do that after leaving you for dead?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t understand it. It seems like some gesture…of what, I’m just not sure.”

  Invoking Hildolfr so suddenly brought to mind the first strange dream—one I had nearly forgotten in all the hustle of our journey out of the Nightlands. Hildolfr fishing by a stream; the nightmarish eight-legged stallion rearing to reveal its writhing mess of legs.

  Wait, a stream? No—no, it had been much wider and more dramatic than a stream. That much was clear in my memory. Not a stream, then. A river. What river, I wondered?

  I glanced at Valeria, who was far more expert in these matters than I. “How do you tell a precognitive dream from a vision—for that matter, from a regular dream?”

  “All dreams have the capacity for certain degrees of prescience,” she explained thoughtfully. “I do not know whether that is because they are derived from the gods or because, having seen the symbol in sleep, our minds seek it out in waking life. So far as prescient dreams heralding actual events are concerned, they are often very vivid, but ultimately the cruel joke is that it is impossible to tell a prescient dream from a more common one until the event in question.”

  “Naturally…” Sighing, I shook my head and told her, “These matters are cryptic to me. The Church of Weltyr teaches that every dream sign contains messages from the All-Father, but I admit they are not always the clearest to me. The priests at the Temple do more interpretation than any other duty.”

  “Few durrow are as in-touch with the contents of their dreams,” Valeria confessed. “Perhaps if they were the Nightlands would be at greater peace with aboveground societies.”

  “Perhaps…but the same could be said of us up here. I can’t speak of elves, but most humans don’t think twice about the contents of their dreams. The only reason why the priests have a pool of so many people coming to request their interpretations is because there are so many people, worshipers of Weltyr especially, living in Skythorn. Ah…”

  My hand slid over her arm and my gaze drifted toward the covered window, where the supple golden glow of evening light eased through the curtains to enchant the room. “I am not eager to return there empty-handed, Valeria…if we are to ask the priests to divine the location of the ring for us, they’re going to want to know why I am pursuing an artifact unrelated to Weltyr and the task for which they sent me from the city in the first place.”

  “But with the ring we could surely reach the scepter with greater ease. It increases my perceptive abilities and grants me many magical powers I do not have otherwise. Without it, I’m precious more than a healer. With it, I can do far more.”

  Yes, perhaps that was true—but I still could not shake the feeling that, whatever Roserpine’s ring bestowed upon Valeria, the last thing the Temple wanted to hear was that I was working with a heathen to retrieve one of her goddess’s artifacts. I kissed the top of her head and drew her ear to my chest, where there we lay until Lively knocked upon the door to deliver a meal. Valeria hurried to cover herself and I drew on a pair of breeches before answering with my finest smile.

  “Hello, dear!” With a smile of her own, Lively pretended not to ogle my chest by instead looking down at the broad and surely hefty tray of sausage, grits, and other breakfast foodstuffs she had been kind enough to put together despite the evening hour. “Here’s breakfast for ya. Delivered it to your neighbors already. Shall I leave it in the hall?”

  “No,” I told her, gesturing, standing aside from the door. “The table there is fine.”

  “You’ll have to pardon the small oranges,” she told me, shining her smile upon Valeria while placing her tray down upon the corner table. “We get them from down south, of course, but lately it’s been hard to get a delivery of anything from that way. The gimlets have been intercepting just about one out of every three shipments, I’d wager…haven’t killed anyone yet, thank the Wanderer.”

  “That certainly is a blessing,” I told her. “I didn’t realize the gimlets were a problem for you here…I had a run-in with one myself while we were coming down the mountainside.” I was almost tempted to ask her if she knew anything about Gundrygia, but she was already going on and I was not sure how to broach the subject without sounding insane.

  “Yes, well, they’ve been a problem for Soot just as long as the town’s been around…at least since my grandmother’s time, and before. Since they’re very poor hunters, they make their living scavenging. Mind you lot stick to groups if and when you leave the town—they’re not liable to start a fight they’re not confident they can win.”

  Then, wiping off her hands, the kindly woman said, “Oh, and I’ve one other thing for you—I hope it’ll fit, hang on a tic…”

  Fluttering back into the hallway, Lively returned in a matter of seconds with a package tied in twine. “Here’s that old dress I was telling you about,” she said brightly, setting it on the nightstand beside smiling Valeria. “You let me know if it doesn’t fit or you don’t want it, but I think it’d ought to suit you. I’d have tried to scrounge up more for your friends, but none of ‘em seem the dress wearing type.”

  “Your generosity is truly without parallel, Madame,” said Valeria, smiling softly. Of the mind that all her well-behaved guest were good as family, Lively patted the elf’s hand without a second thought for the fact that she wore nothing but a blanket.

  “It’s nothing, dearie! Every man had ought to treat all strangers with at least this much kindness…never know when a guest might be an angel in disguise, or one of the gods themselves.”

  Then, she was gone again. Valeria investigated the contents of the package as I smeared a bit of long-missed butter, that greatest of luxuries, upon one of the supplied pieces of toast. “How long this thing is! It must be quite difficult to move about in…I’ll save it for tomorrow, once I’m more used to riding.”

  Translation: the Materna was too famished to delay breakfast by figuring out how to dress in these new garbs. I moved the tray upon the foot of the bed and we feasted together there, nearly every bite punctuated with a cry of Valeria’s delight at the freshness of foods like eggs and even the small oranges that were quite literally rarer than gold in the Nightlands. Halfway through, Indra and Odile drifted over. The evening wore on into night and I explained a little something of horseback ridings’ general principles until Branwen joined us, looking flushed and relieved to have bathed at last.

  “It feels good to take a walk under an open sky, doesn’t it? Though—we seem to have caused a stir.” Branwen laughed, shutting the door and dropping into a creaky old chair at the table in the corner.

&nb
sp; Valeria looked at me carefully. “That won’t be a problem, will it?”

  “We’ll have to see,” I told them. “Let’s just try to keep our heads down and avoid any fuss.”

  “That’s sounding pretty impossible by now,” said the high elf. “The manager of the bathhouse approached me and asked if I were the elf traveling around with the durrow…I denied it at first, because I wasn’t sure what her intentions were, but she convinced me she was friendly after a minute or two of talking. She told me that if you three need to use her facilities after hours tonight, you should go knock on the door of the little house behind the main building.”

  The durrows’ voices arose in pleased tones while I said, “We’re lucky the citizens here have a friendly curiosity, rather than a dangerous one. Regardless of who already knows what, we would do well to proceed with caution.”

  How hard it was to avoid detection, though! We would inevitably draw attention by moving about the town at night—especially by engaging in horseback lessons at such hours. It seemed to me that it would behoove us (ahem) to engage in such activities as far away from the town itself as we could. So, while the durrow bathed, I took one of the two stallions out for a ride around the perimeter of the village and a few of its surrounding ranches.

  The land of the region was well-maintained and populated, and it became apparent soon that the only reasonable location for such lessons would be near the woods at the base of the mountain. From that distance we would neither have to worry about prying eyes nor making noise, and the terrain forbade farming. No neighbors, then. We would be able to conduct a few lessons in peace for several nights in a row, then take off for Skythorn as soon as my armor was ready.

  Of course…just who would be taking off with me still remained to be confirmed. When I returned to the stables attached to the inn, the well-trained but energetic stallion pleased to have been given a bit of exercise after a day of inactivity, I was just thinking about trying the other when I found Branwen already there, patting and whispering to a champagne-colored mare.